Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011) - full transcript

They are mysterious markers
with bizarre messages.

Artists or pranksters have been
sticking these plaques on roadways

and other places around
the globe for years now.

"Toynbee Idea
in Kubrick's 2001..."

manz... Resurrect Dead on
Planet Jupiter."

I have no idea what it means.

Maybe it's a message from space.

The plaques were first
sighted in the early 1980s.

There are 130 known
plaques, most in the US.

Philadelphia, Baltimore... New York,
Washington D.C., Chicago, Saint Louis...

Plus, they have been
spotted in South America.



City officials we contacted were
not aware of their existence.

It's anybody's guess what the meaning
really is, or who's behind it.

So who is placing these tiles all over Philadelphia,
and all over the world, for that matter?

It's like a scene from
"The Twilight Zone."

I've never seen one.

Well, I have all these... Toynbee
tile photographs and artifacts.

Here's one that was in New York
on Fifth Avenue and West 34th

in front of
the Empire State Building.

This is from December of 1998.

Here's one from Maryland
and Meridian in Indianapolis.

Here's that D.C. one.

We don't have this one on
the website and it's in reverse.

It's in mirror writing.

These old New York ones
were so incredible.



You know, I always had this idea, like,
someday maybe there could be a museum

and I could get each one of these
photos in a little frame or something.

The first time I noticed a Toynbee Idea
tile in the street was on South Street.

It was this tile, like a floor tile or whatever,
embedded in the asphalt in the crosswalk

that bears this message on it.

"Toynbee Idea In Movie 2001

Resurrect Dead
on Planet Jupiter."

I started really thinking, that's
weird, what's that all about?

Why was it there?

What did it mean, who made it?

Me and some of my friends lived in this
squat on Fifth and Bainbridge at the time.

It was a chaotic squat full of 17-year-old
runaways and, you know, people like that.

It just caught my eye one day.

I started thinking about it 'cause I
guess we were sitting on that corner

and we were
looking at that tile.

And I said, "Hey, Vern,
isn't that weird?

"That there's that thing in the street that
says, 'Resurrect the Dead on Planet Jupiter'?"

A couple years later, I got this job as a foot
courier for this company, Kangaroo Couriers.

I began to notice more of these cryptic
street messages all over the place...

y'know, from walking around the city and looking
down all the time, delivering packages.

I would walk over the tiles over
and over and over and over again.

So I'd think about them
every single day.

And, you know, I would just constantly think,
like, "I wonder how long they've been there?

I wonder what they mean?"

So I started following them when
I'd see them around downtown.

I would make sure to take note of them and I
started to write down where they were all at.

I had a little notebook
I would take around.

Around 1996, 97,
it became possible to go to

the Philadelphia Public Library
and get on the Internet.

So I thought, "Oh, I can't wait.

"L'm gonna do an Internet word
search on this Toynbee message."

So I actually
took off work the next day.

I called in sick to work so that I could
go to the library as soon as it opened.

And I went to the library as soon as
it opened and I ran up the steps.

"Toynbee ldea" was the first thing I ever
typed into an Internet search engine.

"Your search
returned zero results."

You've got to be kidding me,
there's nothing?

This term has never been mentioned
on the Internet ever, y'know?

And I'm like, "Whoa.

Y'know, this is, like,
weird and kinda creepy."

I went back a couple
months later.

It might have even been
as much as a year later.

This time... I think I pulled up
about ten results.

Toynbeemet had occurred and I was like...
it blew my mind.

I start to see listings
for all of them.

I'm like, "It's spreading!"

You know, I was,
like, just ecstatic.

Then... this is what blew my mind
right out of the water...

I start going down
and it's Baltimore, Maryland.

This isn't just a Philadelphia
thing.

Y'know, these things are,
like, in New York, D.C., Boston.

And the person who made them
was a compete mystery.

I was like, "I've got to find
out who made these things."

I think one of the best descriptions that I've
ever heard of Justin is the "unstoppable force."

He's very stubborn once he gets his mind
set that he's going to do something.

Y'know, he's just constantly
on the move and, uh...

he's at least trying to take down
everything in his way, in his path.

He's manic when it comes to that stuff and he
can't stop thinking it, he can't turn it off.

There could be an explosion in front
of him and the fire could be burning,

there could be people running out
of the fire, like, screaming...

I got the Toynbee Idea flier
up there at all times, y'know?

I see it every night when I go to sleep and
I also keep these things next to my bed.

I know he used to go all over the city and...
you know, be like, "There's one here."

And then he used to take bus trips with
his girlfriend and drag her along.

We were in New York City and going to New
York City, to me, is kind of a big deal.

I was, like, elected to be the Toynbee
secretary and it seemed like an important job.

We were there for one reason,
you know?

And that was to look
on the asphalt for tiles.

The Toynbee Idea tiles' message
is basically a four-part message.

So what are all of these things?

What do all of these
things mean?

Well, the Toynbee referenced is almost
definitely the historian, Arnold Toynbee.

Toynbee was known as a universal historian
because he was not only a historian

but a philosopher as well.

So he would write books dealing
with all of human history.

The general sweeping arch of the history
of the human species on the planet Earth.

The movie "2001," of course,
is the movie A Space Odyssey,"

directed by Stanley Kubrick.

And that was considered, when it came out,
I mean, I think it was pretty much...

as far as special effects and everything...
pretty much the most spectacular movie

that anybody had ever seen
on the big screen.

And, y'know, I'm sure that it was a... y'know,
some sort of proto-religious experience

for many people that saw it.

Frankenstein's daughter.

Resurrect dead, obviously, is the
idea that there will be some sort of

physical resurrection
of the dead.

And then planet Jupiter, the largest
planet in the solar system by far.

And it's a gas giant, it's
mostly made out of gas.

I don't think it has too much
of a solid surface, really.

The message itself has been such a mystery to
people over the years, and each of the parts,

in and of themselves,
makes sense.

The mystery mainly lies in the way that
the parts intermesh with one another.

