Chronovisor: The Rumour That the Vatican Once Had a Machine to View the Past

On May 2, 1972, the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere published an article titled “A Machine That Photographs the Past Has Been Invented.” It interviewed a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti. He said a group of scientists had created the Chronovisor, a screen-like device able to recover images and sounds from events that had already happened. The machine did not send anyone into the past. It let an operator look back at the past as if a distant broadcast were playing.