Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

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.

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."