Starting in the 1980s, strange messages began appearing on the roads and sidewalks in Philadelphia. The messages were printed on what could be described as tiles, and were “installed” in the asphalt. Most of the tiles were the approximate size of an American license plate, but some were bigger. As time went on, the tiles were sighted in other states, and eventually in other countries.
Nearly all the tiles contain references to the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The most often repeated phrase found on the tiles was “TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER,” or some variation thereof. Others of what came to be called “Toynbee tiles” accuse media organizations of having a personal grudge against their creator (on the tile known as The Manifesto Tile, there’s an accusation against Jewish people).
The Toynbee tiles presented a mystery in every possible way. Who was creating them and why? How did these installments find their way onto the middle of busy streets? What in the hell did the messages even mean? Some of the tiles encouraged others to create their own tiles in an early call for virality. That made some people wonder if the tiles were the work of a single person, or of a group.
Justin Duerr with a Toynbee tile
The 2011 documentary, “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles,” chronicles the exploration of — and eventual solution to — this mystery. Artist and musician Justin Duerr presents his evidence to the viewer, and the solution, carefully displayed and explained, of the single man behind the tiles, and his motives. Even if there’s not much mystery left in the Toynbee tiles, there’s still something important in Duerr’s exploration, and in his legacy as a sort of keeper and protector of them.
“I feel like the thing that’s really different about it is … I’m old enough to remember culture before the internet,” Duerr says. There wasn’t much of a platform for people to speculate and sleuth about the Toynbee tiles. This made Duerr’s research much more hands-on and more difficult, but it also created a purer environment in which the legend and mystery could exist. When the internet became available at the Philadelphia Public Library in the early 1990s, Duerr was unable to find anyone else discussing the Toynbee tiles online.
As much as Duerr has kept himself away from the wild speculation that comes with such mysteries, he says the company that released Resurrect Dead had initially wanted to present the Toynbee tiles as being wrapped up in some kind of conspiracy. He resisted. “There’s nothing about it that’s like a conspiracy,” Duerr says. “The [tiles’ creator] is obviously paranoid, but it’s not a conspiracy theory.”
Much of what we see in our current conspiracy theory landscape is “top-down,” Duerr says, which is in contrast to how it used to be:
“Back in the day, you would run into someone on the Greyhound Bus and they would start telling you some eccentric belief … and it would be at least a pastiche of things that they came up with on their own. It was organic and it was from the bottom-up. It was like people coming up with their own stuff, whereas the QAnon and the Targeted Individuals seem like people with a powerful, vested interest, sort of peddling this stuff to the ‘sheeple,’ and it’s from the top-down. It’s formulated to manipulate people, and all the people believe the exact same thing.”
The ultimate revelation in Resurrect Dead is of course the man behind the Toynbee tiles, Sevy Verna, and the most likely meaning behind them. “The guy that’s behind it is utterly sincere,” Duerr says. “He believes that science can reconstruct every dead molecule of every human of past history on the surface of the gigantic planet of Jupiter, and he believes that the conspiracy is people trying to stop that from happening.”
Duerr continues:
“I feel like Sevy came up with this Toynbee stuff on his own, and then his paranoia made it so that he couldn’t really get a flock; he couldn’t get people. Because he was like, ‘Well, I can’t leave the house and I’m a recluse. I want the world to believe this thing, but …’ And so it never caught on, and it was like his own unique, eccentric thing.”
Duerr’s had people suggest to him that perhaps, deep down, he didn’t really want to solve the mystery, as maybe the world’s few remaining mysteries should remain, but it’s simply not true. “People think there’s not a lot of mysteries in the world because they’re just looking at what’s kind of spoon-fed to them,” Duerr says. “To actually find mysterious stuff, you got to go off the beaten path.”
Surrendering to the reality of a thing instead of your own idea of it is the best solution to any mystery, Duerr says.
“The actual truth of things is not boring, and in fact people make things boring and kind of painful by being like, ‘I’m just going to dig my heels in and refuse to think something that might undercut what I want to believe.'”
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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