Castle Gandolfo, a small town with barely thousand inhabitants about ten kilometers south from Rome’s airport Fiumicino, is mostly known as Pope’s summer residence.
It’s 16th century monastery is special, not only because it was build on the top of the high ridge, but because it has three domes. One is that of church. Other two are mobile telescope domes (click on the adjacent image to access the Castle Gandolfo tourist office web page).
Castle Gandolfo is a home of Jesuit priests – astronomers, father Giuseppe Koch and farther Sabino Maffeo. Father Alessandro Omizzolo, expert on Space’s clusters and quasars, resides here only one week each month, the rest of the month he teaches in University in Padova.
Apart from four telescopes, private rooms, working quarters and kitchen, Castle Gandolfo has also two large libraries containing more than 22,000 volumes including the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler and others, small classroom, and museum with meteorites. One of exhibits in the museum is a Moon rock, a gift from NASA. There is also a Meteorite Book, kind of World’s catalogue of meteorites that have fallen on Earth.
Here, for centuries, Jesuit priests work on the Map of the Sky in which position of each star was entered only after it has been checked three times. Once this was done by hand, and today it is done by computers.
Director of Specola Vaticana, as Papal Observatory is called, father George Coyene, who every summer organizes local Summer school for students and young scientists, is frequent visitor to the United States. Tucson, Arizona, is a home of local subsidiary of Specola Vaticana, the Vatican Observatory Research Group, which is hosted by University of Arizona and which manages the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or simply VATT.
VATT that started to operate in 1995, but is still being build, is positioned on Mount Graham, side by side with NASA’s facility, and linked by satellite to Castle Gandolfo where data are stored and processed (click on the adjacent image to access the VATT site).
n exclusive interview to Croatian weekly “GLOBE”, that was conducted by Bisera Lusic, and published on February 4, 2005, Father Alessandro Omizzolo stated that
“Research of other planets is not important only because of the new discoveries, but also because so the inhabitants of Earth could one day find a new home. Sun and Earth are not eternal and we will one day have to move. We are preparing the path for relocation”, said with a trace of sorrow father Alessandro.
Giorgio Buonvino is the only civilian at Castle Gandolfo. He is 75 years old astronomer that got tired of sitting at home and living as an retired person after 50 years of research of Space. So Vatican has called him back and he was given his office again.
“Discoveries in astronomy are changing our knowledge and lots of patience is needed to successfully prove something. That what fascinates us today tomorrow could turn to be silly”, said Buonvino.
Then he continued, this time whispering:
“Few years ago I was invited to attend the UFO conference in San Marino. One of participants was an ex-employee of NASA. This lady has said that all materials that were released by that agency were censured. She said that NASA has found remains of life on other planets, but that it was not ready to announce it yet” (adjacent image is the link to the article THE DAY THE NASA INTENDS TO ANNOUNCE THAT THERE IS A LIFE ON MARS).
According Buonvino, when first photographs started to arrive from Mars, one of his friends told him that on the surface of the planet there were clearly visible domes that in no way could have been of natural origin. His friend then mailed this photographs, after they were removed form NASA’s site, to Buonvino and he still has them on his computer.
Buonvino said that his friend was right and that he does not understand why NASA hides this kind of discoveries.
Of course, Vatican officials should know such things.
I have seen when, on October 8, 1995, Vatican Priest Monsignor Corrado Balducci while on Italian National Television, RAI, said:
“Extraterrestrials do exist.”
Much earlier Cardinal Niccolo Cusano (1401-1464), philosopher and scientist, wrote:
“We are not authorized to exclude that on another star beings do exist, even if they are completely different from us.”
Image on the right links to German web page that describes who Cardinal Cusano, or as they called him, Nikolaus von Kues, was.
Link to Italian page of this reformist before reform is:
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