Over the course of years and in dozens of cities across the world, strange tiles with bizarre messages began showing up affixed to streets. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinellil discuss the Toynbee Tiles, the bizarre ideas they convey, and who is behind them.
Jimmy Akin Podcast
The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2001, Resurrection, Jupiter) - Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World
Jimmy Aiken's Mysterious World is brought to you by the Star Quest Production Network and is made possible by our many generous patrons. If you'd like to support the podcast, please visit sqpn.com/give. You're listening to episode 331 of Jimmy Aiken's Mysterious World. Where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about the mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. I'm Dom Betanelli and joining me today is Jimmy Aiken. Hey Jimmy. Howdy Dom. In 1994, American artist Justin Doer began to notice strange tiles that were affixed to public streets in his hometown of Philadelphia. The tile said bizarre, crazy sounding things and he began investigating them. But there was almost no information available despite how common they were. Doer discovered that there were hundreds of them in dozens of cities across the United States and even in other countries. He decided to get to the bottom of the mystery and with a group of associates, he went in quest of who was behind them. So what are the Toynbee Tiles? What bizarre ideas do they convey and who's behind them? That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Aiken's Mysterious World. So Jimmy, where do we begin today? Our entry point into the mystery of the Toynbee Tiles is Justin Doer. He's an artist, punk rock musician and writer who grew up in rural Pennsylvania. But by the 1990s, he had moved to Philadelphia and it was there that he first discovered the Toynbee Tiles. That happened in 1994 when he discovered one of the tiles, one of the many tiles on a street in Philadelphia. It was about the size of a license plate and it was stuck to the street. It had the same basic message that's on almost all the Toynbee Tiles, which is... Towing the idea in Kubrick's 2001, Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter. A couple of years went by and Justin began noticing more tiles like this in Philadelphia. He began making a list of where they were located and by 1996 or '97, Justin had access to the internet, which had only recently become publicly available. So he decided to see what he could find out about him online. 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. 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 kind of 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 10 results. Toynbee.net had occurred and I was like, "It blew my mind." Of course, the internet was much smaller back then and search engines weren't as comprehensive as they are now or as jammed with ads. So Justin didn't initially find anything, but when he came back, he found a website devoted to the tiles, which was called Toynbee.net. The site also listed the locations where the tiles were to be found and Justin learned that they weren't just in Philadelphia. They were in other cities like Boston, New York and Washington. In fact, they were spread across many states, mainly in the Northeast, but with tiles as far west as Kansas City. And there were even in a few South American countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile. So this was an international phenomenon. The tiles also appeared in the middle of busy streets and highways. There was also one in Times Square in New York and another in front of the Holland Tunnel connected Manhattan to New Jersey. And there were literally hundreds of tiles. As of 2012, it was estimated that there were around 450 tiles in more than two dozen cities. But even when Justin was first reading the Toynbee.net website, one of the things it did not contain was information about who was responsible for the tiles. People were noticing them and reporting them, but nobody knew who was behind them. So Justin decided that he would try to solve the mystery. In fact, in the year 2000, he came close to solving it. I went to get a snack. This must have been now around like 4 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, you know, this person could be like on the block or something, you know. So I leapt to my feet. I jogged down the block, you know, to the north. I start shouting out, "Toynbee idea! Doinbee idea! I believe it! I believe the Toynbee idea!" I jogged down the other way, doing the idea. Nobody ever answers me and there's nobody to hear me except the 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. When I went back and I just hung out with the tile until 7 in the morning and watched the first sunrise on the tile or something. Unfortunately, it would take several more years for him to crack the mystery. However, Justin had learned something about how the tiles were placed. Apparently, they were set on the street covered in tar paper and then as cars drove over it, the tar paper would wear off and leave the tile visible stuck to the street. What are the Toynbee tiles made of? According to an FAQ on the website ResurrectDead.com First, a message is carved on a piece of flexible, not brittle, linoleum. Two pieces of tar paper are used to cover the linoleum, like bread covering the filling of a sandwich. The linoleum is also smothered with Elmer's glue and asphalt crack filler. The whole concoction is then laid down in the asphalt of an intersection while concealed by the tar paper. The tile is baked into the ground by the sun's heat, which liquefies the asphalt ever so slightly. Pressure from car and foot traffic further impress the tile into the ground. By the time the top layer of tar paper is removed, the tile will have become deeply embedded and will be impossible to remove without fully repaving the street. So that seems to be the basic process in terms of material science. Let's talk about the basic message that's on the Toynbee tiles. Is it always the same? Almost always, yes. With minor variations, it was Toynbee idea in Kubrick's 2001 ResurrectDead on Planet Jupiter, and the minor variations tended to just be alterations of how it's worded. Like, sometimes it would say "raise dead" instead of "resurrect dead" or sometimes it would say in movie 2001 instead of in Kubrick's 2001. However, there were also frequently side messages found on one side of the tile or below it on a small sub tile. Before we get to the side messages, let's talk about the main message. What do you think it means? Well, the main message has essentially four parts. The first is Toynbee idea. The second is a reference to Kubrick's 2001. The third is ResurrectDead, and the fourth is on Planet Jupiter. Those, the one that's easiest to interpret, is Kubrick's 2001. That's an obvious reference to Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968. And it does indeed involve the Planet Jupiter. In the movie, astronaut Dave Bowman and his colleagues take a ship called the Discovery One to Jupiter. Though in the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, which was written as the same at the same time as the film, the ship goes to Saturn rather than Jupiter. What about the reference to Toynbee idea? What could that mean? Presumably, it would be an idea connected with someone named Toynbee. This may not be as obvious to young people today, but the most famous, most discussed person named Toynbee in the mid-20th century was the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee. He's best known for a 12-volume set of books he wrote titled A Study of History, which looked at about 20 civilizations and traced the stages of their rise and fall. Arnold Toynbee was very, very famous in the 1940s and 1950s. He's not nearly as famous today, but when the titles were beginning to be laid, he was much more well known. And he is known for having thoughts on religion. For example, here are a couple clips of him discussing his thoughts on religion. This, I believe, Professor Arnold Toynbee is widely considered to be the world's greatest living historian. His monumental work, A Study of History, which now runs to six volumes, with three more due in 1954, sets forth his bold original theories on the rise and fall of civilizations. Professor Toynbee is an alert, blue-eyed Englishman who most enjoys just walking in the country and thinking. These are some of his thoughts. I believe that everything worth winning does have its price in