Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

The trouble with time travel is that if you go to the past and step on a butterfly, that butterfly’s family will then travel to the future and murder you and everyone you love.

We can’t remember how that old adage goes, actually. That makes the Chronovisor, invented by Father Pellegrino Ernetti, quite convenient. On it, you see, you can view the past without disturbing it – TV style.

The paranormal world can stand impressively on it’s own two feet until you ask for concrete evidence of this or that. When that happens the whole thing can crumble right before an unbeliever’s eyes. Believers though – well they’re busy making evidence of their own – like the Spiricom - remember that thing? It was the machine that communicated with the dead. A few conversations using it were caught on tape – including one where the dead guy talked carrots. It’s fascinating, really.

And then there’s the Psychomanteum. That’s used for dead talking too, but it uses a lot less wires and circuit boards than the Spiricom.

Now the Chronovisor, on the other hand, it doesn’t talk to the dead – but it will let you see them. In the past we mean. Because it’s a time travel machine. Not the kind that leaves flaming skid marks – no – those one’s actually transport you to the past. Hypothetically. The Chronovisor just lets you view transpired events from the comfort of your favourite arm chair.

This according to Wikipedia:

“The chronovisor was portrayed as a large cabinet with a normal cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. It could also focus and track specific people. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events, though it could also pick up sound waves.”

Now if you had a machine like that, what would you tune in to first? The murder of JFK? Roswell? Your horny parents conceiving you?

Well if you were a Catholic priest, you’d probably want to watch the crucifixion. And photograph it. Like it says the machine’s inventor Father Pellegrino Ernetti did here on Wikipedia:

“He said that he observed, among other historical events, Christ’s crucifiction and photographed it. A photo of this, Ernetti said, appeared in the May 2, 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, an Italian weekly news magazine.”

Obviously there was a lot of doubt and scepticism regarding Ernetti’s claims. The picture of the crucified Christ (see attached), for instance, looked an awful lot like a wood carving made by some famous or not-famous pocket knife sculptor.

To top it off, there were rumours that on his death bed Ernetti took it all back in a last ditch effort to not walk through the pearly gates with a weird lie in tow.

Also, he said the machine got dismantled in the Vatican or something – so just because nobody can show it to you doesn’t mean it never existed. If you’re the type of person who needs to see it to believe it, well, you’re probably never gonna believe it, and you’re stupid anyway. Right, Ernetti?

If it did exist it’s a real shame it’s been reduced to a pile of pieces. Think of all the murders that could be solved with something like that. Also – you could keep rewinding and watching that one awesome game-saving catch you made in the seventh grade that caused your teammates to hoist you on shoulder and carry you briskly through a shower of ticker tape and the keys to several cities.

Man, back then you were good, weren’t you?

If only your dad had brought his stupid camera.

Your kids will never believe you.

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This week: Scientific Wonders

In June of this year you're gonna get fed up with your Nana's dependence on pain killers, blood thinners and skin tighteners. You're gonna take it upon yourself to flush the whole bunch of 'em down the privy, and she'll die precisely two hours later for lack of her medicinal necessities. That's murder, friend.

Don't worry though, because you won't have to live with offing your Dad's Mom forever, you know, in prison and what-not. That's because according to some legitimate Russian brains, a time portal will briefly open in May of 2008 in which visitors from the future can step through.

Government willing, you could use the chance to set things straight now, couldn't you?

It wasn't so long ago we told you all about how time travel could be yours for just a few hundred dollars. Also in the past we talked about how the big bang was bunk. Today's topic touches on both of those issues.

CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and they are currently working on a massive project. According to their own website:

"Like the last pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, the final components of the titanic Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN are slotting into place. At ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb the remaining large pieces of equipment are being carefully lowered into the caverns in preparation for the start up later this year of the most powerful particle accelerator ever, the LHC."

The accelerator is about three hundred feet underground, and has a circumference of 17 miles. In May it's set to launch two particle beams in opposite directions around the rings. The two beams are set to collide in four different places, and hopefully be transformed into energy. The purpose, as we've heard it explained, is to recreate the goings-on just after the big bang. The purpose, as National Geographic explains it, is to:

"…to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things."

It's an absolutely massive device, as we've already explained, and racing particles around sounds safe enough – but a couple of Russian mathematicians, Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, think otherwise. They thing the circumstances created by the accelerator could be just right to tear the fabric of time itself. The Telegraph explains their point of view:

"…the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle – a trillionth the size of a mosquito – they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime. While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed timelike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment."

The exact time of the portal's opening will be written all over the history books. As a result, when technology has possibly evolved sufficiently, future-folk will be able to take advantage of the opening and step well into 2008.

Will it happen? Probably not. Can it happen? If it's good enough for Russian math-nerds it's good enough for us.

Read More:

Time Travel Possible Very Soon? – Digital Trends

This week: Time Travel

Steven Gibbs is a man who claims he was contacted by time travellers and given the schematics for how exactly to build his own era-jumping machine. He's since built one, and claims to have successfully travelled. Not only that – but he sells the machines so that you can travel too.

Other people have bought the time-devices and even successfully used them, or so goes the claim anyway.

For just $350 you could be the proud owner of a time machine invented/modified by Steven Gibbs, a man who built his first device in 1985. He believes in his apparatus so much he's listed his personal cell phone number online so that you can call him directly to talk about it, and/or place an order.

From what we gather, for the invention to work you have to be standing in one of many exact-right spots called grid points. The device opens a bubble of sorts when activated, and transports you.

Once you arrive in the new time, you can leave the bubble but you have to be in it when it collapses back to the original time – or you're stuck.

Radio show Coast to Coast sums up Gibbs' description of the time travelling process:

"In order to physically travel through time, Gibbs explained, the device must be activated near a vortex for three minutes. The user will see a flash of white light or feel a sinking sensation and be projected into another time. The HDR has a 500-year limit, Gibbs noted."

Gibbs once told a website called American Antigravity about a time he almost got stuck in 1977. It's an interesting read:

“We fired the machine up but didn’t seem to notice the effect, and we eventually got bored and went shopping. Fortunately, the time bubble stayed open, because as it turns out we’d gone shopping in 1977. My first clue was when the person at the bookstore’s cash-register told me that the date on my check was incorrect, but she didn’t make me fix it and I neglected to find out what the correct date was. However, when we got back to the house we realized that the receipt and all of the brand-new books that we’d purchased were dated 1977, and realized how close we’d come to getting stranded.”

He also spoke of a client of his who allegedly travelled back to 1850. That gentleman brought back some coins as a souvenir – he gave one to the machine's inventor.

Not all people who purchased the machine could get it to work, however, as Rob Dyrdek of MTV's Rob and Big will testify. He owns two machines and tried one of them out on his show. You can guess the results from the paragraph's first sentence.

Whether or not the machine works we can't say – but if Gibbs wants to send us one we'd be happy to look into it.

Read More:

Successful Time Travel? – Think-About It.com

Contact Gibbs