(For the video companion to this blog post, please click on the video above to take you to my YouTube chat on “The Popes’ Ghost Hunters.”)

When I set out to write about “occult machines” recently, I knew that I wanted to include the history of a mysterious device called the “Chronovisor,” otherwise known as the “Vatican’s time machine.” As information about its alleged designer tumbled around in my brain, I knew that I’d heard his name before, but it was a while before I realized where.

Then it hit me.

Years ago, I had written a blog post for my old Chicago Hauntings Tours website. It was me trying to defend my work in Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC)—specifically Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP. The article was about how a former pope gave his blessing to the study of the “voices of unknown origin.” Surely, if the pope approved, it was absolutely fine for Catholics to attempt to communicate with spirits, right?

Wrong, but more on that in a minute. Let’s get back to the inventor, but first a tiny bit about EVP.

In the realm of paranormal phenomena, EVP has long been a subject of interest and debate among researchers and skeptics alike. EVP refers to the alleged communication with spirits of the deceased—or other, nonhuman spirits—through the use of electronic recording equipment. One of the earliest and most controversial claims of EVP research is attributed to two Catholic priests from Italy.

One of those priests was my guy.

Father Pellegrino Ernetti was a Benedictine monk and exorcist as well as a respected physicist and renowned musicologist, while Father Agostino Gemelli, his longtime colleague, was a close friend and fellow visionary. On September 15, 1952 the pair were working together on a harmonics project involving recordings of Gregorian Chant. During one session, the reel-to-reel tape recorder they were using kept eating the tape. Frustrated, Father Gemelli (probably half in jest, as we all do sometimes) appealed to his deceased father, looking up to Heaven and saying, “Father, please help me.”

To the shock of the two priests, when the tape was played back, the voice of Ernetti’s dead father could be heard answering his son’s plea with the words, ‘Of course. I am always with you.’

Immediately, the two priests attempted to record the voice again—with success. The men stood in awe as a voice came through the tape a second time, saying,

‘Zucchini, it is clear. Don’t you know it is I?’

“Zucchini” was the nickname Gemelli’s father had called him as a boy—a name no one outside the family would have known.

Above, Father Agostino Gemelli with his students. (Click for image source.)

After these startling initial communications, Ernetti and Gemelli embarked on a journey to discover the possibility of contacting the dead through the use of technology. Their experiments became widely known during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and have since sparked much interest (as well as skepticism) within the paranormal community. But the experiments led to something possibly even stranger . . . one of the greatest legends in the history of time travel experimentation.

And it all started with Father Ernetti.

THE PRIEST’S TIME MACHINE

Francoise Brune, a French priest and theologian intensely interested in both science and the questions of materialism and death, reportedly guided Ernetti in his collaboration with a renowned group of twelve scientists—which allegedly included Enrico Fermi and the Nazi rocket scientist WernHer von Braun— to develop a sort of time viewer which could capture sound and images from a kind of universal memory or energy file—similar to the notion of the Akashic records. In 1962, Ernetti announced to the press that the device was complete, and the worlds of science and theology listened.

It was called the Chronovisor. It took the form of a large cabinet equipped with a cathode ray—or picture—tube. Boasting an array of buttons and levers, the device allowed its operator to select both the desired temporal and spatial location for observation. Essentially, the chronovisor had the capability to receive, decipher, and reproduce the electromagnetic energy imprinted from events that had transpired in the past. According to Father Ernetti, the chronovisor had allowed him to reach back in time to witness pivotal moments such as Jesus’ Last Supper and even the performances of long-deceased historical figures such as Cicero and Wagner. The priest also claimed that the machine was also able to capture and record sound waves and audible signals. This peculiar feature served as an explanation for the ethereal voice of his deceased father, which had seemingly materialized during those initial experiments with Gregorian chant.

The concept of being able to observe historical events firsthand, without relying solely on texts or accounts, ignited a frenzy of excitement and skepticism among both the scientific and religious communities. Many skeptics dismissed Father Ernetti's claims as mere fantasy, accusing him of sensationalism and self-aggrandizement. Others believed he was trying to legitimize his religious beliefs by concocting claims of witnessing the life of Christ. Skeptics also questioned the lack of physical evidence to substantiate his claims, which led to further doubts about the authenticity of Father Ernetti's invention. Later, some “photographs” Ernetti claimed to have taken at the scene of historic events appeared to have been lifted from existing paintings and other modern sources.

Above, one of the controversial photographs reportedly made possible by the chronovisor. Could this be Jesus with his disciples?