There was always these little sidebar
text pieces on tiles, and after a while,

those started to become
more interesting to me

than the main message 'cause I had seen
the main message hundreds of times,

but these little sidebar texts started to
get really exciting because I'd be like...

sometimes they would say
stuff that was unprecedented.

Sometimes there would be tantalizing
clues where one would say:

People had always speculated, "Well, do you think
it's more than one person making the tiles?"

And I always said no way.

I always thought it was one person 'cause they
all look so similar, et cetera, et cetera,

but it was always
open to conjecture.

We see this claim on this tile,
"I am only one man,"

so, all of a sudden, we know more information
than we knew before, that it's one man.

There'd be this other
sidebar text that said:

That's when I begged them not to
destroy it.

Thank you and goodbye.

I always pictured him on his hands and knees
in front of the table at the board room,

y'know, where the Cult of the Hellion is gathered,
begging them not to destroy it, with tears,

of course, streaming down
his face, y'know?

"Please, I beg you,
don't destroy this movement."

They're cackling and they're not
taking him seriously.

And then he says,
"Thank you and goodbye."

It's sort of sad, y'know?

It's sort of like a-—
I don't know.

That was a heavy
extra message, that one.

The Manifesto Tile was a tile that was
on 16th and Chestnut in Philadelphia,

with just hundreds of words
inscribed on it.

It has this very long,
paranoid, rambling message.

It was pretty wild.

I mean, it was probably in the top five most
intense things I've ever seen in my life.

It's not an art project put together
by some art students or something.

It's like something
that's insane.

Y'know, it's, like,
something that's real.

The Toynbee Idea tiles were something that had
this quality to it that was very, sort of,

frightening and disturbing
and strange.

And yet, at the same time, because it was
occupying space in this very public sphere,

people just kind of tended
to pass it by and ignore it.

When you start to realize that it's
unusual and strange and unexplainable,

it's like waking up from this dream
where you're like, "Wait a minute.

"This thing that's been here
all along doesn't make sense."

Well, this is Daisy.

And, well, Daisy got hit by
a car or a bike or something.

Maybe he'll be able to use his
legs again, but maybe not.

So I'm kind of trying to get him
to do these balancing exercises

where I just kind of push him off his feet and
let him try to stand on his own a little bit.

But he's really a handsome dude.

Me and Justin's grandfather
raised pigeons.

Fancy pigeons, he had.

We grew up in a barn and half of it
was our house that our parents built.

I got a... went up in the rafters
and got a baby pigeon and...

me and Justin used to feed that
pigeon popcorn.

We built a pigeon coop
out in the barn.

So we had, like... the biggest amalgamation of
different pigeons you could possibly imagine.

Like, we had... it was like the Noah's Ark of
pigeons, we had two or three of everything.

And then they all started interbreeding
'cause... well, we just had no idea.

I went to get a snack.

This must have been now around,
like, 4:00 a.m. or so.

On my way home I see this mound.

Just this black, shiny mound.

It was tar paper
imbued with tar.

I pull up the edge of the tar paper and, sure
enough, there's the edge of a Toynbee Idea tile.

I just...

It was fresh, as in
a-car-had-not-hit-it-yet fresh.

I'm sure that there was no fresh
tile there when I went to the deli.

I thought, "Oh, man, y'know,
this person could be, like,

on the block or something,"
y'know, so I leaped to my feet.

I jogged down the block to the north and
I start shouting out, "Toynbee Idea!

"Toynbee Idea, I believe it!

I believe the Toynbee ldea!"

I jogged down the other way,
"Toynbee ldea!"

Nobody ever answers me
and there's nobody to hear me

except a sleeping pigeon up
there somewhere or something.

Yes, I came within minutes of solving the Toynbee
Idea mystery for all time with my own two eyes

because I missed the person putting
down the tile within minutes.

Then I went back and I just hung out
with the tile until 7:00 in the morning

and, uh, watched the first sunrise
on a new tile or something.

I've been interested in the tiles
for years, since middle school,

in the early
1990s in Philadelphia.

Every few years I'd, like, sort of get into
it and see what more had been found out.

No one had solved it.

It had been years, so I was
like, "All right, screw this."

The aspect of the Toynbee tiles that really spoke
to me was just the impossibility of the mystery.

I was probably the most skeptical
person involved in the detective work.

I really thought we were just
gonna say, "This is a black hole.

"Here, look at this crazy phenomenon "that
has absolutely no possible explanation

that we could ever come to."

I remember my very first
e-mail to Justin.

He was another person who genuinely
wanted to solve the mystery.

As a team, we could really pool our
resources, come together, and figure it out.

So when we started
researching the tiles,

we really only had a very small
number of clues to go on.

We had an address to
a South Philadelphia home.

We had an article from 1983 printed
in the "Philadelphia lnquirer."

And then there was a play by
playwright/film director David Mamet.

And these three sources were
basically where we began our quest

to discover the identity
of the tiler.

There was a tile discovered in Santiago,
Chile, and it gives a specific street address

of a row home in
South Philadelphia.

Let's really investigate this address
because it's one of the very few...

it's one of just one or two, really,
actual concrete leads that we have.

"You may have information to help
solve "a 20-plus-year-old mystery.

Do you know anything about
the below pictured message?"

We went to Kinko's
and made these fliers

and decided that we would give
them to everybody on the block.

Resurrect the Dead
on the Planet Jupiter?

Yeah.

I don't know about it.

One fellow named Frannie talked to
us a lot and he filled us in as to

who had been living in that specific house
that was on the address on the tile.

He drives a bike with no tires...
with no... rims with no tires.

I don't know,
I don't fucking know.

He lives over there, got all
birds in his house.

Goats, geese,
things all over his house.

The fellow living there now
they call, "Sevy the Birdman."

My first impression, the very
first thing that I thought was:

That must be the person
who made all the Toynbee tiles.

For sure.

And equally exciting was they told us about
the fellow who had lived there before.

The guy that lived in there, we only
can account for, like, 3O years.