suffering, and I know, of course, where this belief of mine comes from. It comes from the accident of my having been born in a country where the local religion has been Christianity. Another belief that I owe to Christianity is the conviction that love is what gives life its meaning and purpose, and that suffering is profitable when it is met in the course of following love's lead. But I can't honestly call myself a believing Christian in the traditional sense. To imagine that one's own church, civilization, nation, or family is the chosen people, is, I believe, as wrong as it would be for me to imagine that I myself am God. I agree with Simicus, the pagan philosopher who put the case for toleration to a victorious Christian church, and I'll end by quoting his words. The universe is too great a mystery for there to be only one single approach to it. They're the creed of Arnold Toynbee, the renowned historian. I do believe that any challenge where it gets down to the quick when it puts you really up against it, brings you face-to-face of religion. I think we've been rather taken unaware of that in our Western world because half or about two or three centuries ago after those wars of religion we fought against each other, Catholics and Protestants. We got pretty tired of religion. It seemed to lead to nothing but war and strife and hatred and uncherishfulness, and we turned away to other things. Science, technology has been safe occupations, innocent compared to religion. But I believe humans can't really live without religion, and when you come against hard times, and we're living in spiritually hard times, then religion confronts you, and you have to grapple with it. Because what one means by religion is often difficult to state, isn't it? I think I'd say the mystery, but behind the things we can handle and touch, behind the phenomena as we call them, and not just becoming aware that there is a mystery, but feeling pretty humble and face-bit and wishing to get into contact with it and into harmony with it. If you take religion and add to broad sense, that's what I barely mean by it. I think, of course, if we do come back to religion, we shall come back to it in the form in which it wasn't going to be turned away from it, because things ever repeat themselves like that, and all the experience we've been through and the things we've learned for our new view of religion, I would say. So, Toy B. wasn't particularly orthodox, but he did have ideas about religion. However, he wasn't known for having ideas about resurrecting the dead on planet Jupiter. That aspect of the tiles remain mysterious for the moment. Then let's talk about the side messages that were found with many of the tiles. What kind of things did they say? They covered a variety of different themes, for example, on one tile the side message read. A real resurrection is easy and proved by caveman's first use of genius or genius tools. Lay tile alone, beds. So, this one has a message about the possibility of raising the dead, along with a message that says, "lay tile alone" and "feds." The meaning of that latter statement will become clear, as we look at a few more side messages. Now, some of the tiles had language on them that isn't politically correct and may be offensive, but because they offer a window into the mind of the Tyler, we're going to keep that language intact. Another tile had a message that read, "Hittman from Venezuela and Cuba failed to murder me twice, so they sent a f*cked cell to murder my mother. Lay tile alone, feds. You must lay tile alone, feds." So, here we have a message about one or more Hittman trying to kill the Tyler and his mother, which could be an indication of paranoid delusions, or it could be absolutely true. We also have "lay tile alone, feds" again, but then we have the clarifying "you must lay tile alone, feds." That reveals that the Tyler is instructing other people to lay tiles on streets like he's doing, only they need to do so alone, and in that context, "feds" would most plausibly be taken as a reference to federal agents. Presumably, this is a warning that if you don't lay the tile alone, if there are other people around when you lay it, then the feds will find out, and there will be bad consequences. What some of those consequences are is revealed in another side message which says, "You must lay tile as hellions, all communists, join up en masse and give you beatings." Here we're told about a group that the Tyler calls "hellions," he says that they're all communists, and that they will join up en masse or as a group to give you beatings, so that's apparently one of the bad consequences that can result. He also mentions another bad consequence in a tile whose side message reads, "lay tile alone as, as hellions and feds infiltrate and harvest to prison." So you could apparently go to prison if you get caught. In another side message, he refers to a cult of the Hellion. Cult of the Hellion is now searching for more than one hell. Ideologies to get more reward. Lay tile alone, feds. Lay tile alone, feds. Here, the Tyler refers to ideologies, and in other messages, he refers to movements that could be considered ideologies, for example, when he writes, "lay tile alone, feds, communists and media, Hellion Jews against text damaged. I've got so many enemies." The "I've got so many enemies" statement could be more evidence of paranoia, and the Tyler apparently believes that communists and the media, as well as what he calls "hellion Jews," are among his enemies. Incidentally, this could indicate that the Tyler is anti-Semitic. Another side message that seems to refer to ideologies says, "lay tile alone, feds. You must lay tile as only Hellion ideas are allowed to survive. All other ideas are destroyed. Lay tile alone, feds." So that gives you an idea of what the side messages on the tiles say. Those messages are all pretty brief. Did they ever discover a longer message from the Tyler? They did. In 1997, they found a group of four tiles placed together. They are collectively referred to as the Manifesto tile, and they did not have the usual message about Toynbee and Kubrick. Instead, they had a much longer message that said, and this one also has some offensive language that we're preserving. John Knight, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hellion Jew, who's hated this movement's guts for years, takes money from the Mafia to make the Mafia look good in his newspapers, so he has the Mafia in his back pocket. John Knight sent the Mafia to murder me in May 1991. Text damage? Journalists all of them gloated to my face, about my death, and Knight Ritter's great power to destroy. In fact, John Knight went into Hellion binge of joy overnight Ritter's great power to destroy. I secured house with blast doors and fled the country in June 1991. NBC attorneys, journalists, and security officials at Rockefeller Center fraudulently text damage, the Freedom of Information Act, all text damage, orders of NBC executives got the U.S. Federal District Attorney's Office and got the FBI to get Interpol to establish task force that located me in Dover, England. When back home, Inquirer got union goons from their own employees union to send down a sports journalist, who with baseball bat bashed in lights and windows of neighborhood car, as well as men outside my home, their station there still waiting for me. NBC, CBS, Group W, Westinghouse, Time, Time Warner, Fox Universal, all of the cult of the Hellion. Each one were much worse than Knight Ritter ever was. Mostly Hellion Jews. When KYW and NBC executives told John Knight, the whole coven gloated in joyous fits on how their Soviet pals found a way to turn it into a. And they're the text breaks off in mid sentence at the bottom of the tile. Perhaps he was going to lay another tile to finish what he was saying, but then someone came along and so he couldn't lay the tile alone. In any event, the monument tile was discovered in 1997 and the city of Philadelphia paved over it in 1998, which the Tyler may have regarded as more persecution of him and the desire of sinister higher ups to obliterate his message. What is all the stuff in the manifesto tile referring to? Well, in the first place, it refers to John Shivley Knight, who was indeed the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, as well as several other newspapers. These merged with Ritter publications in 1974 to form Knight Ritter newspapers, Inc. However, despite what the manifesto says, Knight was not Jewish. I found an interview with him that reveals he was a