Despite the widespread skepticism, some notable figures lent credence to Father Ernetti's work. Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi—who Ernetti had claimed as a team member—suggested it was theoretically possible to capture and decode electromagnetic traces of past events. Father Ernetti's collaborator, Father Gemelli, the founder of the prestigious Catholic University of Milan, also vouched for the authenticity of the chronovisor. It was Gemelli who claimed to have seen images of Christ's crucifixion through the device, leaving both believers and skeptics perplexed.

Unfortunately, the Chronovisor itself was never revealed to the public. Some say Father Ernetti dismantled the device to prevent it from being misused. Other say the Vatican ordered its destruction under threat of excommunication. Regardless, Father Brune went on the record to say that

"Father Ernetti's discovery of the chronovisor is the most important event in human history since the birth of Christ."

I’ve thought a lot about this whole situation, and there were certainly many factors involved that make it a truly astounding story—if it’s even true. If it is indeed true, surely one of the most overlooked aspects of this legendary device is that it was born from spirit communication.

It’s also the most suspect.

A CATHOLIC MEDIUM?

The Church’s involvement in—and apparent blessing of—EVP research was definitely a huge factor for me when, in 2007, I met the famed EVP researcher, Mark Macy, and began following his methodology for obtaining “voices.” The pope’s approval was just the icing on a cake I’d already baked myself, for like many other “Christian “ researchers, I had begun foolishly claiming that the Bible only denounces speaking to the dead to ask for knowledge about the future, and not simply talking to them.

I continued to look for information on the topic of the Catholic faith and EVP, and I must admit to being shocked—but delighted—to discover that more than one pope had seemingly rubber-stamped the occult practice of communicating with the dead, starting with the Vatican’s approval of the work of Ernetti and Gemelli.

The pair were very troubled about the voices they had recorded. They knew that communication with the dead was expressly and deeply forbidden by Catholic teaching, and they visited Pope Pius XII in Rome to share with him what they had discovered. But the pope was nonplussed. He shrugged off the priests’ concern. Later, the Italian journal, Astra would report the pope’s words to Gemelli:

“(Y)ou really need not worry about this. The existence of this voice is strictly a scientific fact and has nothing to do with spiritism. The recorder is totally objective. It receives and records only sound waves from wherever they come. This experiment may perhaps become the cornerstone for a building for scientific studies which will strengthen people's faith in a hereafter.

The pope, then,pope actually seemed to be stating his belief that these voices weren’t actually spirit voices, but sound waves. It was this belief that put his mind at ease about the phenomenon. However, many researchers—including me—went on to cherish this statement, ignoring what it really said and believing the pope meant it as a blanket endorsement of spirit communication.

He didn’t.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the plot thickens. I later discovered that Pope Pius’ cousin was the well-known Catholic parapsychologist Gebhard Frei, who was the co-founder of the Jung Institute, famous for delving—like its namesake—into all sorts of occult stuff. Frei was also a close colleague of Latvian Catholic researcher Konstantin Raudive, the most prolific and influential of all EVP practitioners. We’ll talk more about Raudive when we chat with Daniel O’Connor next week about his book, Only Man Bears His Image, because Whitley Streiber, poster child of the alien contactee movement, claims that Raudive designed his “alien implant”—from the Other Side.

But I digress.

At any rate, Pope Pius’ friend, Dr. Frei, went on record to say:

“All that I have read and heard forces me to believe that the voices come from transcendental, individual entities. Whether it suits me or not, I have no right to doubt the reality of the voices.”

Incidentally, Frei himself would go on to “come through” after his death to at least one colleague, or so they say.

Fast forward to the tenure of Pope Paul VI, where we find that yet some more nepotism—or at least favoritism—was leading to what was being perceived as, essentially, the Vatican approving work in EVP.

One of Paul VI’s good friends was the Swedish film producer Friedrich Jurgenson, himself a major pioneer in EVP research. The two had become buddies after Jurgenson made a film about the pope, and in thanks P6 made Jurgenson a Knight Commander of the prestigious Catholic Order of St Gregory. Later, Jurgenson wrote to Peter Bander, a British EVP researcher, delighting that

“I have found a sympathetic ear for the Voice Phenomenon in the Vatican. I have won many wonderful friends among the leading figures in the Holy City. Today 'the bridge' stands firmly on its foundations.”

And it would go on and on.

Father Leo Schmid, a Swiss theologian, documented more than ten thousand “voices of unknown origin, “ reportedly with Vatican permission, publishing them in a book, When the Dead Speak, which was published posthumously in 1976. Father Andreas Resch reportedly also conducted EVP experiments, and included the methodology and results in the parapsychology courses he taught for priests in the Vatican. In 1970, a group called the International Society for Catholic Parapsychologists (now, I believe, defunct) focused much of its annual conference on EVP.