Because he lived in a green thing...
That was Railroad Joe.

Railroad Joe had lived in that house into the
late '80s and he had worked for the railroad.

His real name was
actually Julius Piroli.

We went to the address that was
listed on the South American tile.

No one answered the door and there's a bar put
through the door with two padlocks on it.

Since no one came to the door, it's sort
of a dead end, except for the fact that

all around in the surrounding blocks are
these sort of proto-tiles, test tiles.

Sort of test materials
layered on top of each other.

Random letters.

Weird tiles,
a couple in Spanish.

The blocks around it are a
testing ground for the tiles.

And so I thought this person lived at
this address at some point, for sure.

At some point, somebody on the Internet
mentioned this newspaper article.

It was such a weird thing that
just came out of nowhere.

Well, here we are at
the Philadelphia Public Library.

We're going to
the microfiche room.

We're gonna get on microfiche the
"lnquirer" article from March 13, 1983.

Wanna run
that one by me again?"

by Clark DeLeon.

Despite the fact that the article
is just a couple of sentences long,

it opens up all these questions.

It's more information than
we ever had from a tile.

There was a time line put on
this stuff for the first time

where you're like, "Early '80s
was when whoever it was

first had this idea and
really started to promote it."

But now there was at least this
potential name of James Morasco

that was brought up
into the fold.

This person really actually believed, quote
unquote, "dead molecules would be put back together

on the planet Jupiter."

There was this group, the Minority
Association, that existed.

This was something
nobody ever heard of before.

The way that I pictured it in my mind was
probably that it was just at somebody's house

in their front room,
in a living room or something.

The Minority Association, at
least according to this article,

according to what James Morasco is saying on
the telephone, had somebody doing the typing.

So then you think, "Oh, my gosh, "somebody
doing the typing, they had a newsletter?

They had a typist, so they
were typing stuff, right?"

I was in love with the idea
of discovering

whatever it was that was typed
because it must exist somewhere.

And... I wanted
to see it so bad.

Toynbee tiles first appeared in the early 1980s,
around the same time playwright David Mamet

published "Four A.M."

It's a one-act play about a radio host and
a strange caller who wants to talk about

his plan to, yes, resurrect
the dead on Jupiter.

Now, all the sudden,
we've got this play.

So David Mamet,
highly decorated playwright.

He had won a Pulitzer Prize, nominated for an
Oscar, wrote this one-act play called "Four A.M."

As you're going through the play and you're
reading the transcript of the play you think,

"Wow, this is uncanny.

"L mean, this guy is calling up
this talk show host guy

"and he's talking about,
okay, Arnold Toynbee.

"That's a little bit weird.

"Oh, jeez, he's talking about in
the movie '2001,'

that's weird."

And then he says, "Yes, we want
to resurrect the dead,"

and you think,
"Whoa, that's crazy."

And then, "The planet Jupiter."

You're like, "All right, this is
no mere coincidence."

He's basically reiterating a
conversation with the Toynbee tile guy

or a member of the Minority
Association or something.

And you just think, "So... so David
Mamet had something to do with it."

And it just makes your head
spin where you're like, "What?"

But even more telling is he mentions
that phrase, "dead molecules."

There had never been a tile photographed
or documented or described by anyone

that mentions this phrase
"dead molecules."

The only time that
the term "molecules"

has ever connected, is in, of course,
the Clark DeLeon newspaper article.

Y'know, it's the same...
it's the same concept.

Mamet wrote that piece but it was... y'know,
it didn't appear anywhere publicly.

And then DeLeon's
1983 article was published.

And then Mamefs play
was published.

It seems like they were working independently
and that was the assumption that we had

going into our detective work.

Mamet insists the play is
not based on a real caller.

People used to ask me where I get my ideas
and I would always say, "I think of them."

There was no call on the radio,
I made it up.

Severino Verna, AKA Sevy.

He's the resident of this address
that was found on the tile in Chile.

I don't think he's answering.

Yeah, I don't know
if he wants to talk to us.

We didn't really know what to do
other than try and talk to him.

So we talked to some of the people from his
neighborhood, who were very personable.

They think it's him
putting the tiles all over.

Like, South America had his
address on it.

Down here, like, 7th Street, 9th Street had
one I think... Sevy don't go anywhere.

Sevy goes nowhere.

He just worries about his birds.

Sevy's a very a guy...
a very hard guy to talk to.

I know.

Well, did you knock on his door?

Yeah, I don't think he's home.

See you, Frankie.

And he wouldn't answer?

Yeah, we've knocked on his door a bunch of
times, I don't think he'll answer the door

'cause he doesn't
know us, y'know?

Yeah.

I'll walk down with you
and knock on his door.

Yeah?

Sevy?

Sevy?

Sevy's very intelligent.

Yeah, yeah, he seems like it.

Very, very intelligent man.

You just talk about, like,
plants and stuff with him?

Anything, anything he feels...
- Sevy's very quiet. - Yeah, yeah.

Very quiet person.

After knocking on his door and
everything we decided an obvious step

is to try to call this person
on the telephone.

Dude, my adrenaline is like... I'm gonna
say something stupid, I just know it.

His phone has been disconnected.

So we call, actually,
his mother.

And Justin...
has a conversation with her.

I'm trying to get in touch, I
think, with a relative of yours?

Um, Severino, Sevy?

I'm doing some research into an art project
that I think that he might be involved in.

And I've been trying to get ahold of him but
he's kind of hard to get ahold of, so...

I don't know if you ever heard
of this thing, Toynbee Idea.

It's, like, it's in Philadelphia, New
York, it's all up and down the east coast

and then it's
also in South America.

Like, do you know if he ever... has
he been to South America or...

So somebody contacted him
before about it?

Uh-huh.

She said he's never been to
South America.

And she said we weren't the first
person to bring this up to her.

And she said that Sevy had mentioned that
somebody had come to his door asking about it.

And he told her he
didn't know anything about it.

So, I mean, you definitely don't think
that your son has any involvement it in?