Christian, although he didn't go to church that often. The fact that the Tyler describes him as a "Hellion Jew" is more evidence of anti-Semitism on his part, because anti-Semites have an unfortunate tendency to assume people they disapprove of are Jewish, even when they're not. The manifesto also contains evidence of paranoid delusions. Not only is it unlikely that all of the different businesses the Tyler names were conspiring against him, you'll note that he twice refers to the year 1991. And he says that in that year, John Knight sent the mafia to murder him, so he had to flee the country. The problem is that John Knight died a decade earlier than that in 1981. He died of a heart attack in Akron, Ohio at age 86, so he wasn't sending the mafia to murder anybody in 1991. This, plus the general implausibility of the scenario on the manifesto tile, strongly suggests that the Tyler was suffering from paranoid delusions. Still, that only adds a new layer to the mystery. Not only do we need to figure out what the tiles mean, how they were being laid in so many places, and who the Tyler was, we also need to ask what was going on in his head. And Justin Doer would be the key investigator who shed light on these questions together with a couple of associates of his, named Stephen Weineck and Colin Smith. The three of them gathered the few clues they had available to them, and they set off on a process of investigation. And before we get to that investigation, we'd like to pause here and take a moment to thank our patrons who make this show possible, including Jeff B, Katherine L, Peter B, Scott G and Eric D. They're generous donations at sqpn.com/give. Make it possible for us to continue Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world and all the shows at Starquest. And you can join them by visiting sqpn.com/give. Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world is also brought to you by delivercontacts.com, offering top-brand contact lenses at always low prices. With free delivery, visit delivercontacts.com and buy Great Lakes Customs Law, helping importers and individuals with seizures, penalties and compliance with U.S. Customs Matters throughout the United States. Visit greatlakescustomslaw.com. Jimmy, you said that this mystery has been solved, correct? Yes, at least in terms of its basic outlines. And this has come as a surprise to some who have covered the case. Here on Mysterious World, we're not like other mystery-based podcasts. We don't just try to generate wonder in the audience and encourage them to imagine what if. Instead, we actually try to solve the mysteries, at least to the extent possible. But many mystery-based shows aren't like that, and it can come as a surprise when a mystery is actually solvable. For example, on decoding the unknown, host Simon Whistler reacts this way, as he's reading the script and learns that a solution is coming. Well, we're answering all of the questions. Oh my god, we're gonna- we decoded something. Hundreds of episodes. Finally, finally, we've solved a mystery. But solving mysteries is par for the course here on Mysterious World, so you know what podcast you want to go to if you want actual answers, or at least informed tentative conclusions. So yes, we will be revealing what has been determined about the mystery of the Toynby tiles. Alright, then, let's look at the investigation by Justin, Steve, and Colin. You said that they had a few starting clues. What did those involve? There were basically three of them. First, they had found a street address on a tile located in Santiago, Chile. In the 2011 documentary, Resurrect Dead, the mystery of the Toynby tiles, they blur out the specific house number, but it's located on South 7th Street in Philadelphia. Second, they had found an article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The article discussed the concepts that were in the tiles, though not the tiles themselves. It appeared in 1983, more than a decade before Justin Doer noticed the tiles, and it was published by a columnist named Clark De Leon. Third, they had found a short play by screenwriter David Mamet, who is famous for plays like Glen Gary, Glen Ross, and movies like The Untouchables, and one of my favorites, the Spanish prisoner. The play was written in 1983 and published in 1985. It was titled 4 AM, and it also discussed the concepts mentioned in the tiles without mentioning the tiles themselves. What was their first step in investigating the mystery? Well, the second two clues mentioned concepts from the tiles, but they didn't mention the tiles themselves. By contrast, the street address in Philadelphia was written on one of the tiles, and so that made pursuing this lead the logical first step. They went to the address, which was just a row house in South Philadelphia and rang the doorbell. Unfortunately, they didn't get a response, so as a backup, they started asking people in the neighborhood about whoever lived at the address. They then discovered two names, both of which became suspects for being the Tyler. The locals told them that the man who lived there now was named Severino Verna. He was popularly called Sevi, and he kept birds, so he was sometimes called Sevi the bird man. However, the previous occupant of the house was named Julius Peroli. He worked for the railroad, and he had the nickname Railroad Joe, so they'd been unable to meet the person at the address, but they now had two suspects for who the Tyler might be. What happened with the second clue, the 1983 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, that gave them their third suspect. The article was called Theories. Wanna run that by me again? And it said, Theories. Wanna run that by me again? By Clark De Leon. Call me skeptical, but I had a hard time buying James Morasco's concept that the planet Jupiter would be colonized by bringing all the people of Earth who had ever died back to life and then changing Jupiter's atmosphere to allow them to live. Is this just me or does that strike you as hard to swallow too? Morasco says he's a social worker in Philadelphia and came across this idea while reading a book by historian Arnold Toynbee, whose theory on bringing dead molecules back to life, was depicted in the movie 2001 The Space Odyssey. "There are no scientific principles I've found that can make this possible," Morasco said, especially colonizing the planet Jupiter, which has a very poisonous atmosphere. The possibility of giving that planet in oxygen atmosphere is beyond even science fiction writer's imaginations. Now, that quote may sound as if Morasco doesn't believe it can be done, but that's not true. He thinks that between Toynbee and Stanley Kubrick, there is a way to pull it off. That's why he's contacting talk shows and newspapers to spread the message. He's even founded a Jupiter colonization organization called the Minority Association, which he says consists of me, Eric, Eric's sister who does the typing and Frank. You may be hearing more from Morasco, then again, you may not. So right out of the gate, De Leon gives us the name of our third suspect, James Morasco, who said he was a social worker in Philadelphia. And in addition to being our third suspect for the Tyler, Morasco lays out the meanin of the main message found on the Toynbee tiles. He says that he got the idea of resurrecting the dead by somehow bringing dead molecules back to life. He says this was depicted in the movie 2001. And the idea is to colonize Jupiter by bringing all of the people who've ever lived back to life and change in Jupiter's atmosphere so they can breathe it. Morasco said he didn't know how this could be done, but he was sure that it could be. And he'd founded a small group called the Minority Association to promote it. Does the movie 2001 really involve the resurrection of the dead? Maybe kind of, at least I know the part of the movie that Morasco is referring to. To explain it, I'll have to explain the plot of the movie, which some people may appreciate anyway, since Cooper didn't spell it out explicitly, and so many people have found it hard to understand. In any event, spoilers for a 56 year old movie. In 2001, a space odyssey, the film deals with an alien race that's trying to cultivate intelligent life in the universe. We never see them, but we see machines that they have made, which take the form of strange black monoliths that do work for them. The movie is structured in four parts. In part one, a monolith appears on Earth in the distant past and affects the evolution of our simian ancestors. In part