Above, Konstantin Raudive, the most famous of many Catholic EVP researchers

Most famously, in 1972 no less than four senior Catholic leaders were part of a series of famous recordings done at London’s Pye Laboratory. We mentioned Jurgenson’s letter to Peter Bander above. Well, Dr. Peter Bander was a senior lecturer in Religious and Moral Education at the Cambridge Institute of Education when he was approached by publisher Colin Smythe. Smythe had become intrigued by Konstantin Raudive's research and invited Bander to be part of experimentation into EVP. But Bander—a Catholic and skeptic—flatly refused, calling the possibility of the dead communicating with the living “not only far-fetched but outrageous.”

And so, without Bander, Smythe began his own research—and got hooked, as people tend to do. He invited Bander to try it out, promising results. After about ten minutes of trying, Bander had had enough, but suddenly . . .

"I noticed the peculiar rhythm mentioned by Raudive and his colleagues... I heard a voice... I believed this to have been the voice of my mother who had died three years earlier.”

Smythe would go on to publish an entire book by Bander, called Voices from the Tapes. In the book, Ken Attwood, Chief Engineer of Pye, swore to the authenticity and inexplicable nature of the "voices,” admitting:

“I have done everything in my power to break the mystery of the voices without success; the same applies to other experts. I suppose we must learn to accept them.”

When the Pye tests were over, England’s Sunday Mirror newspaper that had planned and paid for the project refused to publish the results. Reportedly, the editor-in-chief was very unhappy with the positive results obtained by journalist Ronald Maxwell, who vowed that the phenomenon was real. Even after collecting numerous testimonies from renowned scientist observers of the tests, the article was never run.

A central part of the Pye tests was the fact that numerous priests were involved in observing the experiments. All of them seemed to go all-in on the “voices of unknown origin,” including Father Pistone, superior of the Society of St Paul, who concluded:

“I do not see anything against the teaching of the Catholic Church in the Voices, they are something extra-ordinary but there is no reason to fear them, nor can I see any danger.”

So, voices from the “Other Side” appear on magnetic tape, and a priest “sees no danger?”

Really?

On another occasion, the Right Reverend Monsignor Professor C. Pfleger said something else downright crazy for a Catholic:

“Facts have made us realize that between death and resurrection there is another realm of post-mortal existence. Christian theology has little to say about this realm.”

So it took EVP experiments for a monsignor to realize there is “another realm of post-mortal existence” between life on Earth and in Heaven? That’s extraordinary, as the Catholic faith has a long tradition of belief in such a place. It’s called Purgatory.

In his book, Bander also included a photograph (p. 133) of yet another Catholic higher-up, the Right Reverend Monsignor Stephen O'Connor, Vicar General and Principal Roman Catholic Chaplain to the Royal Navy. In the photo, O’Connor is shown listening to, ostensibly, the voice of a suicide victim which had been recorded by Konstantin Raudive. Neither O’Connor nor any of the others priests involved seem to have suggested the possibility that these voices were those of souls needing prayers or Masses, particularly a soul who had committed suicide.

SELECTIVE HEARING

Research into the voices continued full throttle throughout the 1980s, spearheaded by Raudive and other predominantly Catholic researchers. The 1980s also so the advent of many EVP innovations, including the Spiricom device (a whole other topic even more enigmatic than the Chronovisor).

Occasionally, one or another researcher would remind observers that the Vatican was totally behind the research.

Then, in the 1990s Father Gino Concetti, chief theological commentator for the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, made a rather Earth-shattering statement, one that has influenced many Catholic paranormal investigators to go down a very dangerous road:

ROME – One of the most authoritative spokesmen of the Roman Catholic Church has raised eyebrows among the faithful by declaring that the Church believes in the feasibility of communication with the dead.The Rev. Gino Concetti, chief theological commentator for the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, denied he was signaling any change in approach. But he agreed that his remarks might come as a jolt to many believers.
He said the Church remained opposed to the raising of spirits, but added: “Communication is possible between those who live on this earth and those who live in a state of eternal repose, in heaven or purgatory. It may even be that God lets our loved ones send us messages to guide us at certain moments in our life.”
His comments were first made in support of an American theologian, the Rev. John Neuhaus. Neuhaus had described how a friend had seen a ghost. He said there were various explanations, but “the important thing is not to deny such things a priority.”
Concetti said the key to the Church’s attitude was the Roman Catholic belief in a “Communion of Saints,” which included Christians on earth as well as those in the after-life. “Where there is communion, there is communication,” he said.
Concetti suggested dead relatives could be responsible for prompting impulses and triggering inspiration – and even for “sensory manifestations,” such as appearances in dreams.
Concetti said the new Catholic catechism specifically endorsed the view that the dead could intercede on earth and quotes the dying St. Dominic telling his brothers: “Do not weep, for I shall be more useful to you after my death and I shall help you then more effectively than during my life.”

