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..."
... 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...
you 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,
"I can't wait.
"I'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 Idea"
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,
you know?
And I'm like, "Whoa.
You 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.
Toynbee.net 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.
You 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.
You 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, you 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, you know, I'm sure
that it was a...
you 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,
you know, where the Cult of
the Hellion is gathered,
begging them not to
destroy it, with tears,
of course, streaming down
his face, you 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, you 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.
You 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, "Man, you know,
this person could be, like,
on the block or something,"
you 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 Idea!"
I jogged down the other way,
"Toynbee Idea!"
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
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
the "Philadelphia inquirer."
And then
there was a play
by playwright/fiirn 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, 30 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 rail road.
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 "inquirer" 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, "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.
"I 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.
"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.
You know, it's the same--
it's the same concept.
Mamet wrote that piece
but it was-- you know, it didn't
appear anywhere publicly.
And then DeLeon's
And then Mamet's 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,
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, you 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
a hold of him
but he's kind of
hard to get a hold 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?
- 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.
- 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 rail yard
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 rail road
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.
"I 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 'inquirer.'
"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--
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
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, you 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, you know,
push me down the stairs.
And then they'd be like,
"Fucking pigeon man."
He received a lot of abuse.
It was personal,
you 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, you 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.
"I'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
Toynbee.net 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 Toynbee.net 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.
You know, we had, you know,
no training in being detectives.
We're not gonna make
this discovery.
You know, we're wasting our time.
We're barking up
the wrong tree, it's--
You know, it's a quagmire.
H, 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.
One interesting thing that came
out of the Toynbee.net e-mails
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 going 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, you know?
I'm not crazy.
I definitely-
I definitely heard this.
This guy, Nathan Mehl
wrote into Toynbee.net
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,
"Bill O'Neill misquoted me.
"There was no street prophet guy
or whatever.
"I 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,
How many people think I thought
about the wavy line?
One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
20, 21, 22,
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.
You 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,
"Back in the early '80s,
"I mean, everybody knew
the Toynbee tile station.
You 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, you know...
"my head is spinning.
Like, this is
just crazy."
Do you remember any--
do you remember talking to
any other people
or just 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, you 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,
"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," you 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, you 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,
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, he just 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.
You know, it's, like,
how do you connect
with this person, you 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.
You 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 'inquirer.'
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
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,
you 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.
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...
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.
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
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.
"I have listened
to the shortwave frequency
"listed on the fliers from so
many years ago,
"but have never heard you.
"I 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.
"I 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 any more.
"I write all of this to you
in a spirit of total
"openness and frankness.
"I 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.
"I 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, you 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...