two, humans discover another monolith on our sister planet, the moon, which was left there to await the time when we had discovered space travel as a result of what they did back in the ancient past. After we discover this monolith, it sends a radio signal in the direction of Jupiter. In part three, the humans follow up on that signal by sending a spaceship to Jupiter. However, the ship's onboard computer, Hal 9000, goes crazy and tries to kill the crew. But the last survive an astronaut, David Bowman, disconnects him. That brings us to part four of the movie, where David Bowman finally gets to Jupiter and discovers another monolith in orbit. Bowman then leaves the discovery to investigate the new monolith, and it takes it inside him and sends him on a weird psychedelic journey. As part of that journey, the monolith or the aliens behind it put him in a simulated human environment, which looks kind of like a hotel room, with what Stanley Kubrick described as deliberately inaccurate French architecture since the aliens wouldn't have a really good idea of what a human environment was like. Bowman seems to age and live the rest of his life in this room, and at the end, he's dying in bed when a monolith appears to him and he raises his hand toward it. He then is transformed into an embryo, known as the star child, and the film closes on a shot of the star child looking thoughtful. What this means has been debated, but apparently David Bowman has been renewed by the monolith aliens and taken to a new level of human evolution, just like the apes were at the beginning of the film. However, James Morasko interpreted it in terms of David Bowman literally dying and being resurrected in the vicinity of Jupiter, which he connected with something he'd read in a book by Arnold Poinby. He concluded that this was possible in the real world for all of the human dead, everyone who's ever lived, who would then be able to live on Jupiter with a terraformed atmosphere, and he started trying to publicize this idea, such as by Colin Clark De Leon in 1983, and getting his idea in his newspaper column. And what about the third clue, the play by David Mamet? What did that contain? It contained a scene in which a late night radio host is taken calls at 4 a.m., and someone calls in and describes basically the same ideas. Here's a performance of the scene. Hello, you're on the air. Greg, it is a pleasure to talk to you. I have been a continual listener of yours since you started the 22 stations, and I admire you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Greg. What's your problem? Greg, we need your help to publicize our plan. We've been trying to get our organization together to hire public relations to publicize your... In the movie 2001, based on the writings of Arnold Toyn B, they speak of the planet. Excuse me, excuse me, but 2001 was based on the writings of Arthur C. Clark. Oh, Greg, no, we have to go on. Greg, in the writings of Arnold Toyn B, he speaks of a plan whereby all human life could be easily reconstituted on a planet Jupiter. Uh-huh. Greg? Yes. I'm listening. In the movie... No, no, no, go on. I got it. Our Arnold Toyn B, human life on... Greg, as we are all made of molecules and the atoms of all human life that ever lived are still in all of us... Okay, I got it. They exist. They've just been rearranged, so... Greg, we need your help to publicize our plan. We've just been in existence over a year, and we're going to publicize our theory, and we don't know how. How do you publicize your plan to bring dead people back to life on Jupiter? Yes. Why? Well, how would you want to do that? Hello? Yes? Greg, I told you. Well, I'm not sure that that's what the movie was about, but be that as it may. Why would you want to do that? I mean, do you have a program for this, or what are your goals? It's too broad. Can't you see what I'm saying? You can't bring them all back. Can you? I don't know. Well, think about it. We're talking about billions of people here, huh? They've lived at different times. They speak different languages. What about the people who kill themselves? Because they didn't want to live. And how do you explain the technology to some guy who just came back from 1565, and all of a sudden he's in some space suit, and he's alive again, and he doesn't be in the space forever. And who governs this, a Gus group? Or did they just all just get along to have in this lifetime, friend? You think because they all came back that they're all going to be philosophers? Maybe for a day, yes, maybe a week, a month later, chaos. Do you see what I'm telling you? Listen to me. The world is full of histories of people trying to live in utopias. It doesn't work. We wish did. It doesn't. All right. All right. Yes. Thank you for calling. Let's move on. So we have the same basic ideas under discussion in the play, and that suggested that David Mamet had knowledge of the 20 B Tyler back in 1983 when the play was written, even though it doesn't mention the tiles themselves. Okay. So we've covered the three basic clues that Justin and his colleagues started their investigation with. What did they find out? Well, they continued to follow up on the leads, and they got information that pointed in different directions. For example, David Mamet revealed that his play 4 AM was a kind of tribute to radio talk show host Larry King, who used to have a late night talk show on the radio. In fact, I called in and spoke with Larry King on it once or twice in the 1980s. At the time, the phrase social justice was a big buzzword, and King was using it. So I remember calling in and asking what he was using the term to mean, what exactly is social justice as opposed to regular justice? But he kind of dodged the question and didn't give me a definition. In any event, Mamet told NPR that the conversation involved in 20 B 2001 and resurrecting the dead on Jupiter was his own idea. He said there was no call on the radio. I made it up. And in an interview I read, Mamet seemed to interpret the Toy B tiles as something that was based on his play 4 AM. That is, he thought that he wrote the play and then people got the idea of making the Toy B tiles from it. But that's really hard to explain. If Mamet wrote the play, like you said, in 1983, and it wasn't published until 1985, because the Clark De Leon piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer had already appeared in 1983. So how would the same ideas show up there if they originated in a play that hadn't yet been published? This is indeed a mystery, but we'll get more clarity on it as we go along. Another thing that Justin and his associates did was continue to follow up the street address in Philadelphia. They couldn't get Sevivirna to answer his door. So, we're not going to just warn everything we decided. An obvious step is to try to call this person on the telephone. My adrenaline is like, I'm going to 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, Severino Sevi. 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 it's kind of hard to get ahold of, so. I don't know if you ever heard of this thing, Tweenby idea. It's in Philadelphia, New York, it's all up and down the East Coast, and then it's also in South America. Do you know if he ever has he been to South America? 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 Sevi 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 in it. Like, he never talked about Arnold Tweenby or anything like that. Like, yeah. Is he like into history or 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. That seemed to rule out Sevi Verna as the Tyler. They then began looking at railroad Joe, and they found some really interesting stuff. When I heard the name railroad Joe associated with that address, and that he worked for Conrail, railroad, I went and found a Conrail mat. Not only did Conrail pass through every city that had a tile in North America, but the tile stretch exactly as far as Conrail's roots 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 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 Tyler. Working on the railroad as a profession is someone who is going to fit this profile. Traveling, traveling late at night. Just that sort of lonely moving through empty space sort of person. I imagine a Tyler to have a lot of his qualities and railroad Joe fit that. So many things line up the map, the profession, the address, the tombstone carving business and the family. All of these things were coming together on this one suspect. The fatal flaw of the railroad Joe's Tyler theory is that