Transcripts:
[music] My name is Thomas Adams. In 2023, I was 38 years old, and my job was the quietest, most invisible one you could imagine within the Vatican walls. [music] I was an audio restoration technician. My domain was the third subb of the Palazzo del Santosio in the Phonographic Collection Restoration Laboratory.
a pompous name for what was in reality a glorified basement with damp stone walls, the smell of ozone, and [music] the constant hum of dehumidifiers. I spent my days in headphones digitally [music] cleaning the hiss from old realtore tapes, papal speeches, cyine chapel choirs recorded in 1960. It was monotonous work, but it paid well and granted me the kind of anonymity I cherished.
Everything changed on August 14th, 2023. [music] It was around 3:30 in the afternoon, a Tuesday. I was finishing the digitization of a series of homalies by Pope Paul V 6, when a metal cart pushed by a junior archavist I barely knew, [music] a young man named Justin Perez, stopped at my door. He handed me a dark wooden box, unlabeled, bearing only a broken red wax seal and a protocol number branded into the side, XC478.
Inside, [music] there was a single 1/4 in realtore magnetic tape on a metal spool I had never seen before. It wasn't Ampex or 3M, which were the standard for the era. It was completely smooth with no markings. Justin just [music] said Cardinal Turner requested priority on this. It's for restoration and transcription.
Maximum confidentiality Thomas secretum pontificium level. He didn't even look me in the eye. Cardinal Alexander Turner [music] was the head of the apostolic archive. A man I only saw from a distance. An imposing and severe figure. A [music] direct request from him was unheard of for someone at my level.
Curiosity got the better of my usual boredom. [music] I placed the tape on my Studa A810, an old but reliable Swiss machine. The counter read [music] zero. I pressed play. What came first was a dense staticladen silence. Then the sound of a room, a large echoing chamber. You could hear the rustle of heavy fabric, perhaps [music] lurggical vestments and breaths, several of them tense, shallow, not a single word, just that heavy atmosphere for almost 3 minutes. I fast forwarded the tape.
More silence. [music] I started to think it was damaged. But then at 4 minutes and 12 seconds, a voice spoke, and I froze. It was unmistakable. the cadence, [music] the slightly trembling tambber, the Italian pronunciation with a specific accent from the Venetto [music] region. It was the voice of Albino Luchani, Pope John [music] Paul Furf, the smiling pope whose pontificate lasted only 33 days in 1978.
The recording quality was terrible, but the voice was clear [music] and he wasn't giving a speech. He sounded afraid. He was saying short phrases in Latin as if answering questions I couldn't hear. Ingo sik ingo I understand. Yes, I understand. Promeito in nominos. I promise. In his name. [music] His breathing was ragged.
And then the sound changed. A low guttural noise that didn't sound human. a kind of deep resonant rumble that made the hair on my arms stand on end. It wasn't a flaw in the tape. It was an ambient sound. The Pope's voice faltered for a moment, and he whispered something the microphone barely caught. I had to isolate the frequency, apply multiple filters, and amplify the gain by 20 dB.
[music] It took me almost 2 hours. When I finally managed to clean the audio, I heard it clearly and what I heard made no sense. He said in Italian, [music] "Lasa presensa eschante his presence is overwhelming." Whose presence? What was that guttural sound? I kept listening. The noise grew louder and then suddenly it stopped.
There was a silence of exactly 10 seconds. And that's when the pope spoke the words that haunt me to this day. His voice was no longer that of the gentle pastor from the photographs. It was the voice of a broken, submissive man. With a terrible [music] clarity that echoed in my small lab, he said in clear and reverent Italian, "See [music] Mio Senor." "Yes, my lord.
Lord, to whom would a pope, the vicer of Christ on earth, refer as my lord." And what was that thing, that sound that terrified him? The tape ended abruptly right after, a sharp click and then silence. I rewound it and listened again and again, about 10 times. There was no doubt the audio was real.
The 78 in the protocol number branded on the box could only mean 1978, the year of his pontificate. I was holding a record of a secret event. One that occurred during one [music] of the shortest and most mysterious papacies in history. An event where the Pope addressed an unknown entity. A sonic monster with total submission.