Like, he never talked about Arnold Toynbee
or anything like that, like... Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Is he, like, into history
of anything, like... No?

She said there's no way he has
anything to do with this

and I don't know
what you're talking about.

He can't travel because he has
a lung condition.

Your son, with his lung condition, like, he
never travels or anything, so... Yeah, huh.

Yeah, because that would really put him
out of the picture for being the person

because whoever's done it has at least
traveled, you know, up and down

the east coast
of the United States.

All right, thanks for your time.

Okay, goodbye.

When I heard the name Railroad
Joe associated with that address

and that he worked for Conrail Railroad,
I went and found a Conrail map.

Not only did Conrail pass through every
city that had a tile in North America,

but... the tiles stretch exactly
as far as Conrail's routes travel.

No further west and no further south,
with the exception of South America.

However, we found an article
about a telescope.

It was, at the time, in the early 1970s when it
was made... the largest telescope ever made.

And bits of it were being shipped,
one-by-one, to Chile, South America.

They were going through the railyard
that Railroad Joe worked at at the time.

The article
mentions him by name.

I went to the library and did
some research on his family name.

The only reference I found in the early '80s
Philly directories were tombstone carving.

Railroad Joe's family
is carving tombstones.

It's not a whole huge leap to get from
carving tombstones to carving tiles.

Railroad Joe... really fit my
mental image of the tiler.

Working on the railroad as a profession
is someone who is gonna fit this profile.

Traveling, traveling
late at night.

Just that sort of lonely, "moving
through empty space" sort of person.

I imagine the tiler to
have a lot of those qualities.

And Railroad Joe... fit that.

So many things line up:

the map, the profession, the address, the
tombstone-carving business in the family.

All of these things were coming
together on this one suspect.

The fatal flaw of the "Railroad
Joe as tiler" theory is that...

he died.

You need to find a way for him
to be tiling beyond the grave.

Short of resurrecting himself, it's
difficult to make that argument.

So James Morasco called up
Clark DeLeon in 1983

and was interviewed espousing the
same ideas that the tiles have.

Clearly this is
a leading suspect.

It's the only real tangible
piece of evidence.

I contacted Clark DeLeon via e-mail and I
started to kinda get him talking about

anything that he remembered about this caller,
that the caller might have said in addition to

the basic message that
he wrote about in the article.

"L think that Morasco said he
lived in Fishtown or Kensington,

"which are working-class, mostly white
neighborhoods "that run along the Delaware River

"north of Center City.

"He sounded blue collar, proud of his
education, "certain of his information,

"but not confident of his presentation
to me "or, rather, to the 'lnquirer.'

"He had a soft bass voice "which was
definitely Philadelphia working class.

And that's about it,
my friend."

Yeah, this is sort of pointing
to a different area of the city.

It's giving a little bit of a
profile of Morasco as a person.

But that's about
all we know about him.

There's not a whole lot more information aside
from that about James Morasco as a person.

Based on trips to the library and looking at old,
early '80s- 1983 or so... telephone directories,

the only James Morasco that
existed was not in Fishtown,

not in Kensington, not in South Philadelphia,
but in the northwest of the city,

in a very not working-class
neighborhood called Chestnut Hill.

He's been interviewed by
reporters.

"Cincinnati City Beat" ran an
article in, I think, in 2001.

The person who answers the phone
says, "Well, Mr. Morasco can't speak

because he's had his
voice box removed."

His wife spoke for him and said he
had nothing to do with the tiles.

Based on his age, when the tiles would
have been put down across the country,

he would have been
in his 70s and even 80s.

It doesn't fit, obviously.

We're looking for a social
worker named James Morasco.

We've never found a social
worker named James Morasco.

The more we looked into James Morasco, the
less likely it seemed that he even existed.

There's still this lingering
question, "Who's James Morasco?"

The cutting of the cake!

Whoo!

Justin's exhibit will be up for the next month,
so please come over and take in the art.

When he came into 7th grade,
he was a really talented artist.

He had the same art teacher from 7th
grade to 12th grade and she loved him.

I remember being in 9th grade and I had an art
class and she had all of his art laid out.

She brought everybody from
our class over and was like,

"Look how good this kid is,
he's gonna be great,"

and she was like, "You should
really be proud of him."

It just seemed like she just always had
one kid that was, like, her favorite.

And she put all their artwork in these art
competitions and you'd win these gold keys.

Where I think things all went... took a
turn for the worse was, she really...

wanted him to just kind of conform to
this thing that she thought was going to

win him these awards
in this competition.

He didn't take instruction well and
he didn't do what he was told.

That naturally put him at odds
with the art teacher.

He was on
a controversial mind trip.

It was a slap in the face to her that somebody
that she championed as being talented

could not be exactly the person
that she wanted them to be.

It was a love affair
gone sour, y'know?

So there was just a conflict about that
and then the conflict just escalated

and got worse and worse.

My day-to-day life in school
was pretty much a war.

I would walk through the hallway and kids
would open up a locker and smash me into it

and, y'know,
push me down the stairs.

And then they'd be like,
"Fucking pigeon man."

He received a lot of abuse.

It was personal, y'know?

They were anti-Justin
and he was anti-them.

He definitely has
always been an outsider.

It really got to a fever pitch.

I would skip classes and I would
just go back behind the auditorium

where there was a area back there
that was dark and lonely and gloomy

and I would just
draw pictures, y'know?

Once he got kicked out of art class, I
think in the beginning of 11th grade,

his high school days
were numbered.

Justin was out of step with the world from
the very beginning to what he is now.

He's a strange bird.

Think he's gonna
carry that right on out.

Let's see this.

Bill O'Neill eventually lost interest
in the whole phenomenon and decides,

"I'm just going to hand it over
to you guys.

"L'm passing the torch.

"It seems like you guys are keeping up "on
investigating the mystery and everything.

So here you go."

And he hands over the access codes
and everything to Toynbeemet for us.

There we go.

Aw, shit, here it is, man.