he died. You need to find a way for him to be tiling beyond the grave. Sort of resurrecting himself. It's difficult to make that argument. So railroad Joe had died specifically in 1987 and they knew that the tiles continued to be laid long after that, such as the manifesto tile that referred to the year 1991. And it was apparently laid in 1997. So railroad Joe looked like he couldn't be the Tyler either. That would leave James Marasco, the third suspect that was mentioned in Clark Elione's 1983 column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Did they conclude that they had their man? Well, they certainly looked into the matter and they contacted De Leon for more information. So James Marasco called up Clark De Leon in 1983 and was interviewed, you know, espousing the same ideas that the tiles have. Clearly this is a leading suspect. It's the only real tangible piece of evidence. In contact with Clark De Leon via email and I started to kind of 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 Marasco 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 base 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 Marasco as a person, but that's about all we know about them. There's not a whole lot more information aside from that about James Marasco as a person. Based on trips to the library and looking at old early 80s, 1983 or so telephone directors, the only James Marasco 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. The Cincinnati City beat Ramon article, I think, in 2001. The person who answers the phone says, "Well, Mr. Marasco 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 Marasco. We'd never found a social worker named James Marasco. The more we looked into James Marasco, the less likely it seemed that he even existed. So the only James Marasco who seemed to live in Philadelphia in the right time frame lived in the wrong part of town was too old and was not a social worker. The team thus concluded that James Marasco likely never existed, so all three suspects were eliminated. It looks like the team's at a dead end. What did they do next? Well, it got lucky. You'll recall that the first website that Justin discovered discussing the Toynbee tiles was Toynbee.net. In the years since, he found it, the owner of the site had received many emails from people who came across the site and were curious about the tiles. But he'd gotten tired of investigating the mystery himself, and so he decided to turn the website over to Justin and his colleagues. He gave them access to all the emails that he had received, and that's when they found some new leads. One interesting thing that came out of the Toynbee.net emails was an email that came from a guy named Joe Ramondo. He said that in 1985, this really strange broadcast came over his TV. Look, I got a real story here because I heard this. I was watching eyewitness news at 11 o'clock on Channel 3. I was by myself kind of in the dark, just like chilling out. All of a sudden, I heard this thing about Toynbee's conception of 2000, Clark's 2001, or whatever it was. Like the television newscasters 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 like 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, like, 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, I got called him up. I'm like, I'm like watching your news, and I just heard this thing about Toynbee, and the person who's the operator is like, yeah, well, you're not the only one. So, it appears that in the mid-1980s, the Tyler was using pirated TV signals to try to get his message out, and it wasn't just TV signals. They also got in touch with another person who had emailed Toynbee.net that revealed another type of broadcast connection. In those days, in the early 80s, there were wheat-pasted flyers all over the city with the Toynbee message on them, and then the pirate shortwave radio address, you know, so you can tune in. Now, we knew something we never knew before, which was somebody involved in the minority association, where 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. So, in 2006, Justin and his colleagues went to a shortwave radio convention called the shortwave listening festival. Most of the people at the convention had never heard of the Toynbee tiles or the IDs associated with them, but then the group struck Paydirt. We go over and start talking to this guy. I'm John T. Arthur. You were saying you remembered something about that? The shortwave broadcast? The only contact with me to use my post office box for a middle drop. That's exactly what you describe in the whole fire. When did they contact you? Well, I was in school there between '81 and '83, so it was early '80s. Wow. Did you remember, did you ever listen to the broadcast? I never could hear them. That's from out there. And I never saw any reports of them. Yeah, I never got any mail for them either. Just being there in the flesh with someone who had had communication with the Toynbee Tyler was like everything comes together, everything clicks where you're just like, whoa, like, you know, my head's spinning. Like, this is just crazy. Do you remember any, do you remember talking to any other people or just him or... Oh, it was all by mail. Yeah, okay, then talk to him and know him. And you didn't save any mail or anything, obviously, you're probably not. No, I didn't, unfortunately. Yeah. Did you mention anything about a group like the Minority Association? Yeah, I recall that name too. Wow. Do you remember any of the names of the people that contacted you? If you could rattle off some names, it might drive my memory about seven, seven, seven, you know, Sivy? Orna? Fair enough. Yeah. Pop that first try. Colin throws out the first name. John T. Arthur completes the last name. We know conclusively who the Tyler was. Seven, orna. Yeah. So, suddenly, Sivy Verna was back in play, and this was significant evidence. I went over the footage of this part of the documentary carefully, and Colin Smith does say Severino, and then after a pause, John Arthur does say Verna. So, that really was in his memory. The gang then went back to the street in South Philadelphia and talked to Sivy's neighbors again. He used to have a car. One side of it was, the floorboard was out of it. I knew that, because one day I happened to look, and I went, "Oh my God." You know, I said, "How can he drive it?" Like, I only had one seat on one side. I remember, and I looked, and I said, "Man, I don't have no floorboard in his car." You know? The Tyler doesn't have a floorboard in his car. It, like, takes a second, no floorboard. Immediately, it makes you think, "Well, that's how he's putting the toymie tiles down, is he's driving in his car, dropping the toymie tiles through this floorboardless part of the car." No one will see a thing. I remember seeing that tile in the middle of the highway. 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, so you can put tiles at impossible locations. It's brilliant. So now it looked like a new piece of the puzzle had dropped into place. They now knew how the Tyler was getting the tiles into places that were odd. He modified his car, so it didn't have a floorboard on the passenger's side, and all he'd need to do is perhaps stop for a moment, drop the tile, and then move on. They also found out something else about Sevi's car. 