This statement has been used by many researchers since—including myself—as a sort of “all systems go” for any and all kind of spirit communication.

But it’s not. Like so many statements coming out of the Vatican in the last several decades, the statement of Father Concetti was poorly articulated, and it’s been widely misinterpreted. The statement is referring to the long-held belief that souls in Purgatory and possibly in Heaven may occasionally attempt to communicate with us. Concetti was speaking to a generation that, like my Mom, largely believed that at death the human personality goes to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory—that it has no business here on Earth. My mom’s generation was taught that “ghosts” don’t exist, and so if you think you have one in your house, it’s a delusion—or it’s demonic.

Concetti was also voicing a restatement of the well-known Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints and the role of deceased saints in the lives of the living. It’s not a blanket approval of EVP research, ghost boxes, Ouija boards, mediumship or anything else. It’s not at all an approval of reaching out to these souls for communications. Yes, we talk to the saints, but we don’t expect or want them to talk back. If they do, that’s generally a bad thing: a big clue that they aren’t human spirits. But while sometimes saints—including our loved ones in Heaven—may be trying to comfort us or warn us about the state of our souls—through dreams, feelings or subtle signs—, the main reason for our loved ones to reach out to us is one not even stated by Father Concetti:

They need prayers.

So, what are we to do? If legitimate Catholic priests and even the pope aren’t telling us the truth, you have to get it—you’d better get it—where you can, because a lot of this has turned out to be the Vatican and other Catholic religious saying either misleading or overtly outrageous things about spirit communication.

Crazy things.

I hate to reference a sedevacantist source (someone who believes there’s been no legitimate pope since Vatican II), but as infamous sedevacantist Brother Peter Dimond has correctly said of the current UFO/alien question and the Vatican’s crazy response to it, many of the most high-ups over the years have been less-than-dependable teachers of the faith. I’ve seen myself in my own research that, like Dimond has stated, many of the Vatican Jesuits have shown themselves to be “liberal heretics” and that Pope Francis is a

“heretic who says all kinds of false and unbiblical things.” (Peter Dimond, “UFOs, Nephilim, ‘Climate Change’ and the Devil” 2019)

I’m not a sedevacantist, but I concur. And—though I’m not supposed to endorse the views of schismatics—it was through Dimond’s observation that I began to second-guess the conviction that my EVP work was “endorsed” by former priests and even popes. I stopped blindly accepting everything popes say as Gospel truth. It’s not, and we aren’t taught to do that. Should we be able to look to them for authority on such things? Maybe. But we can’t. They are only human, and they err and fail. Sometimes they seem to deliberately lead us astray.

FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENCE . . . OR THE LOVE OF GOD?

I’ve thought much about what these numerous Catholic researchers, priests and even popes could have been thinking when they enthusiastically embraced attempted communication with the dead, in violation of the most basic laws of Christianity. And that not one of them seems to have ever used that all-powerful tool that Catholics have used for centuries in dealing with the dead:

Prayer.

What I’ve concluded is that there were several movements at work during this remarkable period of time. One, of course, was the Twentieth Century’s massive scientific push. These primary researchers, including Jurgenson, Raudive, Bander and others, had seen the atom bomb’s power and other weapons of world war. They’d watched the beginning of the UFO era that began in 1947 with the first “saucer” sightings. As the age progressed, they saw men step onto the surface of Earth’s moon. They saw computers go from room sized to desk sized in a matter of decades. For them, EVP was a part of this wondrous new world of possibility, and even the popes were “hooked on the feeling” that doors of knowledge were swinging wide open that had been shut tight for millennia.

Above, illustration of a “Frank’s Box” spirit or ghost radio, designed for attempting real time communication with the Voices of Unknown Origin. For over a decade I used such boxes in almost daily EVP research.

Suitably, this time period was also one of greatly reduced emphasis on angels, demons and other characters from the ages-old spiritual battle between good and evil. These men had seen real, tagngible battles between good and evil. They had fought in them. War had rendered black and white troublingly gray in so many realms. Who was to know what was even right or wrong anymore? Concentrating on the observable must have been a welcome relief from all of the unknowables the world had been left with as the century droned on, rudderless.