I made a digital copy of the tape, [music] encrypted the file, and saved it to a tiny flash drive that I hid in the seam of my backpack. [music] I returned the original tape to the archavist the next day along with a doctorred transcript. I wrote that the tape contained only fragments of apersonal prayer in Latin, mostly unintelligible due to severe damage to the magnetic material. I lied.
And I knew with a certainty that chilled me to the bone that my life would never be the same. Because that audio wasn't just a historical record. It was proof. Proof of something that shouldn't exist. A secret kept at the heart of the faith of over a billion people. And Cardinal Turner wanted that secret transcribed.
The question was why? [music] And what would they do to me, a simple technician who now knew the truth? What I discovered in the following weeks showed me that [music] the audio was just the tip of a terrifying iceberg. Those two words, Mio Senor, were the [music] key to a conspiracy that spanned centuries, and I had just turned it in the lock.
From that day on, the Vatican, which for me had always been a labyrinth of silent corridors and ancient art, transformed into a spid. I felt eyes on me everywhere [music] in the employee cafeteria, in the small square in front of my workstation, even on the bus back to my apartment near Viadella Conilion. Small things almost unnoticeable.
The same Swiss guard, a man named Patrick Long, seemed to always be at the same post when I left, [music] his eyes following me until I turned the corner. The IT supervisor, a man named Christopher Nguan, who had never spoken a word to me, suddenly appeared in my lab on August 22nd, [music] 2023, with the excuse of running a routine check on my computer.
He stood there for almost an hour typing commands I didn't understand. [music] his eyes fixed on the screen. I knew he was looking for the digital copy, but the file was safe on my flash drive, and I had wiped any trace of it from my hard drive using militarygrade data eraser software. The paranoia started to set in. I began to investigate on my own using the few tools I had.
I needed to date that recording. The year was 1978. But when exactly? John Paul Lefen's pontificate lasted from August 26 to September 28th, only 33 days. I started cross-referencing the public papal agenda from that period with any anomalies I could find. That's when I remembered something I'd read years [music] ago in a book about Vatican conspiracy theories.
It talked about undocumented ceremonies, rituals not listed in the official liturggical calendar. One of these rituals was called the silent confirmation. [music] Legend had it that every new pope had to undergo it alone in the first days of his pontificate in a specific and rarely used chapel. The Pauline chapel adjacent to the cyine chapel.
It was described as a right [music] of passage where the new impontiff accepted the true weight of the throne of Peter. [music] It was considered folklore, a story to scare seminarians. But what if it wasn't? Using the low-level access I had to the archives digital index, I started searching for any reference to the Pauline [music] Chapel in September 1978.
Officially, it was closed for minor restorations for the entire month. The perfect cover story. I needed more. I needed documentary proof. My chance came on September 5th, 2023. I was assigned to digitize some old radio recordings stored in the same section of the archive that housed maintenance and logistics records.
It was tedious work, but it gave me the perfect pretext to be there. Around 400 p.m., when most of the archavists were on their coffee break, I slipped into the operational records 1970 1980 section. The shelves reached the [music] ceiling filled with yellowed cardboard folders. I looked for anything related to the Pauline Chapel in September 1978 and I found it.
It was a service log book with a green leather cover titled Diario de Manutension Palazzo Apostolic. I flipped to the date I was interested in and there it was an entry for the night of September 4th, 1978. The handwriting was rushed, almost illeible. The entry read. Chinu translated 9 PM Pauline Chapel request from the Secretary of State.
[music] Installation and subsequent removal of realto-re audio recording system model Nagra before single microphone positioned on altar. Operator S. Hughes. [music] Conclusion 3:45 a.m. of 95. My heart raced. This was it. [music] The proof. The recording was made on the night of September 4th to 5th, 1978 inside the Pauline Chapel.
[music] The equipment, a Nagra 4, was a highquality portable recorder for its time, often used by film crews and intelligence agencies. The signature S. Hughes belonged to Samuel Hughes, a sound technician who I later discovered died in a car accident in 1981. Convenient, [music] I took a photo of the log book with my phone as fast as I could.