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 hear you're watching a TV show, and you will hear somebody talking. My father used to complain about it going on to the TV, because it would be the floor model back in the day, and I used to go, "You're here only talking on the thing, and my father used to go out there and scream and holler." He's got his car, and before he starts tiling, he's, like, tiling the airwaves. Like, he's tiling the 11 o'clock news. You've basically, you got this guy in a car with the floorboards taken out of the passenger's side of the car with no passenger seat, with a big Texas flycatcher and 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 toy and bean 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 the signal onto the televisions. It's a pretty intense story. So that explained the Tyler's Pirate TV broadcast and setup. They also uncovered a possible reason behind some of the paranoia that the tiles displayed. The neighbors revealed that Sevi had been in the habit of playing musical instruments late at night, like the accordion really loud in the wee hours of the morning. And one former neighbor who was drunk got so incense that he broke into Sevi's house, found him sleeping on the couch, woke him up, and held a knife at his throat, threatening him about the accordion music. It was after that that Sevi boarded up the windows in his house. So maybe some of the paranoia on the tiles was at least based on stuff in real life, but Sevi had interpreted it in terms of persecution from John S. Knight of the Philadelphia Inquirer and other organizations. But then, just as the team concluded that Sevi Verna was the Tyler, the name James Morascos suddenly came up again. What happened there? About a month after the shortwave listening festival, they got an email from a guy named Ulyss Fleming, who had heard about them on something called the Pirates Week broadcast, and he remembered something. Years earlier, he'd been listening to a shortwave broadcast from the Minority Association, and they gave a post office box that you could write to. So he wrote in and got a handwritten letter from James Morascos. What's more, Ulyss had still had the letter, and he had a bunch more documents that he had received from the Minority Association. So he scanned them and sent them to Justin and his colleagues. They were finally in possession of the Minority Association documents that they had sought for so long. And what did the documents reveal? For a start, they revealed Morascos' relationship to the Minority Association. One of the documents was an undated press release about a press conference that they were planning on holding. It stated, "A small group of men are planning press conference in Philadelphia regarding Arnold Toynbee's conception of the colonization of outer space, as depicted in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey." James Morascos' publicity director stated that the purpose of the conference is to bring favorable attention to Arnold Toynbee's belief in science, to bring dead molecules of dead human bodies of all dead human beings of history back to life on the gigantic planet of Jupiter. Morascos insists 2001 A Space Odyssey is based on this theme. So James Morascos was the publicity director of the Minority Association. The same press release also describes him as its spokesman and a fact sheet describes who was involved in the association. "Personal. Besides myself, a few part-time volunteers. All personnel are volunteers. There are no salaried personnel." And this went along with the 1983 Clark De Leon column, where Morascos had said that in addition to himself, the Minority Association consisted of a man named Frank, a man named Eric, and Eric's sister who did the typing. But Morascos himself was apparently the prime mover of the organization and the others were unpaid part-time volunteers. The documents also contained a tip sheet that explained biographical material about Morascos and how the Toynbee idea began. It said, "Between January and June 1979, exact month unknown, by a complete accident I discovered a piece of writing by the historian Arnold Toynbee in a library book, where Toynbee explained his belief in the ability of science to bring every dead molecule of every dead human body of every dead human being of past history back to life again through scientific means." In July 1979, I discovered that Toynbee's claim that the first caveman, who made the first stone tool, created the power of science to bring all dead molecules of people of past history back to life again, was the same caveman in the movie 2001, a space odyssey. Through a process of discovery, I realized the connection between this caveman and the caveman's first tool in the movie 2001, a space odyssey. So this traces the origin of the Toynbee Tiles movement to the first half of 1979, and then, if I follow correctly, in July of 1979, Morascos realized that Toynbee had spoken of a caveman created in science with the invention of stone tools, and that this caveman was also depicted in 2001. This also syncs up with the side message we heard earlier about the possibility of resurrection being proved by the first caveman using tools. Though I should point out that there aren't technically any cavemen in 2001, they're pre-human apes, and they don't use stone tools, but bones as tools. In fact, that's the cut on action between parts 1 and part 2 of the film. Under the influence of the monolith, the apes have gotten the idea of using bones as tools for hunting, and they then start using them as tools of warfare with other apes, after which one of them triumphantly tosses a bone in the air, and we cut to a modern spaceship suggesting the idea of technological progress. So, the apes are celebrating their new use of bones, one of them tosses a bone into the air, and we cut to a similar looking spaceship in orbit, making a thematic jump between primitive and modern moments in evolution. However, it appears that Marasco's memory of this was bit off, but back then home video was a totally new thing, and you usually had to see movies in the theater, and it had been a decade since 2001 had been released, so his memory may have been off. What about the passage you referred to from Toynbee that he said he read? Did anyone ever uncover that? It appears that the book Marasco was referring to is called Experiences, which Toynbee published in 1969, and it's not an autobiography in the strict sense, but it at least includes autobiographical material. In a chapter called Religion, What I Believe and What I Disbelieve, Toynbee has a section where he writes, "Our bodies, though fearfully and wonderfully made, are in physical terms, specks of dust on the surface of a speck of dust called the earth, which is a satellite of another speck of dust called the sun, and our sun is a speck of dust in our galaxy which is a speck of dust in a universe that may be infinite in terms of spacetime. However, the dust of which a human body is composed, quantitatively trivial though it is, is an integral part of the inconceivably vast physical universe, and when, after death, the body dissolves into its physical elements, these elements themselves are not annihilated. Death has destroyed the organism that, for a brief time, had succeeded in maintaining itself as a puny counter-universe, but the physical materials of which the dissolved human body was composed at the moment of death have not been destroyed, through seizing to be incorporated temporarily in an organic physical structure. They are continuing to exist as parts of the physical universe, though this no longer in an organic form. So this has Morascos ideas about the elements that our bodies are made of, continuing to exist after our death, and he sets it in a framework, contemplating their locations on earth, in relation to the sun and the galaxy of the universe, then a page or two later, he writes, "Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved, and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into soul and body is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been or ever met a living human soul without a body, though, as I have noted, we do not meet living human bodies, in which the soul has been virtually extinguished, or has never come to flower. The partition of the human personality between two supposedly different and incommesurable orders of being is a mental act of human intellect, and it is a disputable one. Present day medical and psychological research seem to agree in indicating that a human personality is an indivisible psychosomatic unity. The psychic aspect of its life cannot be properly understood if this is artificially isolated from the physical aspect, nor conversely is the physical aspect intelligible in isolation from the psychic aspect. This is not a new discovery. It is a rediscovery of a once widely recognized truth. It is the assumption implied in the stories of the gospels of acts of healing performed by Jesus. The same assumption is implied in the Christian Church's belief that Jesus rose from the dead physically as well as spiritually, and that all human beings who have ever lived and died are destined to experience a bodily as well as a spiritual resurrection on the day of judgment. Someone who accepts, as I myself do, taking it on trust, the present day's scientific account of the universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature once dead can come to life again. But if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more scientifically if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit. Since Toynbee says no one has ever been or ever met a living soul without a body, it's obvious from this that he wasn't a paranormal investigator used to investigate reports of