July 5, 2002: Father Ernetti's Chronovisor - John Chambers

Art Bell devotes a Friday night to time travel, beginning with author John Chambers, publisher of "Father Ernetti's Chronovisor," documenting the Benedictine monk who claimed to have built a device capable of viewing past events. Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a quantum physics scholar and world authority on polyphonic music, reportedly collaborated with 12 anonymous physicists to construct the machine in the 1950s based on the principle that light and sound waves never truly disappear.

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.