Chambers describes how Ernetti claimed to have witnessed the crucifixion of Christ, watched Cicero deliver an oration, recovered a lost Latin play from 169 B.C., and even glimpsed a future bank robbery in time to alert police. A photograph allegedly showing Christ on the cross later matched a wooden carving in an Italian church, raising questions of fraud, though Jesuit priest Father Francois Brun maintained that Ernetti was too accomplished to fabricate such claims.
The program shifts to open lines where callers report apparent time slips, including a woman in Walmart witnessing the same mother and daughter enter twice in identical fashion. Art notes that two previous guests who researched time travel have both vanished without explanation.
Key Moments
What the chronovisor allegedly captured: Art reads the source article setting up the show: starting in 1956, Benedictine Father Pellegrino Ernetti and 12 anonymous physicists built a 'television-like' device that supposedly retrieved photographs of the crucifixion of Christ, the original Latin of Quintus Ennius's lost tragedy from 169 BC, and the original text of the Ten Commandments.
A Benedictine monk with a quantum physics degree: Chambers explains that Ernetti held the world's only chair in polyphonic music, was a leading authority on Gregorian chant, AND held a degree in quantum/subatomic physics - the rare combination of mystical sound theory and hard physics that makes him impossible to dismiss as a flake.
Vanishing physicists and Russian abduction rumors: Chambers says the 12 physicists Ernetti named conveniently 'went on vacation' or stopped responding when researchers tried to verify, and Russian press reported about 10-15 years earlier that foreign governments attempted to abduct Ernetti himself.
Cicero's Latin and Vatican silence: Ernetti reportedly used the chronovisor to watch Cicero deliver an oration and noted that Cicero's Latin differed slightly from how priests had been taught it; Chambers adds that when the Vatican tells a priest to clam up, they tell him to clam up about being told to clam up - a self-sealing silence around the device.