The Vatican covered up existence of a time machine, or "time viewer" known as the Chronovisor. Using an TV-like interface, one can observe and record scenes from Earth's history. Some of these scenes could be used to blackmail leaders of government.
Father Pellegrino Ernetti was Benedictine Monk in Italy and a published authority, as a musicologist. In 1965 he was working at the Catholic University of Milan, transferring wire recordings of Gregorian chants to the "modern" medium of magnetic tape. The university archivist Father Agostino Gemelli was checking the quality of the tape transfer, when he heard the voice of his deceased father on the tail end of one recording. Gemelli's father was not attempting to contact his son from the spirit world. He was arguing with another man about the price of shoe wax. Gemelli's father had been a cobbler. Since the voice did not exist on the original wire recording, Gemelli believed the magnetic tape had captured an event from the past. He believed it to be a reward from god.
Father Ernetti on the other hand, believed this phenomena just might be scientifically reproducible. He petitioned his Bishop to assemble a team of scientists to explore the possibility of fabricating a "time recorder". Normally the Bishop would not have bothered to consider the fruits of science over the truth of the bible, but Ernetti was prepared for this objection. Ernetti made a promise to the Bishop that his only goal was to obtain an audio recording at the scene of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The deep coffers of the Vatican were used in funding a secret project tasking some of the most eminent scientists of the age. According to Father Ernetti this included Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer who defected to the United States, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The scientific team discovered that sounds and images of past events left a permanent record behind in the residual form of electromagnetic radiation. A device was built to register, amplify and display the source of these invisible waves. They called it "the Chronovisor".
The first test was a visual journey of only 150 years into history. As the vacuum tubes of the Chronovisor hummed while warming up, a fuzzy picture of Napoleon Bonaparte came gradually into focus, except that... there were two of him. The team was mortified. Something was wrong with the machine. But Oppenheimer said, "No." There is a little known story that Napoleon sent a body double in his place to suffer the sentence of his final exile on the island of Saint Helena. "Now," he said, "we know for sure the story is true."
When the scientists were done experimenting for the day, Father Ernetti would be allowed to use the Chronovisor freely. He wanted to see and hear musical instruments of old, in the process of being played. At first he searched in vain among the marketplaces of ancient Greece. He was looking in the wrong place. He discovered that amphitheaters of the ancients were not used exclusively for presenting plays. They were also the preferred venue for musical concerts. As a Roman Catholic monk he was also well versed in Latin. That is how Ernetti was able to transcribe the complete script of Thyestes as it was being performed, two centuries B.C. Thyestes was one of the lost plays of Quintus Ennius, the poet laureate of the Roman Republic.
Father Ernetti also fulfilled his promise to the Bishop. In 1969, the same year celebrated for man landing on the moon, the Chronovisor was used to document in the backwaters of the Roman Empire, an event almost two thousand years past, of the crucifixion of a man sentenced to death by the governor of Judaea. Unfortunately for the Bishop, the tape of this event disappeared except for this photograph, preserved by Ernetti.
Chronovisor ⏰ Vatican's Secret Time Camera ⏰ Photograph of Jesus ⏰ Father Ernetti Time Machine
