Chronovisor

The Chronovisor is a device that Pellegrino Ernetti claimed in 1972 to have built — a machine said to be capable of observing and recording past events. No working device, schematic, measurement or primary document for it is presented in the source; the Chronovisor is treated here as a named claimed artifact, not a demonstrated instrument.

The claim as stated

Ernetti said the Chronovisor was developed over several years through the collaboration of twelve scientists, three of whom he named: himself, Agostino Gemelli, and Wernher von Braun. The other nine are unnamed in the source.

Ernetti asserted that he had used the device to:

• observe the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ;
• view a performance of the lost Latin tragedy Thyestes by Quintus Ennius;
• hear a speech by Cicero.

Presented evidence and its identification

Ernetti presented a photograph said to depict Christ during the Crucifixion and a text said to reproduce the lost play. The source reports that the photograph was identified as an image of a wooden sculpture of Christ by Coullaut Valera, and that the text is regarded by scholars as a modern composition, likely created by Ernetti himself. The source states that Ernetti's claims for the Chronovisor are generally regarded as pseudoscientific.

Origin narrative

Peter Krassa's book links the Chronovisor project to a 1952 tape-recorder episode involving Ernetti and Gemelli, in which a repaired recorder allegedly captured the voice of Gemelli's deceased father. The source describes this as an early account of Anomalous Voice Phenomena (EVP). The connection between that episode and the 1972 device claim is asserted by Krassa and is not independently corroborated.

What the source does not contain

The source gives no technical description of the Chronovisor — no mechanism, no components, no operating principle, no measurements, no institutional record. The device's claimed function is stated only as an assertion. See Chronovisor Claim (Time-Viewing / Retrocognition Devices) for the claim category and Chronovisor Claims vs. Evidence: The Photograph, the Text and the Pseudoscience Classification for the evidentiary comparison.