Speaker 1: Have you ever been in like a really old place. Yeah,
you know, like surrounded by these ancient stones and stuff
and felt this like sh fur, Like the air itself
is full of echoes of the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we all have that sense of wonder sometimes.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, imagine being able to actually see the past
unfold before your eyes, not just sense it. Today, we're
diving into a story that takes that fascination with history
to like, well a whole other level.
Speaker 2: What's so interesting here is that this isn't just about
you know, digging up artifacts or reading old documents. It's
a story that combines science or maybe pseudoscience with one
of the most secretive institutions in the world, the Vatican.
Speaker 1: It is, and you brought some really fascinating stuff to
my attention about this thing called the kronavisor it's this
device that's rumored to be hidden somewhere in the Vatican archives.
And the claim is it can let you view past
events like a time machine, but without actually traveling.
Speaker 2: Through time, right, like a window into the past.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. And look, we're not here to say whether
it's real a hoax. What we're going to do is
unpack the story look at the people involved and see
what we can make of it all.
Speaker 2: It's like we're investigating a legend, but one with some
surprisingly credible people attached to it, right.
Speaker 1: And the setting for all of this is Vatican City,
which is already like this mysterious historical place. I mean,
you've got the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter's Basilica, all this
incredible art and history packed into this tiny little country.
And to think that alongside all that there might be
this hidden super advanced technology. It's kind of mind blowing,
isn't it.
Speaker 2: It really is. And at the center of this whole
thing are two figures, two priests whose backgrounds make the
story even more intriguing exactly.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Father Pellegrino Ornetti. He was a Benedictine monk,
so that means a life of study and contemplation, right,
But he was also a scientist, a musician, he spoke
multiple languages, and he was even into things like the occult.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a real renaissance man, not someone you'd usually picture
as being involved in something so well out there.
Speaker 1: And then you have Francois Brune, another French also highly
respected within the church, but with this real interest in
how science and history intersect. It's the connection between these
two that really gives this Cronovisor story its legs.
Speaker 2: It does, and the way they met, according to the
accounts you've shared, is almost too perfect, like something out
of a movie. They just happened to bump into each
other on a faery in Venice.
Speaker 1: Seriously, it sounds like the start of a Dan Brown novel,
two guys crossing paths amidst the beauty and history of Venice.
And it was during that meeting that Arnetti supposedly dropped
this bombshell on Brune. He claimed that they had figured
out a way to actually see what actually happened in
the past. That's when he first used the word cronovisor.
Speaker 2: And the basic idea is so simple yet so powerful.
Imagine being able to just watch history unfold like a film,
without having to rely on interpretations or guesswork right.
Speaker 1: No more assisting through old books or arguing about different
versions of events. You're basically getting a live feed from
the past, and Arnette claimed he had already used it
to see some pretty major stuff. He mentioned witnessing speeches
by Napoleon and Mussolini, which are relatively recent events.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder how they chose what to look at.
Was a random or were there specific events they were
interested in.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. And it wasn't just recent history either.
He also talked about seeing events in ancient Rome. Apparently
he was particularly impressed by Cicero's speaking abilities.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine to actually see Cicero delivering one of
his famous speeches, to witness the power of his oratory firsthand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would completely change our understanding of him as
a historical figure. But then things get even more well intense.
Urnetti also claimed to have witnessed key events from the Bible.
We're talking about the final days of Jesus, including the Crucifixion,
the giving of the Ten Commandments, the destruction of Sodomcgemora.
Speaker 2: These are events that have shaped religious belief for millennia.
To think that someone might have actually seen them with
their own eyes, it's almost incomprehensible right.
Speaker 1: It raises so many questions about faith, history and the
nature of reality itself. Now, the origin story of the
Cronaviser is almost as bizarre as the claims themselves. It
involves Father Agostino Jemelli, a prominent figure who founded the
Catholic University of Milan, and a recording of Gregorian Chance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where the story gets a bit strange.