So we start going through the back...
the back catalog of all these e-mails.

Most of it is just this endless array of
people who believe that they've figured out

the Toynbee tile message or they
know what it's really all about.

And it's anything you can
think of.

People have conspiracy theories
about the Toynbee tiles.

And people who believe that
they've solved the mystery.

There were multiple who mentioned
seeing the tiles in the early '80s.

We're not the first people to
try and solve this mystery.

Yeah, it's definitely been
investigated in depth by other people.

We learned from the Toynbeemet e-mails, there's
two other groups of people who had resolved

to make documentary
films about it, even.

Everybody who researches this
seems to just hit a brick wall.

And this has been going on
for decades, yes.

A detective tried and failed.

Two documentary teams
tried and failed.

Countless other people tried and
failed to solve this mystery.

It seemed to me like
we weren't special.

Y'know, we had, y'know,
no training in being detectives.

We're not gonna make
this discovery.

Y'know, we're wasting our time.

We're barking up the wrong tree, it's...
You know, it's a quagmire.

Ahh, like, who is-—
it's a person.

Like, it is
someone... somewhere.

There are so many ghosts and
phantoms and shadows to chase.

But the tiles
are a physical thing.

They exist in physical reality.

We're not dealing with
the supernatural.

The tiles are being cut
out with some kind of blade.

A hand is holding the blade.

It's totally real.

It's physical, it's tangible.

It's not a shadow.

It's not a phantom,
it's not a ghost.

Somewhere there's a human being
who's behind all of this.

was an e-mail that came
from a guy named Joe Raimondo.

He said that in 1985, this really
strange broadcast came over his TV.

Look, I got a real story here
'cause I heard this.

I was watching "Eyewitness News"

at 11:00 on Channel 3.

I was by myself, kind of
in the dark, just chillin' out.

All of a sudden, I heard this
thing about Toynbee's conception

of 2000... of Clarke's
"2001" or whatever it was.

Like, the television newscaster is talking and,
all of a sudden, like, they kind of faded out

and then this voice comes in,
you know.

And then they said it real fast and then
there's all this static and then it went away.

Somebody hijacked the TV news and they're
beaming this Toynbee Idea thing at me.

Like, it took me a minute to get my head
together, like, "What-s gging on here?"

So I thought, I gotta find out
what's going on here.

So I called Channel 3.

I called... like,
I called them up.

I'm like, "I'm watching your news and I
just heard this thing about Toynbee."

And the person who's the operator is like,
"Um, yeah, well, you're not the only one."

The voice of the Toynbee tiler is
apparently coming through his TV set.

This is just fascinating.

So... how is
this happening?

I mean, that's like some
"Twilight Zone" thing, y'know?

I'm not crazy.

I definitely...
I definitely heard this.

This guy, Nathan Mehl wrote into Toynbeemet
many, many years ago with this story

of running into this street prophet guy in
the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Philadelphia.

And he's giving out these pamphlets or pieces
of paper with the Toynbee message on them.

Steve Weinik... decided he was going to track down
this Nathan Mehl guy because we were thinking,

well, maybe he's got one of these
pamphlets or something, still.

Nathan Mehl told us this story,
"Oh, Bill O'Neill misquoted me.

"There was no street prophet guy
or whatever.

"L didn't meet a guy on
a Greyhound bus or anything.

"What happened was, in those
days, in the early '80s,

"there were wheat-pasted
fliers all over the city...

"... with the Toynbee message
on them.

"And then a pirate shortwave radio
address, so you could tune in."

Now, we knew something
we never knew before,

which was somebody involved in the Minority
Association or in spreading the Toynbee message

had involvement in
the shortwave radio community.

So I thought somebody in the shortwave world knows
who these people were or who this person is.

Well, we're here at the shortwave radio convention
in order to track down people who may remember

the shortwave radio
broadcasts from the 1980s.

Is this fictitious?

No, it's not fictitious.

- I mean, I don't know... - Well, who... I've
never... I don't know what you're talking about.

And they were propagating this message of
Arnold Toynbee's ideas in the movie "2001"

to reconfigure dead molecules
on the planet Jupiter.

This is the thing, you found it.

That's the gold mine.

We found a schedule of events.

Most of the discussions were just technical
radio things that were way over our heads

but there was one thing that did
sound interesting.

So now what I'm gonna do is conduct
this paranormal experiment with you.

I'm going to think of one of these
cards and then we're going to find out

if my messages got out to you.

How many people think that
I thought about the star?

One, two, three, four.

How many people think I thought
about the square?

One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten, 11,12,13,14.

How many people think I thought
about the wavy line?

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine, ten, 11,12,13,14,15, 16,17,18,19,

20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26... So all of you
thought, in my fine thinking apparatus,

that I was thinking about
the wavy line.

That was
the majority of the people.

Well, I'll show you what
I was thinking about.

I was thinking...
see, there's nothing here.

That's the... I was thinking of
the wavy line.

Maybe there's something to this.

At the end of the lecture,
the guy who did it

opens up a little forum
for people to ask questions.

Question and answers, you know.

I apologize, it's kind of off the subject, but
it's a mystery that we're trying to solve.

Somebody's been creating sort of like
an art piece or whatever that's...

somehow, Arnold Toynbee's ideas
in the movie "2001" would...

people would be able to raise
the dead on the planet Jupiter.

They were doing shortwave radio
broadcasts in the early '80s.

What we were basically trying to do
here is see if anybody remembered

those shortwave broadcasts
talking about this stuff.

And I figured this would be as good of a
place... You've got an old-fart audience here,

so they ought to... Anybody
remember any of that stuff?

Big zip here.

Sorry.

Right after everybody
says nobody knows anything

and the guy says, "Okay, well,
we're gonna move on then,"

somebody sitting in front of
me turns around their little

metal folding chair a little bit and whispers to
me, "Hey, listen, I know some guys that probably

"know about what you're
talking about.

"It's some of the pirate guys.

Y'know, just catch up with me
after it's over, all right?"

