Do the time warp


Well, sort of. Ernetti actually told the French theologian Father François Brune that he watched it live on a time-warping device called the Chronovisor. Rather than transporting people through time, the Chronovisor tuned into the events of the past and displayed them like time-travelling television.

Ernetti claimed to have developed the Chronovisor during the 1950s with 12 famed scientists who, except for Enrico Fermi and Wernher Von Braun (both dead when their names were published 1992), wished to be anonymous. consisted of numerous antennae, three composed of "mysterious" metals, which received light and sound signals on every wavelength; "direction finder" for tuning to a particular time and place; a screen and a recording device.

Ernetti described how, crowded around their invention, the time team watched speeches by Mussolini and Napoleon and scenes from ancient Rome, including a performance of Thyestes, a lost play by Quintus Ennius, one of Rome's most important authors.

Although nobody saw the Chronovisor itself, Ernietti did provide evidence of these televisual travels, for example publishing fragments of Thyestes in Latin. Then, on May 2 1972, the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere published what should have been Ernetti's trump card: a Chronovisor image of the crucified Christ. The team had viewed his last days in their entirety: from the Last Supper to his final agonising moments, and had retained the photo as a powerful souvenir.

Ernetti's glory was shortlived. Another magazine revealed that Christ was a reversed image of a postcard from the Santuario dell'Amore Misericordioso, in the town of Collevalenza. More recently, doubt has been cast on his "transcription" of Thyestes, and an apparent deathbed confession has also surfaced. It is time to add holy hoaxer to Ernetti's accomplishments.