The document was an internal memo on yellowed Vatican letterhead with the official stamp of the Secretariat of State Refer VSSs 1978 log 0904. It was the smoking gun that connected the tape to a specific time and place, and it proved the recording was intentional, ordered from the highest echelons of the Vatican at the time.
The threat escalated on September 11th,2023. When I returned home, I found the door to my apartment unlocked. Nothing was stolen, but everything was subtly out of [music] place. A book on the shelf was upside down. The coffee cup I'd left in the sink was now in the drying rack. It was a clear message. We can get in whenever we want.
Cardinal Turner summoned me to his office the next day, September 12th. His office was on the top floor of the archive palace, [music] a vast room with windows overlooking the Vatican Gardens. He didn't offer me a seat. He stood behind his massive mahogany desk, his hands clasped. "Mr. [music] Adams," he began, his voice smooth, but cold as steel.
"Your work on tape XC478 was satisfactory. However, it has come to my attention that you have shown an excessive curiosity about materials that do not concern you." He knew. [music] He knew I was investigating. "I'm just a technician, your eminence," I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. [clears throat] "I just do my job.
" He smiled, a smile that didn't reach his eyes. Ensure that it stays that way. There are stories that are the very foundation of this institution. To try and expose them is like trying to bring down a cathedral by pulling out a single stone. The only thing you will accomplish is getting crushed. The threat was no longer veiled. It was [music] direct.
I left his office with sweat trickling down my back. I knew I needed help. I had the audio and the documentary [music] proof of when and where it was recorded, but it wasn't enough. I needed to understand what the Lord the Pope [music] addressed was. And for that, I needed someone who knew the Vatican from the inside, but who no longer held any loyalty to it.
And I knew exactly who to find. But that document, the technician's log, was just the surface. What was filed in the next room in the special pontipical events section would reveal connections that went far beyond the Vatican, reaching into the most powerful families in Europe.
I knew that going on alone was suicide. The system was closing in around me. Cardinal Turner, with his chilling warning, wasn't the only one. I started noticing other faces. Men in dark suits who didn't look like priests [music] or tourists watching my building from across the street. My phone started making strange clicking noises. My internet connection would drop for no reason.
[music] I needed an ally, someone who understood the rules of the game and wasn't afraid to break them. [music] That's when I remembered a name, Gregory Edwards. Gregory was a former Swiss guard. I'd met him briefly years earlier at a Vatican employee event. He was an outspoken American who didn't fit the rigid European mold of the guard.
He was [music] discharged in 2019 officially for insubordination. But the rumors were that he'd seen something he shouldn't have, something during his night shift at the papal residence. He now worked as the head of security at a luxury hotel near the Patza dea Republica. I found him on September 18th, 2023.
I arranged a meeting at a small cafe in Trstdever, far from the prying eyes of the Vatican. Gregory had aged. There was a weariness in his eyes that hadn't been there before. I didn't beat around the bush. I told him everything [music] about the tape, the voice of John Paul Fur, the guttural sound, and the words Mio Sor.
I showed him the photo of the log book on my phone. He listened in silence, his face an impassive mask. When I finished, he stared into his coffee cup for a long time. "I knew it," he said finally, his voice low. "I knew there was something more. The things that happen late at night in that place, the doors that are locked from the inside, [music] the private masses that aren't on any schedule, with guests who arrive in cars with no license plates.
" He told me why he was discharged. One night in November 2018, he was on guard duty near the papal apartments when he saw a group of cardinals, including Turner himself escorting a tall cloaked figure, [music] down a service corridor that led directly underneath St. Peter's Basilica. The figure didn't walk normally.
It glided, [music] Thomas, Gregory said, his eyes focused on a distant memory. It made no sound, and the air grew cold, cold as a tomb. When he reported the incident to his commander, he was reprimanded and transferred to an outer gate. Two weeks later, he was accused of a fabricated protocol violation and [music] discharged. Gregory agreed to help me.