We were going to go upstairs
and we were gonna be let in

on this secret part of
the shortwave fest.

So we've been led to believe they
may know something about this.

So we are on the mission.

Over here is a very
low-power transmitting device

that is radiating a signal
around the hotel here.

He's actually performing a shortwave
broadcast on the fourth floor of the hotel

or whatever where
the shortwave fest is at.

This is Radio Clandestine.

All right, on this broadcast from Radio
Tim Tron Worldwide here in room 412,

we have some gentlemen from another aspect of
an interesting life form that have arrived.

And who do we have seated at
the guest microphonium?

Well, my name is Justin Duerr
and I'm from Philadelphia.

And we're filming a documentary about a
mysterious phenomenon that has been unfolding,

as far as we
know, well over a decade.

Wow.

There was a distinct possibility that Tim
Tron might say, "Oh, back in the early '80s,

"I mean, everybody knew
the Toynbee tile station.

Y'know, we used to listen to it
all the time."

And maybe he'd even have
a tape of it or something.

This is the first time I've ever heard
of this, so I guess putting it out there

in shortwave radio land we'll get it
out there and maybe somebody who has

experienced this phenomenon
can get back to you all.

There.

Colin was in and out of the room
during Justin's interview.

And he comes back in... We have a
development downstairs, you guys.

Whoa!

The guy pulled me out of the room and he said,
"There's someone you really should talk to.

Here, come down
and talk to him."

"There's someone... we've
got to go downstairs."

We go over and start talking to
this guy, John T. Arthur.

You were saying you remembered something
about that... the shortwave broadcasts?

Well, they contacted me to use my
post office box for a mail drop.

It's exactly what you describe
in the little flier, there.

When did they contact you?

Well, I was in school there
between '81 and '83

so it was early '80s.

Mm-hmm.

- Wow. - Do you remember any... did
you ever listen to the broadcasts?

Do you remember anything
about those?

I never could hear them,
not from out there.

And I never saw
any reports of them.

Never got any mail for him,
either.

Just being there, in the flesh, with someone who
had had communication with the Toynbee tiler.

It was like, everything comes
together, everything clicks,

where you're just like, "Whoa, like,
y'know... "my head is spinning.

Like, this is
just crazy."

Do you remember any... do you remember
talking to any other people orjust him or...

- It was all by mail.
- Yeah, okay.

I didn't talk to him,
and, no, it was just him.

And you didn't save any of the
mail or anything, obviously.

Probably not.

No, I didn't, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Did he mention anything about a
group, like the Minority Association?

- Yeah, I recall that name, too.
- Yeah, really?

Wow.

Do you remember any of the names
of the people that contacted you?

If you could rattle off some names, it
might jog my memory, but... Severino?

Sevy?

- Verna?
- Verna.

Yeah, how 'bout that?

First try.

Colin throws out the first name.

John T. Arthur
completes the last name.

We know conclusively
who the tiler was.

Sevy Verna, yeah.

After the shortwave fest, we got together
and we had a little round table discussion

about what our next
steps would be.

Well, stranger things
have happened.

Well... Nah, that's not true.

Nothing stranger
has ever happened.

Well, where do you guys
want to take it from here?

I mean, what can we do
from here, y'know?

We should go back to
the neighborhood or at least,

like, nail Frannie down
more into just being like,

"You've gotta talk to him,"
you know what I mean?

Because now we know something
we didn't know before.

So, yeah, knowing more about him is
really what's important at this point.

Right, yeah, yeah.

And just filling in
all the holes.

We go back to the
neighborhood...

Here's a man that no one sees.

Here's a man that, if he goes food shopping,
he goes 2:00, 3:00 in the morning.

He just put about half-inch plywood on the
windows and nailed it into the window.

And, like I say,
then he used to chain the door.

People like him, they just...
they don't want to be bothered.

They live by themselves.

I think he works
a little night work.

I'm not sure, we don't see him.

All I do know is people used to bother
him, but he didn't bother nobody.

He used to have a car.

One side of it was...
the floorboard was out of it.

I know that because one day I happened to
look and I went, "Oh, my God," you know.

I said, "How can he drive it
like that?"

It only had one seat
on one side, I remember.

And I looked and I said, "Man don't
have no floorboard in his car," y'know?

The tiler doesn't have
a floorboard in his car.

It takes a second.

You're like,
"No... no floorboard?"

Immediately, makes you
think, "Well, that's how he's

"putting the Toynbee tiles down,
is he's driving in his car,

"dropping the Toynbee tiles through
this floorboard-less part of the car."

No one would see a thing.

I remember seeing that tile
in the middle of the highway

and I wondered,
like, "How did he do that?"

You're on the
interstate, you drop a tile.

You're at the entrance of the Holland
Tunnel and you drop a tile, y'know?

So you can put tiles
in impossible locations.

It's brilliant, it's...

Well, I remember there was a car
up here with a big, big antenna.

With a real big antenna.

He used to come over
on the TV screen.

Like, he used to come in
with the TV back in the day.

Like, he used to come across, like,
you'd hear... you're watching a TV show

and you would
hear somebody talking.

My father used to complain
about it going onto the TV.

'Cause it would be the floor model,
back in the day, and it used to go...

You hear him talking on the thing and then my
father used to go out there and scream and holler.

He's got his car, and before he starts
tiling, he's tiling the airwaves.

He's tiling
the 11:00 news.

You basically, you've got this guy in a car with
the floorboards taken out of the passenger side

of the car with no passenger seat, with a big
Texas Flycatcher antenna attached to the car,

transmitting a signal.

Driving down the street in his
neighborhood and, as he passes each house,

the television in the house goes haywire and his
Toynbee message is coming over the speakers

on the television.

And people are coming out of their
house and yelling at the car

because they know that it's him that's
transmitting this signal on to the televisions.

It's a pretty intense story,
you know.

I remember, younger, when we were kids, we called
him the Birdman 'cause he would take the birds.

Like, if there was a broken... a bird on
the street with a broken wing or whatever,

he'll take it back and he'll
nurse it and this and that.

