A Newspaper Column on the Chronovisor: Ernetti's Wave Principle, the Collevalenza Crucifix and His 1953 Rebuttal

"A spasso nel tempo perduto" (roughly, "A stroll through lost time") is an opinion column by Carlo Silini in the newspaper Corriere del Ticino. It retells the Chronovisor story in Italian and in an ironic register. Silini presents the machine as a cure for unreliable information and then takes it apart point by point. The column is short and gives no references, but it adds several specifics not found elsewhere in this dossier: the exact issue of the 1972 interview, the name of the sanctuary where the matching crucifix is venerated, and the dates Ernetti gave when he defended his photograph.

What the column says Ernetti claimed

Silini describes Pellegrino Ernetti as a Benedictine, physicist, exorcist and scholar of music. The column dates the public revelation to an interview in La Domenica del Corriere, issue no. 18 of 2 May 1972. In the column's account, Ernetti said the experiments behind the device had been carried out with other physicists 30 years before the interview. The result, he said, was an apparatus that let a viewer watch past events as if on television.

Two of the claims, as the column reports them, came with something tangible attached. For the last moments of Jesus's life, which he said he had witnessed, Ernetti handed the magazine a photograph of Christ's face that he said the device had produced. For the Roman poet Quintus Ennius, he claimed to have attended a performance of the mostly lost tragedy Thyestes and to have filled in its missing passages from a recording made with the machine. The column mentions no photograph or text for the others: he said he had watched and heard Mussolini give a speech, and had seen Napoleon give his speech on abolishing the Venetian Republic, the Serenissima.

The column's opening, written in a mock-credulous voice, also mentions an oration by Cicero. It says the builders were a monk-scientist and seven other world-famous physicists, Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun among them, and that the machine was hidden in the Vatican. The Chronovisor and Pellegrino Ernetti pages and the Looking Back on the Chronovisor: A Skeptical Review of the Photograph, the Ennius Text and the Deathbed Confession review give twelve scientists in total. The column does not explain the difference.

How the device was said to work

The column's most useful contribution is Ernetti's own statement of principle, which it quotes from the same 1972 interview. Ernetti appealed to what he called "a principle of physics accepted by all". His idea was that sound and images, being energy, persist in altered form after they are emitted, so in principle they could be reassembled. Silini grants that the premise is sound as far as it goes, likening it to the way we still see starlight from stars that have long since died. The column does not say how waves that have spread and dissipated could be gathered back into a picture, and Ernetti's quoted words give no method. The column describes no antennae, circuitry or recording apparatus.

The objections the column records

Silini sets out three reasons the story attracted doubt.

The collaborators. Silini says Fermi and von Braun were the only colleagues Ernetti named, and that both were already dead and could not confirm anything. The column gives no dates or sources for the deaths of Fermi and von Braun. It and the Looking Back on the Chronovisor: A Skeptical Review of the Photograph, the Ennius Text and the Deathbed Confession review both name Fermi and von Braun as the collaborators. The Chronovisor and Chronovisor Claim (Time-Viewing / Retrocognition Devices) pages instead name Agostino Gemelli and von Braun. The column does not mention Gemelli.

The photograph. A few weeks after the interview, a reader of La Domenica del Corriere sent in a photograph of the face of a wooden crucifix by "Cullot Valera" (the column's spelling; other pages give Coullaut Valera). The crucifix is venerated at the sanctuary of Collevalenza, near Todi, and the column says its face was identical to Ernetti's image.

The text. A Princeton classicist who specialised in Ennius, unnamed in the column, judged Ernetti's additions to Thyestes inauthentic. Her reason was that they contained many Latin words that entered the language more than 200 years later. The column gives neither the words nor her analysis. The Skeptoid review cites Katherine Eldred for a similar finding with a gap of at least 250 years. The column does not name its classicist, so it does not establish that the two accounts refer to the same assessment.

Ernetti's rebuttal on the crucifix

The column quotes Ernetti's reply on the photograph, which is the most specific version of his defence in this dossier. In translation, he said: "our Christ was captured in 1953, while the one at Collevalenza was made about six years later." He added that Madre Speranza was delighted when she saw the face in his photograph, because it matched the one in her vision. The argument is that the carving followed the image, not the other way round. The column offers no evidence for the 1953 date and does not test the claim.

According to the column, Ernetti tried at first to answer the critics but gradually fell silent. He died in 1994 without ever disowning the invention. The column notes that many people online still believe the story, and ends with the joke that the only way to settle the matter would be to get hold of a chronovisor, even a second-hand one.

What the column does and does not establish

This is commentary, not investigation. It relays the 1972 interview and the objections that followed, but it reproduces no documents and names neither the reader who found the crucifix nor the Princeton scholar. What it does supply is a precise citation for the original interview, the location of the matching crucifix at Collevalenza, and Ernetti's dated counter-claim. For how these fit the wider evidence, see Chronovisor Claims vs. Evidence: The Photograph, the Text and the Pseudoscience Classification and Chronovisor Claim (Time-Viewing / Retrocognition Devices). For a fuller skeptical treatment of the Thyestes text, see Looking Back on the Chronovisor: A Skeptical Review of the Photograph, the Ennius Text and the Deathbed Confession.