Speaker 1: So supposedly Jamelli was listening to these chants and he
thought he could hear the voice of his dead father
in the recording. At first he thought it might be
some kind of divine message, but Ernetti, with his scientific background,
had a different explanation.
Speaker 2: He proposed that maybe sites and sounds from the past
don't just disappear, but they linger in some form of energy,
like electromagnetic waves.
Speaker 1: Exactly like the way a sound echo fades but doesn't
vanish instantly. And this idea, however far fixed it might sound,
intrigued Jamelli enough to fund research into it. And remember
Jamelli was also the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
So here you have this unexpected link between religious scholarship
and cutting edge scientific research.
Speaker 2: And it makes sense in a way. They were dealing
with questions of faith, of the afterlife, of the nature
of reality. It's not so strange that they might be
open to exploring new ideas, even if they seem unconventional.
Speaker 1: Right. So Ornetti gets this funding and he assembles a
team of scientists to build this chronaviser. Now, he claimed
the team had twelve members, but he only ever publicly
named two of.
Speaker 2: Them, and those two names are pretty big deals in
the scientific world. Huge.
Speaker 1: First, there was Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist
who was instrumental in developing nuclear energy. His involvement would
lend a lot of credibility to the project.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Fermi was one of the leading minds in physics
at the time. He wasn't some fringe theorist. He was
a serious scientist.
Speaker 1: The second name was Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist
who was a key figure in both the German and
American space programs. Again a brilliant and controversial figure, but
someone with undeniable expertise.
Speaker 2: Right, But here's the Neither Fermi, who died before the
story became public, nor von Braun ever confirmed their involvement
in this project.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's a pretty significant silence, isn't it. So how
did this chronavisor actually work? Ernetti's explanation was surprisingly straightforward.
He said it used antennas to pick up these residual
electromagnetic signals both light and sound from past events, kind.
Speaker 2: Of like a radio receiver, but instead of tuning into
different frequencies across space, it was tuning into different times exactly.
Speaker 1: And these signals would then be processed and displayed on
a cathode ray tube like an old fashioned TV screen,
So you'd input the date and location and boom, you're
watching the past.
Speaker 2: Sounds simple, but technologically it would be incredibly difficult to
isolate such faint signals from all the noise in the.
Speaker 1: Universe, right, like trying to hear a whisper from centuries
ago in the middle of a hurricane. But this is
where the ethical implications start to get really.
Speaker 2: Serious, because if such a device actually worked, the potential
for abuse would be enormous. Yes, think about it, spying
on historical figures, uncovering state secrets, blackmail.
Speaker 1: It would be chaos, the ultimate surveillance state, and that's
what Ernetti claimed led to the Cronaviser being dismantled. He
said they realized how dangerous it was and informed Popius the.
Speaker 2: Twelve, which makes sense. Imagine the power the Vatican would
have if they could literally see into the past. It's
easy to see why they might want to keep such
a device secret or even destroy it.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And the irony is that, according to Ernetti, his
conversation with Brune was the first time he had broken
his silence about the Coronaviser in years.
Speaker 2: So he claims. But the big question, of course is
where's the proof. Did Arnetti have any evidence to back
up his story?
Speaker 1: Well, he claimed he did. He said he used the
cronaviser to witness a performance of a lost play from
ancient Rome called Theistes. The playwright was Quintus Eneus, who
was a really important figure in Latin literature, but most
of his work has been lost over time.
Speaker 2: A rediscovery of a complete play by eneusis would be
like finding a new Shakespearean play. It would be huge
for our understanding of Roman culture exactly.
Speaker 1: And Arnetti claimed that he watched this play being performed
in Rome in one sixty nine BC and was able
to transcribe the entire thing. He even said the manuscript
still existed somewhere now. The story of the Coronaviser stayed
relatively quiet for a while until nineteen seventy two, when
an Italian magazine published an article with this dramatic headline,
A machine that photographs the past has finally been invented.