Like, he does do
stuff like that.

He's very timid.

Like, he has to know you,
I guess, to talk to you.

But other than that,
he keeps to himself.

He rides his bike
and then he comes back.

He was, in his house that he lived in, he's,
like, made himself a prisoner in the house

because he had a confrontation
with one of the neighbors

that was renting off
of the next-door property.

See, he's like a late...
like a night owl.

And he plays the organ and then he plays the
thing... - The accordion. - The accordion.

And he plays that, like,
3:00, 4:00 in the morning.

And so the neighbor that
lived next door to him

was drunks and they broke into the back of his
house, and while he was sleeping on the couch,

they put a knife to his throat.

One time he had
the music so, so loud.

He says, "Well, we hear your
piano all the time."

So he said...
so he threatened him.

And that's why he barricaded
the windows.

And now, recently this year, he
just took off all the boards.

But he still locks his
door up with the big lead pipe

with the lock 'cause he's
still a little timid.

These guys break into his house
and hold a knife to his throat.

I think that would
make anybody paranoid.

It's interesting because it ties into a
message that was actually found on a tile.

People trying to kill him and he
boards up his house with blast doors.

This is another
version of the story.

Do you think if you knocked on his
door and said, "Hey, it's Frannie,"

do you think he would come,
just for you?

Well, we can knock, we'll try.

Sevy?

I see somebody there, like...

Yeah.

He was home.

And, um, hejust wasn't
answering the door.

We start to realize here's somebody that's really
sensitive to any kind of outside pressure.

And it's doing
something bad to him.

No.

I don't think we'll
ever talk to Sevy.

It's a mystery.

It's a public mystery, it's been put out in
the public for 25 years asking to be solved.

But once you solve it, you realize that the
person really doesn't want you to solve it.

He doesn't want it
to be a mystery.

He doesn't want
that kind of attention.

And what do you do with that
information, then?

At that point... we had
kind of hit a dead end.

I've been looking for this
needle-in-the-haystack name

or whatever for years and years
and years and years.

Y'know, it's, like, how do you
connect with this person, y'know?

I always had doubts that that
would ever happen.

A mysterious phenomenon that has been unfolding,
as far as we know, well over a decade.

I guess putting it out there in shortwave radio
land, we'll get it out there and maybe somebody

who has experienced this phenomenon
can get back to you all.

Ulis Fleming
has this amazing story.

When he was a kid, he was driving
from Baltimore to Philadelphia

and he was listening to shortwave and
he picked up the Toynbee Idea message

shortwave transmission.

And at some point in the transmission,
the person read out a PO Box address

that he could write to.

And so he wrote to the address and said,
"Yes, I'd like some of your information."

It was the press packet
for the Minority Association.

Ulis still had
all of the material.

Still had all of the papers.

We all got together to have a meeting while
we received the e-mails in real time.

So, as Ulis was scanning in the sheets
of paper and sending them to us,

we were actually receiving them
as they were coming in to us.

And we're all watching them
unfold out of the ether world.

And we finally get to see
the type-written messages

and all the details of
everything and who knows what.

I couldn't even imagine what
would be in the material.

All these details were running
through my mind like wildfire.

The information that he had was a personal
letter signed from James Morasco.

As well as some other documents
on the Minority Association.

The fact that we knew that it was an original
letter from James Morasco was incredible.

Y'know, who... we had pretty much given up
on the name James Morasco at this point

and now here it was being
tied back in to the mystery.

The question then was, why James Morasco...
how did he fit in to all this?

James Morasco was the publicity
director for the Minority Association.

The name Julius Piroli
never came up.

The author of the documents refers to himself
repeatedly as James Morasco except for one time

when he refers to
himself as Severino Verna.

"He sounded blue collar, proud of his
education, certain of his information."

Sevy is very intelligent.

Yeah, yeah, he seems like it.

Very, very intelligent man.

"But not confident of his presentation
to me, "or rather, to the 'lnquirer.'

He had a soft bass voice."

Sevy is very quiet.

Very quiet person.

I don't think there ever
was a James Morasco in Fishtown.

I think Clark DeLeon remembered
incorrectly.

The descriptions of James Morasco via Clark
DeLeon all matched with the descriptions of Sevy

that we had gotten from
Sevy's neighbors.

They could have very easily
been describing the same person.

James Morasco is sharing
the same PO Box.

He's got the same handwriting.

He's using the same typewriter.

He's got the same phone number.

Everything really suggests that
James Morasco never existed.

There was only ever one person
and that person was Sevy.

The fact that he would create a pseudonym to
unleash his idea on to the world made sense.

It's very difficult to do that if you're
not an outgoing, charismatic person

who's willing to deal with
the public and everything.

And so I feel like he wanted
there to be somebody like that,

so he just made up a character
to do that.

In the writing of Arnold Toynbee he felt that
there was a promise that physical resurrection

could be achieved
through scientific means.

Toynbee never uses the
exact phrase "dead molecules,"

but he comes real close to it.

If you look at it from his point of view
it seemed as if Arnold Toynbee was giving

specific instructions
about how, if you were to take

every molecule that made up a
person while they were alive

and you were to reassemble those molecules
exactly as they were when that person was alive,

that they would then be alive again
just as they had been at that point.

The tiler tied Toynbee's
idea of physical resurrection

being a scientific process
in with the movie "2001,"

where humanity achieved its next stage
of evolution on the Jupiter mission.

In the end of that movie, there's this section
where the astronaut sees himself dying.

But then he could be
coming back to life.

He had some trouble with death.

I think he felt that people die,
and they're gone.

Yeah, heaven, now at this stage
of evolution, does not exist.

I think that the basic
thinking is:

the promise that God
has made for there to be

some type of afterlife is true...
it will be true...

but it will only become true when humans use
science to actually fulfill this promise.

You could build heaven
from the ground up.

If you interpret
the end of the movie "2001"

as people building a physical
afterlife in outer space,

then that basically is
the Toynbee idea in movie 2001

to resurrect dead on
planet Jupiter.

