Mysterious tiles have been turning up all over the U.S. They
are size of license plates, embedded in the street and all say
the same thing: "Toynbee idea in Kubrick's 2001, Resurrect
dead on planet Jupiter."
Doug Worgul writes in the Kansas City Star that he first
spotted one in his home town in 1996 (and it's still there
today). He did some internet research and found that there
have been more than 130 of these "Toynbee tiles" seen in at
least 20 cities around the United States (and two in South
America). In New York, around 50 tiles have been found, and
in Philadelphia, nearly 30. Twenty have been spotted in
Baltimore, 16 in Washington, D.C.
They all look the same and say the same thing, except some
are made with colored letters and others with black letters.
They first started turning up in the late 80s. No one has ever
seen one of them being embedded in the street, and no one
has claimed responsibility for them.
In some cities, there's another tile nearby that says, "Murder
all journalists, I beg you!" In Philadelphia, next to one of the
regular tiles, there was one blaming "hellion Jews" for a long
list of the tile maker's personal problems. While the original
tiles are mysteriously charming, these other tiles are creepy,
as if some dangerous tile-making fanatic is on the loose.
The "Kubrick" referred to on the tiles must be Stanley Kubrick,
the filmmaker who made "2001," which is also mentioned. In
the film, Jupiter is the destination of the ill-fated
spaceship. "Toynbee" must be 20th century British historian
Arnold Toynbee, who lived from 1889 to 1975. He was best
known for his theory that the way we understand history
shapes our future. In the 1983 short story "The Toynbee
Convector" by Ray Bradbury, a character named Stiles travels
80 years into the future and returns with stories of mankind's
marvelous achievements. Stiles' reports of a future free of
war and disease inspires people to join forces to work
together to attain this future and in 80 years they succeed,
at which point Stiles reveals that his story was a lie.
Jeff Martin, supervisor of street maintenance and repair for
Kansas City, says, "When you look at it closely you can see
that it's some kind of epoxy or super hard plastic that's
actually inlaid in the asphalt itself. To do this would require a
lot of prep. You'd have to heat the road surface. You'd have
to have special equipment. An operation like this would take
some time and if you wanted to avoid being seen while you
were installing something like this it would require some
planning. Whoever did this has fairly sophisticated know-
how."
When Kansas City detective Todd Butler compares the
Kansas City tile with photos of other tiles, he says, "The
lettering isn't identical in each tile, but clearly it was created
by the same hand. So you can conclude that the tiles were
not mass-produced by a machine. It looks like they were
handmade, one at a time by a single individual. Obviously this
person has the resources to travel to all these cities, even to
South America, to put these things in the streets. It's
probably a man, because the tiles are obviously installed at
night, since nobody seems to have witnessed them being put
in. It's unlikely a woman would risk being alone at night in a
downtown environment. Plus there may be heavy equipment
involved. And he probably drives from wherever he lives to
the cities where he puts these markers, because flying with
whatever equipment he uses would likely be a problem."
In 1992, Bill O'Neill started noticing the tiles, and started a
website about them. It contains a
database listing more than 130 places where tiles have been
sighted and includes photographs of some of them. "It's been
interesting," he says. "People will find these things and
become curious about them and when they search the Web
they find our site and then they start reporting their findings
to us. We've become the clearinghouse for tile info?We've
had reports of some of the tiles being paved over, but then
some of them reappear."
The identity of the maker of the Toynbee tiles may have
been uncovered in 1983, when Philadelphia Inquirer reporter
Clark DeLeon wrote a story about a Philadelphia social worker
named James Morasco, who was trying to get newspapers to
publish his theories about colonizing Jupiter with dead people
from Earth. DeLeon's story mentions Morasco's belief that
Arnold Toynbee and Stanley Kubrick figured out how to bring
dead people back to life there. When Worgul called the only
James Morasco listed in the Philadelphia telephone book, a
woman answered the phone and said her 88-year-old
husband had recently died. If tiles keep turning up, we'll know
it wasn't him.
There are some
strange secrets in this world?and now they're on
sale!
To see photos of the tiles,
click here.