He still had contacts, former colleagues who owed him he favors, and more importantly, he knew the Vatican's security architecture like the back of [music] his hand, including the flaws in the older systems. Our plan was risky. The photo of the log book proved the recording took place, but it didn't reveal the context.
We needed visual evidence of what happened in that chapel on September 4th, 1978. Gregory believed that if an event of that magnitude was recorded on audio, it was almost certain it was alsophotographed. Those photos wouldn't be in the main archive. They would be somewhere much more secure. the so-called archivum secretum personnel del Ponttofish, a subarchive within the apostolic archive where popes kept their most sensitive documents.
Access was restricted to a select few. But Gregory knew a loophole, a flaw in the surveillance system. The cameras in the corridor leading to the personal archive, the 6us 5 corridor on the second subb had been updated in 2015. But the recording system still ran on an old server located in an adjacent IT room.
There was a 90-second blind spot in the recording loop, a reboot buffer that occurred every 2 [music] hours, precisely at 2:00 a.m. If we could get into the corridor and open the door in that window, we'd [music] have a period of time inside the room before the system started recording again. It was an insane gamble. We spent the next few weeks planning.
Gregory [music] through an old contact in the Vatican Jean Marie got the electrical schematics for that wing. I meanwhile [music] used my time in the lab for more research. I discovered that the secretariat of state which ordered the recording [music] was headed in 1978 by Cardinal Jean Marie Vo, a powerful and enigmatic man who also served under Pope Paul 66.
VO was one of the first people to find John Paulen dead in his room on September 28th, 1978. Another convenient coincidence. We made our move on the night of October 2nd, 2023. It was a Monday when security was typically more relaxed. Gregory used an old service pass. He never returned to get us inside the apostolic palace.
[music] We were dressed as cleaning staff. We reached the second subb at 1:45 a.m. The corridor was deserted and silent. [music] The air was cold and smelled of dust and old paper. The door to the personal archive was solid steel. With an electronic lock [music] and a traditional key lock, I handled the electronic part.
Using a device I built, [music] a simple electromagnetic pulse emitter, I could overload the card reader for a few seconds, long enough for the latch to release. Gregory with a set of lockpicks would handle the mechanical lock. At 15930, we began. The pulse worked. The card reader's light blinked from green to red. [music] Then went dark.
Gregory went to work on the lock. My ears were ringing with adrenaline. Every click of the lock sounded like a cannon shot. At 2:45, the door swung open. We slipped inside. The room was small, cold, and windowless. The walls were lined with gray metal safes, each bearing the coat of arms of a different pope. We found the one for John Paul II.
His safe was almost empty, which was expected for such a short papacy, but in the back there was a single black leather box. Inside was a photo album. The pictures were black and white, high quality, [music] and they showed everything. The Pauline Chapel lit only by candles. Pope John Paul I standing before the altar, his [music] face pale and sweating.
And before him, it wasn't a monster of claws and teeth. It was something far worse. It was a tall, slender figure, dressed in a dark robe that seemed to absorb the light. You couldn't see a face, only a void beneath the hood. But what was terrifying [music] were its hands, long with slender fingers like an insects which rested on a black sphere that hovered above the altar.
[music] In one photo, the pope was kneeling, his head bowed. And in another, a closeup, it showed one of the cardinals present. [music] I recognized the younger but unmistakable face of Cardinal Alexander Turner. He was there. He was a witness. We flipped to the last photo. It was the most shocking. It showed the cloaked figure extending one of its long fingers and touching the Pope's forehead.
The Pope flinched, his face a mask of pain and terror. [music] This was the creature he called Lord. We took pictures [music] of every page with our phones, and that's when we heard it. Footsteps in the corridor, slowly getting closer. We were [music] trapped. What we found in those photos didn't just show the ritual.
It showed who was presiding. [music] And that person, Cardinal Turner, was now one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church. If you're finding this story unbelievable, I ask you to stay with me. [music] Subscribe to the channel and leave a like because what happened next proved [music] this conspiracy was alive and very active.