Speaker 2: That must have caught people's attention.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. It brought the Chronaviser's story into the public
eye in a big way. And around the same time,
some photos started circulating that were supposedly taken by Arnette
using the device.
Speaker 2: What kind of photos.
Speaker 1: Well, one was supposedly a photo of Jesus with his disciples,
and another was of the crucifixion itself.
Speaker 2: Wow, if those photos were real, that would be well,
that would change.
Speaker 1: Everything, it would, But it turned out they weren't real.
The photo of Jesus and his disciples was actually a
photo of a well known painting by a German artist,
and the crucifixion photo was a photo of a statue
by a Spanish artist. So fakes, yeah, pretty much. And
then for a while the story kind of died down again.
But then in two thousand and two, Francois Brune published
a book called The New Mystery of the Vatican where
he laid out his whole account of the Coronaviser and
his friendship with Thernettie.
Speaker 2: So he was convinced it was real, Oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. He even included what he claimed were blueprints
of the device in the book, and both Arnettie and
Brune maintained their belief in the Coronaviser until they died.
Ornetti even published an open letter reaffirming its existence shortly
before his death.
Speaker 2: That's pretty remarkable. You'd think that if it was all
a hoax, one of them would have admitted it at
some point, right.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, despite all the intrigue in the
compelling stories, there's a lot of evidence that suggests the
Coronaviser never actually existed. For one thing, no one else
has ever come forward to corroborate or Nettie's story, and
the two scientists he named ever confirmed their involvement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a pretty big hole in the story.
Speaker 1: And then there's the whole issue with the fake photos
and the manuscript of the lost play. Experts who analyzed
the text said it was full of inconsistencies and anachronisms,
meaning it used language and grammar that wouldn't have existed
in Ennius's time.
Speaker 2: So it seems more likely that Arnetti made it up,
or at least heavily embellished it, than that he actually
witnessed a performance from two thousand years ago, right, And there.
Speaker 1: Were even some rumors after Arnetti's death that he had
confessed to faking some of the evidence, although those rumors
were never confirmed.
Speaker 2: And Brune of course denied those rumors.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he insisted the coronaviser was real and suggested
that any confession by Arnetti would have been forced by
the Church to keep the whole thing secret. So you
have all these conflicting accounts and interpretations swirling around the story,
which makes it even more fascinating but also harder to
figure out what's true.
Speaker 2: What about the Vatican, what's their official stance on all
of this.
Speaker 1: Well, they've always denied the existence of the Coronaviser. They
basically say it's a complete.
Speaker 2: Fab which you'd expect them to say, right, yeah, But.
Speaker 1: Then there's this weird detail that kind of contradicts that.
In nineteen eighty eight, the Vatican issued a decree saying
that anyone caught using a coronavisor would be excommunicated.
Speaker 2: That's odd. Why make a rule against something that doesn't
exist exactly.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe they know
more than they're letting on. So here we are at
the end of our deep dive and we're still left
with this big question. Was the Coronavisor real or not.
Speaker 2: We've got these extraordinary claims, some questionable evidence, official denials,
and a whole lot of mystery right, and.
Speaker 1: It's ultimately up to you, the listener, to decide what
you believe. But what's so fascinating about this story is
that it touches on so many things that we as
humans are drawn to. The desire to understand the past,
the allure forbidden knowledge, the tension between faith and science.
Speaker 2: And even if the Coronavisor never existed, the very idea
of it forces us to think about what we would
do if we had access to such a powerful technology,
What would we want to see? What would we do
with that knowledge?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's a thought provoking question, isn't it. The Coronavisor
story may be full of holes and inconsistencies, but it
continues to capture our imagination because it taps into something
deep within us. It makes us wonder what secrets are
hidden in the past and what it would mean to
have the power to unlock them. Thanks for joining us
on this deep dive, we hope it's given you some
things to think about.