Additionally, we can’t forget that, during the Golden Age of EVP research, the Second Vatican Council happened. In the realm of what it meant to be Catholic, it seemed nothing was sure anymore, and so many things seemed “okay” that had formerly been anathema. The devil was out of style, to put it bluntly; only now is the reality of the great unseen spiritual war coming back into the radar of Catholics. The devil is back in fashion, and that’s a godsend indeed, if a poor way to put it.

Years after those first Catholic ghost hunters switched on their recorders, I would follow the same line. EVP was “science” for me. I wasn’t “consulting mediums” or anything else the Bible forbade. I was searching for the truth of God’s creation. And I was doing it with a machine. What evil could a machine do? Of course, like my far smarter but equally foolish predecessors, I should have been well versed in the answer to that.

When I started out as a paranormal investigator back in the 1980s, we did use tape recorders, and I still do, some five years now after my last EVP session. The recorder is an essential tool for documenting what’s happening in a field investigation of reported ghosts, hauntings, possible demonic infestations or other cases of what parapsychology calls “spontaneous phenomena.” But our use of recorders “back in the day” was not this kind of occult use that is so prevalent today—and that I got sucked into myself, with dire consequences. We used tape recorders simply to record investigations.

Were there sometimes sounds that seemed like voices? Rarely. But sometimes there were. And when they spoke, most of the time they said what the great majority of such voices say:

Help. Help me. Help us . . . pleas for prayer. Prayers we never thought of saying, just like Raudive and Bender and even the popes never thought of saying, either.

It wasn’t until the dawn of the current “ghost hunting era”—of hobby ghost hunting—in the early 2000s that the obsession with real-time, two-way spirit communication began to completely eclipse every other popular type of paranormal research, but it wasn’t the first time investigators had become so enchanted by the Voices that they forgot their simplest Sunday lessons against speaking to the dead. Not long after they discovered the sounds on their tapes, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli started asking questions of the voices. And it’s this two-way communication that has led many into the first stages of possession, and into other occult activities and even religions. Including me.

Indeed, any exorcist worth his holy water will tell you rule number one for dealing with spirits:

Never, ever talk to them. No matter who you think they are.

WHAT’S IT GOING TO BE?

In 1978 a sound researcher named D.J. Ellis published a book on the “Voice Extras” found in the recordings of Jurgenson, Raudive and others. The book is called The Mediumship of the Tape Recorder. And what an apt title it is. Ellis recognized that, with EVP, technology had replaced the woman (or, occasionally, man) at the head of the 19th-Century seance table. Now, more than another century after the first Voices were recorded, thousands of researchers into EVP have discovered a firm truth: many things can act as mediums.

For ITC researchers, it’s obvious that, without the recorder—or the ghost box or the television or the computer hard drive—they wouldn’t receive the voices or images or even emails of unknown origin. Just as, without the living, breathing psychic medium, seance sitters of old—and Theresa Caputo and Tyler Henry fans today—would never have gotten the “messages from the dead” so sought after by the living. Even forgetting paranormal research, it’s a truth known, indeed, to anyone who has turned on a radio or a television or watched a movie spring to life on a blank screen. Without the medium of the tv or the stereo or the projector, we don’t get the communication.

Without the medium, we don’t get the message. Instead, we sit in silence.

Leaving behind the pursuit of EVP has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Having those “cheat” tools to get messages from the great, mysterious Other Side seemed so cool. It made me intensely more popular with other paranormal investigators, and almost god-like to “regular” folks in awe of “ghost hunting.” As time has gone on, I’ve found that, if you don’t participate in spirit communication today, you’re pretty much out with pretty much everyone into the world of popular ghost and hauntings research. At the end of the time when I owned our ghost tour company, everyone wanted to use ghost hunting tools on the tours. They didn’t want to just learn about the dead at these historic locations. They wanted to talk to them. People have always wanted and needed to communicate. And today, in a world where communication is omnipresent, who wants to say no when those delicious messages are just a flick of a switch away? When you know it’s just that flick of a switch that could patch you through to the Unknown—and maybe even the dear people who have left our lives—, who wants to sit in silence?

But for Christians, tempted to seek these communications from the Voices—yet forbidden by our faith from doing just that—, the lesson is as simple as it is hard to hear.

We must choose to sit in silence.

We must resist the medium.

I believe everyone should have an understanding of what EVP is and the history of its pursuit Please don’t use it as a how-to guide, but I highly recommend reading Konstantin Raudive’s book, “Breakthrough” for an understanding of the subject. It’s available here.

Thanks for reading, and remember to #prayforghosts. And please support me on Patreon if you can! It would mean the world to keep my work coming. Learn more on my Patreon page here.