ghosts and after death communications, though in the section immediately after this one, he does indicate that he believes in telepathy. He's also dealing with an inadequate understanding of the Christian concept of body and soul and the soul's ability to exist between death and resurrection in the intermediate state. Toynbee doesn't actually propose to resurrect the dead through scientific means, though. Are we sure that this is the passage in Toynbee that Muraska was reading? Well, this is the best one I've seen in the Toynbee idea research materials. There may be a better passage out there that remains undiscovered or that I haven't read because Toynbee wrote a ton. But I think this is likely the correct passage. While he doesn't propose using science to raise the dead, he does say that one is thinking more "scientifically" if one is thinking of a resurrection rather than of a disembodied spirit. Muraska thus may have misremembered what he read in the library book or given mental problems he had, he may have interpreted Toynbee to be saying something that he wouldn't. But one way or another, I think this is the likely passage. He then cross-connected his memory of this passage with the beginning and end of 2001, and that led him to conclude that Toynbee had the idea of resurrecting the dead on planet Jupiter. We're making good progress, but we still have a number of lingering little mysteries, like why David Mamet said that he came up with the ideas in his play for himself with no connection to the Tyler. Well, hypothetically speaking, it's always possible that Mamet picked up the idea telepathically from Muraska. But the Minority Association documents suggest a much simpler and more normal explanation. The tip sheet begins with this entry. Dates available. Available all times, day and night for Collins. Am ready, willing, and able for all types, media presentations. So, Muraska says that he's available day or night for Collins, like the one in 4am. More specifically, the fact sheet begins this way. History. Arnold Toynbee's conception of the colonization of outer space, as depicted in the movie 2001, a space odyssey, was first explained in a call-in on the Larry King show in February 1980. So right there, Muraska indicates that he called the Larry King show in February of 1980 and announced the plan there. David Mamet's play 4am is a tribute to Larry King and his late night call-in radio show, so it's very likely that Mamet happened to hear Muraska on the show. Maybe he then took notes about the conversation, and then three years later, he found the notes but didn't remember taking them. So he thought it was his own idea instead of something he'd heard on the radio. So that explains how David Mamet could get the information from James Muraska, but Justin and his associates looked for a James Muraska in Philadelphia and they concluded that he didn't exist. How do you explain that? Well, there is something in the Minority Association documents that sheds light on this. It's a letter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Younger people may not know who that is, but Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, intellectual, and dissident during the Soviet period. He spoke out against Soviet oppression in his writings, such as in his non-fiction work, the Gulag Archipelago, which I have not read, and in his fictional work one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, which I have read, both are about life in Soviet prison camps. As a result of his dissident activities, the Soviet Politburo stripped him of his citizenship and deported him to the West. He eventually came to live in the United States, where he was very famous, though he was able to return to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. He passed on to his reward in 2008 at the age of 89. But the Minority Association documents contain a letter that was sent to Solzhenitsyn, which explains the Toenby idea and asks for his consideration. The letter says that the idea should be spread in the Soviet Union. There's also a diagram of a pirate radio plan that could be used to do this, along with a map of a thousand mile wide corridor of the radio signal through Europe and Asia. What's significant about this letter is the way it signed. It signed Severino Verna. Now, if you think about it, if James Marasco didn't exist, but somebody was used in that name, that would suggest that James Marasco was the pen name of somebody else. And here we have a document with Severino's signature among a batch of documents used in James Marasco's name. And there are other similarities. The descriptions of James Marasco via Clark Dalianon all matched with the descriptions of SIVI that we had gotten from SIVI's neighbors. They could have very easily been describing the same person. James Marasco 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 Marasco never existed. There's only ever one person and that person was SIVI. The fact that he would create a pseudonym to unleash his idea onto 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. So the likely conclusion is that James Marasco is just the pen name that SIVI Verna used when he was publicized in the Toynbee idea in public. This is reinforced by some of the side messages, which say things like "I'm only one man." And it looks like that one man's real name is SIVI Verna and his pen name was James Marasco. Based on all the things they had learned about the tiles, Justin and his associates were able to piece together a proposed timeline of how the Toynbee idea developed. 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 to that above and beyond the Clark Dalianon article. His ways of publicizing the idea become more street level and grassroots as he experiences more rejection from the established media. Sometime around this point, he has developed stationary and is making weak pastes. He is also experimenting in short-wave radio, tries to get a pirate radio station up and running and broadcast 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 a pirate short-wave 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 leg method in the first tiles, begin to appear. In the late 80s, Sivy 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, you know, overcome death and everything, and decided that if he could just figure out a way to publicize the idea, that the rest of the story would kind of write itself. And this didn't happen. Not only did people not listen to him, but they were actively mocking him. That mocking may have helped foster his paranoia and antagonism towards the press. Like all the different news organizations, he thought were persecuting him. In the manifesto tile, he talks about them having a hellion binge of joy and gloating in joyous fits. All of that raises what's essentially the last mystery about the Toynbee tiles that we need to consider. What was going on in the Tyler's head? Do you see any evidence of mental illness here? I do, but I'm not a psychological professional. So I contacted one of the mysterious regulars who is Dr. Joseph Sheridan. Now, nobody can diagnose someone at a distance without talking to them, and certainly not on the limited information we have here. But I asked Dr. Sheridan to speculate on what diagnosis might fit what we know about the Tyler. And here's what he said. Based on the content of the tiles, it appears that there are two main types of delusions held by the creator of the tiles, persecutory and bizarre. The persecutory delusions include the belief of being harassed and targeted by various individuals and organizations, and the bizarre delusions include the belief that the dead can be resurrected on the planet Jupiter. It is known the creator of the tiles held these delusional beliefs for a long period of time, as evident by the fact that the tiles were appearing in multiple locations over a period of several years. The most common psychiatric conditions that include persistent or recurring delusions include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and delusional disorder. For a diagnosis of schizophrenia, an individual with delusions would also have to have other symptoms, such as hallucinations or grossly disorganized speech or behavior, and have significant impairments in day-to-day functioning. It can't really be determined if there were any of these other symptoms based solely on the content of the tiles. In bipolar disorder, one can develop delusions during a severe manic episode. In manic episodes, an individual experiences symptoms such as racing