The sound of footsteps echoed in the silent corridor, each one landing like a hammer blow to my [music] chest. Gregory and I looked at each other, panic etched on our faces. There was no way out except the door we'd come through. Gregory acted fast. He pointed to a metal filing cabinet in the corner of the room. In there now.
We squeezed into the tight, dark space, the smell of metal and old paper filling our nostrils. I could barely breathe. [music] The door to the archive room creaked open softly. Through a slit in the cabinet, I saw a silhouette enter.It was a man, but not a guard. He wore the black cassak [music] of a priest, and he was accompanied by none other than Cardinal Alexander Turner.
"Is the box in place?" Turner asked, his voice reverberating in the small chamber. The priest, a younger man I didn't recognize, went to John Paul the first safe. Yes, your eminence, exactly as you left it. Good, [music] said Turner. Perform the weekly check. The seal must not be broken. The oath is eternal. The lineage must be preserved.
Lineage? Oath? What was he talking about? The priest opened the leather box, glanced at the photo album for a moment, and closed [music] it again. All in order, your eminence. The testimony is secure. [music] They were silent for a moment. Then Turner said something that chilled me to the [music] soul. The audio technician Adams.
Are we certain he has nothing else? Supervisor Newan confirmed it. His computer [music] is clean. He seems frightened. We believe your conversation with him was effective, the priest replied. We cannot rely on we believe, Turner [music] retorted. If that recording gets out, if it's connected to this, he gestured toward the album.
Centuries of balance will be destroyed. He is a loose thread [music] and loose threads must be cut. Arrange it, Mark. The priest, Mark Alvarez, nodded. [music] Consider it done, your eminence. They left, closing and locking the door. Gregory and I waited in the dark for nearly half an hour, not daring to move a muscle.
[music] They're going to kill me, I whispered, terror paralyzing me. Not if we move first," Gregory said, his voice firm, [music] filled with a cold resolve. "This isn't just about exposing a secret anymore. We're fighting for our lives. [music] We escaped the Vatican, the nightlike ghosts, using a service tunnel escape route Gregory knew from his time as a guard.
From that moment on, I was a fugitive. I abandoned my apartment, my job, [music] my entire life. I took only the flash drive with the audio and the phone with the pictures from the secret album. We hid out in a small safe house Gregory maintained in the suburbs of Rome. It was there that we assembled our dossier.
We had the pieces of the puzzle, the audio of the ceremony, [music] the documentary proof that it occurred, the photographs of the ritual, and the confirmation from Turner's own mouth that it was a secret to be protected at all costs. What the photos revealed was unequivocal. That ceremony wasn't a simple oath of feelalty. It was an act of submission to a nonhuman entity.
[music] The black sphere floating above the altar, the creature's appearance, the pope's terrified reaction. It all pointed to an ancient dark [music] power operating in the shadows of the Vatican itself. The lineage Turner mentioned it [music] meant John Paul wasn't the first and Pope Francis would not be the last. [music] It was a secret tradition passed from Pontiff to Pontiff.
The Pope wasn't just the leader of the Catholic Church. [music] He was the guardian or perhaps the servant of something else. We needed to leak everything, but in a way that couldn't be dismissed as a hoax. We needed a journalist with credibility and courage. Gregory through his security contacts knew a name, [music] James Jackson Guan, an independent investigative journalist who had been fired from a major newspaper for digging too deep into the Vatican bank's finances.
He was known for his integrity and his hatred of corrupt institutions. [music] We arranged a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on October 15th, 2023. >> [music] >> We gave him everything we had. The audio, the photos, the documents. James spent days verifying every detail. [music] He hired a voice analysis expert, a former MI6 agent, who confirmed with 99.
8% certainty that the voice on the tape was Albino Luchanes. E [music] hired a photographic analysis expert who confirmed the photos were from the 1970s and showed no signs of manipulation. The final confirmation came from a source of James' inside the Vatican itself. An elderly manscior named Daniel Carter [music] who racked with guilt confirmed the existence of the secret ceremony known [music] internally as the shadow pact.
