Brian Dunning's Skeptoid episode #919, published on 16 January 2024, is a short review of the Chronovisor story. It starts from an explicit null hypothesis, that the device is fiction unless evidence shows otherwise, and then works through the only two exhibits Pellegrino Ernetti ever offered. It ends by asking why the legend was created at all. Along the way it relays a numerical argument from Peter Krassa's book about the supposedly recovered Roman play.
What the review says Ernetti claimed
According to the episode, the story became public in 1972, when Ernetti spoke to a reporter from the Italian press. The first interview appeared in La Domenica del Corriere. Ernetti said he and a team of twelve physicists had built a machine that could see and hear events from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and that it was finished in the 1950s. Dunning lists the events Ernetti claimed to have watched: the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, speeches by Napoleon, Mussolini and others, and a performance of a lost play by the Roman poet Ennius.
The review places the idea's origin in Ernetti's musical work. He was an expert in Gregorian chant and pre-polyphonic music, and the episode says his theory began with studying music on an oscilloscope. Dunning calls the explanation "fanciful and vague". As he summarises it, the premise was that sound and light waves never fully die away and can be captured and rebuilt however old they are. On that account the machine would be a way of viewing the past, not a vehicle for travelling into it.
The physical description comes mainly from Father François Brune's 2002 French book, The Vatican's New Mystery. Brune was a priest and a friend of Ernetti. In that description the machine has many antennae that can pick up almost any frequency, a direction finder that can be tuned to a chosen person, event or time, and a recording unit that Ernetti said little about. That unit was supposedly how he got his photograph of Jesus. Dunning adds that Ernetti told Brune the machine had been taken apart and hidden for fear of misuse, so no living witness ever saw it.
The named collaborators
The review says Ernetti named only two of the twelve scientists: Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. Other accounts on this wiki name Agostino Gemelli, not Fermi, alongside von Braun (see Chronovisor). The episode does not mention Gemelli, and the discrepancy is left open here. Dunning's objection is practical. Both men lived in the United States, and long working stays in Italy would have made news. He reports that a keyword search of e-book biographies of both men found no mention of Ernetti or a Chronovisor, and no unexplained absences. That is a negative search result, not a documentary refutation, but it is the only check of the collaborator claim the review describes.
The photograph
Ernetti's first exhibit was an image he said the device had recorded: the face of Jesus dying on the cross, printed with the 1972 magazine article. According to the episode, it turned out to match a known wooden sculpture of Jesus. A reader matched the two using a postcard of that sculpture bought in a gift shop; once the postcard picture was mirrored left to right, it was identical to Ernetti's photograph. The reader's letter and the postcard appeared in a different magazine, which the review does not name, and neither the sculpture nor its maker is identified. Ernetti's reported answer was that the carving had been guided by a nun's vision of the crucifixion, so it would match what the device saw.
The Thyestes fragment count
The second exhibit was a long passage that Ernetti presented as the text of Thyestes by Quintus Ennius, transcribed while he watched a performance through the device. In the review's account, 24 short fragments of the real play survive, each a line or two quoted by ancient writers.
The argument rests on assumptions that Dunning attributes to Krassa and does not check himself: that 24 fragments survive, that Ernetti's text is about 10% of the length of a typical Ennius play, and that the fragments are spread evenly through the play. Granting those, a passage of that size should contain roughly 2.4 known fragments; Krassa found 16 in Ernetti's. The episode treats chance as implausible and says no writings from the play's own time suggest Thyestes was unusually short. That leaves, in Dunning's reading, a text composed by someone who had already collected the surviving lines and used them as a starting point. He floats Ernetti himself as a possible author.
The review adds a linguistic test. Citing Massimo Polidoro's 2003 article in Skeptical Inquirer, it says Katherine Eldred, an attorney with a PhD in Classics, found Latin words in the text that did not yet exist when Ennius wrote. On that basis the text was composed at least 250 years after him. The review gives neither the specific words nor Eldred's full analysis.
The deathbed confession, and why the review discounts it
Krassa also reported an anonymous letter he received while researching his book. Its writer claimed to be a "distant relative" who visited Ernetti on his deathbed and heard him recant. The recantation covered only the Roman play, not the whole Chronovisor story. Dunning treats the letter as weak evidence. Nobody can say who wrote it, and nothing in the review confirms that the deathbed visit happened. The content also undercuts itself: by the letter's account, Ernetti's recantation included a claim to have known Nostradamus in a past life and to have got the idea from a Chronovisor Nostradamus owned. The review leans on the fragment count and the anachronistic vocabulary instead.
Context and motive
The review also notes that the English translation of Krassa's 1997 book, Father Ernetti's Chronovisor, came from New Paradigm Books of Boca Raton, a publisher of metaphysical and New Age titles. Dunning reads this as a sign of the book's place outside mainstream science.
On motive, Dunning is openly speculative. He points out that the first interview ran a few days after Apollo 16 returned to Earth, when von Braun's Saturn V was in the headlines. He suggests that a device joining science and religion might have been Ernetti's way of drawing attention back to the Church. He also acknowledges that no surviving record shows Ernetti stating any such aim.
What the review does and does not establish
The review gathers secondary reports: Krassa's count, Polidoro's account of Eldred's findings, the reader's postcard and the anonymous letter. It reproduces none of the underlying documents. It does not give the Latin text, the list of anachronistic words, the identity of the sculpture or the exact magazines involved. The fragment arithmetic is in principle checkable by anyone holding the published fragments and Ernetti's text, but the review relays Krassa's premises and counts without verifying them. For the general category of claim, see Chronovisor Claim (Time-Viewing / Retrocognition Devices).
Source notes & attribution
- https://skeptoid.com/episodes/919