thoughts, heightened energy, decreased need for sleep, increased activity such as taking on multiple new projects, a sense of invincibility, and indiscriminate behaviors such as excessive spending or traveling. Writing delusional statements on tiles and then traveling around the world to lay down the tiles in the middle of busy streets could certainly be consistent with a manic episode. Lastly, a delusional disorder is essentially a condition whereby an individual holds one or more delusions, but there really aren't any other associated mental health symptoms, and the individual remains quite functional in life. By definition, one with a delusional disorder has behavior that is not obviously bizarre or odd. I would say that traveling around the world to place tiles in the street is definitely odd, so I think this diagnosis is unlikely. In schizophrenia, delusions tend to be longstanding and firmly held and often remain fixed even when patients are taking anti-psychotic medications. In bipolar disorder, delusions only occurred during manic episodes. Manic episodes typically last for weeks or perhaps even months at a time, and individuals with bipolar disorder can go years or even decades in between manic episodes. We know that the creator of the tiles made hundreds of them over the course of several years, which would suggest that the delusional beliefs were quite chronic. Therefore, I would speculate that the most likely diagnosis is schizophrenia. So Dr. Sheridan thinks that schizophrenia is the most likely explanation. Of course, these possibilities raise a logical question about how Justin and his team should treat the Tyler, and at a certain point, they decided they needed to back off. 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 Tyler 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 let you know, leave it as it is. So they did step back. They completed the documentary. They were working on which the Tyler may not have been happy about since he didn't want personal attention. And I'm only covering Seve's identity because it's already out there, and there are numerous videos about it. But Justin and his colleagues decided to stop trying to contact the Tyler. And Justin stuck with that decision even when it appears he had a chance to meet him. Late spring or early winter of 2007, I got off the subway train at Broad in 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 Tweenby Tyler in South America was listed or whatever. I just had an encounter with who I assumed to be the Tweenby Tyler culprit. I kind of kept looking at him because I thought, could that be Seve? I mean, it very well could be. He's the right age. You know, 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 intense, but nothing was said. 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. You know, 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 going to 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 in my way, and that would be it. So that was good. Justin stepped back and didn't force a meet in Wassevi when he seemingly had the opportunity. That was an act of compassion and respect for his privacy. Anything else we ought to know about the Tyler from the reason perspective? Yes, we mentioned that the Tyler made numerous appeals for other people to lay tiles in some of the side messages. Well, people have been doing that. So the Tyler has an ongoing legacy with people laying Toynbee tiles in other parts of the country. And this may be in part due to Justin's 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead in the mystery of the Toynbee tiles, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival's US documentary category and which won that category's direct and award. And which helped get the message out to even more people. Consequently, or relatedly, tiles have appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Roswell, New Mexico, Salt Lake City, Utah, and in West Coast cities like Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California. So the message is getting out there and the Toynbee idea is continuing to spread. What can we say about the Toynbee idea from the faith perspective? Well, from a Christian point of view, there will be a resurrection of the dead. So the Toynbee idea is correct about that. But it will happen here on Earth, not on Jupiter, and it will be done by God rather than by science. There's also the matter of the Tyler and his apparent mental illness. It's impressive that whatever issue he's dealing with, he didn't let that stop him. He had the force of character to plant hundreds of tiles and via his legacy, he's now launched a Toynbee idea movement just like he wanted to. And I invite listeners to pray both for him and for everyone who struggles with similar issues. May God give them all the comfort and peace that they seek. And Jimmy, what's your bottom line on the Toynbee tiles? The Toynbee tiles are a fascinating mystery. The fundamental message on them is startling and arresting. And the side messages revealed a troubled aspect to the Tyler. But there's still an amazing achievement. And it appears that we finally know their meaning and the identity of the Tyler. Let's all keep him in our prayers. Of course. So what further resources can we offer to the viewers and listeners? We'll have links to the documentary Resurrect Dead, also an FAQ on the documentary. The link to the Clark De Leon column theories want to run that by me again, as well as information about the Toynbee tiles, some statements by Arnold Toynbee about religion, an unofficial performance of David Mamet's 4 AM, as well as links to the Minority Association documents, and Toynbee's book of experiences that apparently inspired the tiles. All right. And now it's time to hear from you. What are your theories about the Toynbee idea and the Toynbee tiles? You can let us know by visiting SQPN dot com or the Jimmy Yacon's mysterious world Facebook page, sending us an email to feedback at mysterious dot FM, sending a tweet to @MYS underscore world, visiting the star quest discord community at SQPN dot com slash discord, or calling our mysterious feedback line at 619-738-4515. That's 619-738-4515. And I want to say a special word of thanks to Oasis Studio 7 for the video and animation work in this episode. You can check out their work by going to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Jimmy Aiken, where you can also see lots of pictures of the Toynbee tiles in this episode. While you're there, please do all the YouTube things like comment and share the video, and I am trying to grow my channel, so please do subscribe and hit the bell notification so you always get notified when I have a new video. Also want to say a special word of thanks to mysterious irregular Dr. Joseph Sheridan. So Jimmy, what's our next episode going to be about? Next week, we're going to be continuing our Lost Scripture series. This time, we'll be taking a two part look at an early Christian apocalypse called the Ascension of Isaiah. It was written around AD 67, which is before the book of Revelation was written, and it contains first century traditions about Jesus that are not recorded in the gospels, so you won't want to miss that. Excellent. Folks, be sure to share the podcast with your friends and write a review in Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast from. Help us grow this community of listeners and reach more people. Get your very own mysterious world t-shirt, mug, and more in our merchandise shop at SQPN.com/merch. You can find links to Jimmy's resources from our discussion on our show notes at mysterious.fm/331. And remember to help us continue to produce the podcast, please visit SQPN.com/give. Jimmy Yakin's mysterious world is also brought to you in part by The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States, using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more at gradygroupinc.com and by Rosary Army, featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary Resources, Videos, and the School of Mary Online Community, Prayer, and Learning Platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at Rosary Army.com and SchoolofMary.com. Jimmy Yakin's mysterious world is also brought to you in part through the generous support of Aaron Ferguson Electric and Automation, making connections for life for your automation and smart home needs in North and Central Florida at AaronV.com. Until next time, Jimmy Yakin, thank you for exploring with us our mysterious world. Thanks, Tom. 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