He revealed that the ritual had been taking place since the 11th century [music] and that the entity was known in the most secret circles as the silent regent. [music] On November 1st, 2023, the world changed. The full dossier was published simultaneously on several independent news websites around the globe. The headline was simple and devastating.
[music] The Pope's tape, audio, and photos reveal secret Vatican ritual. The audio of John Paul saying mo senor to an unknown entity was heard by millions within hours. The photos of the cloaked creature and the terrified pope went viral. The chaos [music] was instantaneous. The Vatican vehemently denied everything. The official spokesman in a chaotic press conference on November 2nd called the evidence a cruel and blasphemous fabrication, acoordinated attack against the Holy Sea.
They claimed the audio was a composite and the photos were sophisticated deep fakes. But it was too late. The seed of doubt had been planted. Cardinal Turner was made the scapegoat. On November 10th, 2023, [music] the Vatican announced that the cardinal was retiring from his duties for health reasons and would retreat to an isolated monastery in the Italian Alps.
In reality, he was silenced and exiled. His reputation was destroyed. The conspiracy, at least that cell of it, had been dragged into the light. The world was [music] split between those who believed and those who refused to see. But the proof was out there for anyone willing to listen [music] and to look. We did it.
We revealed the dark truth at the heart of one of the world's most powerful institutions. [music] But that document, that ritual, those names, they were just a fragment. The true center of the conspiracy was still there intact, waiting for the next pope to renew the oath. The fall of Cardinal Turner was swift and silent.
A typical Vatican purge. He [music] vanished from public life. His disgrace a whisper in the corridors he once commanded. Father Mark Alvarez, his aid, was reassigned to a remote dascese in the Philippines. The official narrative hammered home by the Holy Seas propaganda machine was that a small group of radical traditionalists led by Turner had fabricated the evidence to destabilize the reformist papacy [music] of Pope Francis.
It was a clever lie, one that many wanted to believe. The world desperate [music] for normaly accepted the explanation. The story slowly became just another conspiracy theory in the vastness of the internet. But we knew the truth. Gregory and I survived. We are living under new identities in a northern European country, looking over our shoulders at every turn. The lives we had are over.
We won the battle, but the war is far from finished. I carry the weight of what I know. [music] Sometimes late at night, I still put on my headphones and listen to the audio. I hear the terror in the voice of a holy man, the ragged breathing, [music] the inhuman guttural sound of that presence, and the two words that shattered my world, Mio Senor.
The revelation did not cleanse the Vatican. It only forced it to be more careful. The structure that allowed such an unholy pack to exist for centuries was not shaken. The cancer was not removed. Only the visible tumor was excised. [music] The silent regent, the entity in the Pauline Chapel, did not disappear. [music] I know this because a few weeks after the leak, James Jackson Guan, the journalist who helped us, received an anonymous package.
Inside was a single item, a black and white photograph printed on old stock. The photo showed the same Pauline Chapel, but [music] the date stamped on the back was March 14th, 2013, the day after Pope Francis was elected. [music] In the photo, the new pope was kneeling before the altar, and before him, the same cloaked figure with its long, slender fingers was there.
[music] The oath had been renewed. The lineage continued. They fell. The names we knew were exposed. But the structure that allowed it all, it just changed its address. New codes, new protocols, same intent. The power they serve is patient. It has outlasted empires, wars, and popes.
And it is still there in the heart of Rome, waiting in the dark. And I, Thomas Adams, a former audio technician, am one of the few people in the world who knows the truth. And that is a loneliness I wouldn't wish on anyone. What will they do when the next conclave gathers? Who will be the next to kneel in that chapel and whisper, "My lord, the truth didn't set us free.
It just showed us how small and fragile our cage is." And that is [music] the most terrifying part of all. Thank you for watching until the end. If stories like this which explore [music] the secrets hidden in the shadows of power fascinate you, then subscribe to the channel. Leave a like to help us reach more people who, like you, aren't satisfied with the official story.
Share this video with a friend who also loves to unravel conspiracies. And let me know in the comments what city or country you're watching from. I [music] read all of them. Stay vigilant and always question