In the play "Four A.M.,"

David Mamet uses this
phrase "molecules."

Another one of the enduring mysteries
of the whole Toynbee story was

where David Mamet got this idea,
y'know, what this was all about.

So it was incredibly revealing to
read this little piece of information

in one of
Sevy's letters to Ulis.

Well, David Mamet actually had even
done interviews where he said...

The play is an homage to Larry King,
the days when I used to listen to him

on the radio in the middle
of the night.

Well, now we knew there was a specific
phone call made in February 1980.

And he was on the air
on Larry King.

And who knows?

But Mamet insists the play
is not based on a real caller.

People used to ask me where I get my ideas
and I would always say, "I think of them."

There was no call on the radio,
I made it up.

There are so many similarities between
"Four A.M." and the Toynbee Idea campaign.

Certainly, all of the things that the
caller says sound like they could have come

directly out of the mouth
of James Morasco.

The phrasings in the literature that we got from
Ulis are so close to that source in "Four A.M."

Maybe he wrote something down
at the time he heard it.

4:00 in the morning.

Went to bed.

Three years later, he forgot about where he
got the idea and then wrote a short play.

It's kind of mind-boggling
somehow, I don't know.

This is all somewhat up to conjecture because
we don't know any of this stuff for sure.

It's all from context clues.

But this is what I'm thinking...

1979, he discovers the library
book, has seen the movie "2001,"

puts two and two together
in his mind.

February 1980, he makes a phone
call to "Larry King Live"

and gets on the air.

1980 through 1983, attempts are made
to contact major media outlets.

Very little comes of that above and
beyond the Clark DeLeon article.

His ways of publicizing the
idea become more street level

and grass routes as he experiences more
rejection from the established media.

Sometime around this point, he has developed
stationary and is making wheat pastes.

He is also experimenting in
shortwave radio.

He tries to get a pirate radio station up
and running and broadcasts via his car.

They won't put the Toynbee Idea on
television and so he just drove around

transmitting directly onto
people's television sets.

He had this grandiose plan to build
a pirate shortwave broadcaster

to transmit signals
into the USSR.

He actually had plans and schematics
drawn out so that he could do that.

Sometime between 1983 and 1987, he
perfects the tile-laying method

and the first tiles
begin to appear.

In the late '80s, Sevy drove his car across
the US and also visited South America

and laid hundreds
and hundreds of tiles.

This process continues
to this day.

You have to look at it from his point of view,
which I'm sure is hard for a lot of people to do.

I think he became
fixated on this idea

that he had found the answer to
overcome death and everything

and decided that if he could just
figure out a way to publicize the idea

the rest of the story
would kind of write itself.

When this didn't happen, not only
did people not listen to him

but they were
actively mocking him.

There's a big part of that story that has to
just do with empathizing with him as a person.

We found out everything
we needed to find out.

We found out why the tiler never stepped
forward and took credit for everything.

It gets to this point where there's this
strange kind of dilemma where you say,

"Okay, how much is too much?"

And let's just step back
and leave it as it is.

"Mr. Verna, I have so many
questions for you.

"L have listened to the shortwave frequency
"listed on the fliers from so many years ago,

"but have never heard you.

"L want to make perfectly clear
to you

"the immense amount of respect I have for
you as a thinker, "as a creative individual

"and as someone who has persevered "despite
being ignored or mocked in the press

"in the early
stages of your campaign.

"L sincerely admire you for your
stalwart dedication

"and your innovation of a method
of circumventing the media.

"Mr. Verna, if it is at all possible, "we
would love to have you tell the story

"of this unparalleled publicity
campaign in your own words.

"You have my solemn word, as someone who has
followed "your creative work for over ten years

"that it is my highest priority "to
present your thoughts and words,

"in whatever form, in the most respectful
and positive manner "of which I am capable.

"We have tried knocking on your
door to speak in person,

"but began to feel as if we were making pests
of ourselves, "so we will not do so anymore.

"L write all of this to you in a spirit
of total "openness and frankness.

"L hope you will be able to
respond to us

"and that you would be willing
to share your thoughts with us.

"But whatever decision you make, "please
know that you have my understanding.

"L hope this finds you
in good health and spirit.

Very truly and respectfully
yours, Justin Duerr."

Imagining this ending up in his hands kind
of makes me nervous with anticipation.

I run scenarios over in my head.

It's just that whole world of
possibilities.

I mean, I... I... after
I do that for a while,

I just have to stop doing it
'cause it will drive me insane.

Late spring or early winter of
2007, I got off the subway train

at Broad and Oregon
in South Philadelphia.

And I catch a bus.

Around the 700 or 800 block, which is in
the neighborhood where the address on

the Toynbee tile in South America was...
was... listed, or whatever,

I just... I had an encounter with who I
assumed to be the Toynbee tile culprit.

I kind of kept looking at him 'cause I
thought, "Could that be... could that be Sevy?

I mean, it very well
could be, he's the right age."

He looked like, sort of the type of person that
was wrapped up in his own thoughts or whatever.

Certain people that you see, you can just tell
that they're more on an introspective mind trip.

We exited the bus at
opposite sides.

There was some extremely
uncomfortable, you know...

glancing back and forth
and eye contact and stuff.

It was, y'know, uncomfortable
and tense.

But nothing was said.

And... but we definitely
noticed each other.

All kinds of stuff went through
my head.

For years and years,
I wanted to talk to this person

and for years and years I wanted
to solve the mystery.

But the thing was that when I ran into
him on the bus, I didn't want to do it.

It's not that I couldn't
bring myself to do it.

I decided not to bring myself to do it because
I felt like it was not the right thing to do.

You can't force
somebody to open up to you.

You can't force somebody to decide that
they're gonna share things with you.

I need to know when to let go.

I had a moment of emotional and intellectual
clarity about where I stood with the story.

Let them go in peace on their way and I would
go in peace on my way and that would be it.

Resurrect... dead...