Beyond Bizarre - Haunted California House | Bizarre Electronics | Aztec Artifacts | Bizarre Sub-Cultures | Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratory |
Documentary television hosted by Jay Robinson focused on exploring great mysteries around the world, from ghost sightings, alien encounters and everything else in between.
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00:00Among the more unusual duties of the U.S. Department of Commerce is to declare historical landmarks as officially haunted.
00:1329 such places exist, but one old house, prominent in early California history, has been scaring up popular interest
00:25since well before Uncle Sam gave his seal of approval.
00:35The Whaley Haunted House, completed in 1856 during the California Gold Rush, is now a museum which boasts antique treasures,
00:47such as a couch from Andrew Jackson's White House, a 19th century music box, which is no longer in use, and even a rare life mask of President Abraham Lincoln.
01:02Having functioned as everything from a county courthouse to San Diego's first theater, it has one additional distinction.
01:15It is the most haunted house in America.
01:20From the time we opened our doors as a museum in 1960, I would say that occurrences have happened at a steady clip for now almost 40 years.
01:29We have seen apparitions and swirling balls and things like that, but the main occurrences are auditory.
01:38The other occurrences that you'll experience will be muffled voices, footsteps upstairs walking across the top floor of the house.
01:48I'll be here on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday morning and someone will say, will come into the museum and say,
01:56was someone playing a piano in here last night while we're closed? And we'll say, no, a lot of people hear the piano playing at night.
02:05The most unexplainable thing that's happened to me here has to be when I first started, it was this loud banging, crashing noise coming from the courtroom.
02:15And I knew that there was nobody besides myself in the house.
02:18There's been visitors who've come in and they tell me that they can actually see spirits in the house and they can describe them to a tee.
02:27There's pictures in our storage and they look exactly just the way that the people had described them.
02:34The spirits in question are those of Thomas and Anna Whaley and their family.
02:40Graced with both money and good taste, they turned this old brick structure into the county seat as well as a local center of civic life.
02:52So why does this loving cultured couple still stalk these grounds?
02:58The Whaley House was the first county seat from 1869 to 1871.
03:02There was a major battle over Old Town versus New Town, which is now downtown San Diego.
03:08A man by the name of Alonzo Horton had purchased parcels of land in New Town.
03:12To get people down to that part of town, he needed the county records because wherever the county records are is where the seat of government is.
03:19So they decided that they would take the records by force.
03:22Whaley was away on business in San Francisco.
03:25They were watching the house. They were very sneaky.
03:27They put burlap sacks over the horses' hooves and took the Wells Fargo wagons up behind the house, kicked in the door,
03:33and then went upstairs and proceeded to take the county records by force and meeting Mrs. Whaley halfway up on the stairs at gunpoint.
03:40Alone with her young children, Anna Whaley was in terror as the gunmen raided her home.
03:48The shattering emotions of her brush with death were never forgotten and became imbued into the spirit of the house.
03:57Compounding these traumas was an even more tragic tale, that of young Annabelle Washburn.
04:06She was a neighbor child. She was about between the ages of 9 and 11 and had an accident out in the backyard.
04:15She ran into a clothesline and received a really traumatic injury to either her neck or her head area.
04:22And sadly enough, she did pass away on her kitchen table.
04:28But Annabelle was not the first to die of strangulation.
04:32The Whaley's themselves were haunted by the ghost of Yankee Jim, a small-time thief who was hanged on the property years before the house was built.
04:45To this day, visitors climbing the main stairs report a constricted sensation around their throats.
04:53These spirits who toy with their visitors' nerves add a certain twist to an otherwise routine museum tour.
05:04At about 2.30 in the morning, it made its way from the back of the study through the doorway, through the music room.
05:10He turned his flashlight on and it dissipated.
05:13This is the music box that also plays by itself. As you can see, it has a crank. It's crank-wound.
05:18Once it winds down, there's no possible way that it will play, yet it does.
05:22That's the piano that was used in the motion picture Gone with the Wind.
05:26It appears twice in the film and was like the one that Anna Whaley played that was here in the house.
05:31We sometimes get music melodies off of it and also one chord at this end of the keyboard.
05:37We come to investigate and there's nobody there.
05:40This is the chandelier that sometimes swings by itself in a counterclockwise move.
05:45And this is also where we get the heavy sound of walking emanating from upstairs here that we hear down below.
05:50This is the original flooring, by the way.
05:52This is the rocker that sometimes rocks by itself.
05:56Despite all the odd sounds and spooky apparitions, the spirits of the Whaley house seem by and large friendly and even comforting.
06:08Anytime there's been any sort of occurrence, I've never felt scared or uneasy.
06:14It's just sort of a loving sense of somebody saying hello.
06:19Another very comforting thing that happened to me is smelling Mrs. Whaley's perfume, a definite sweet rose perfume.
06:29Even visiting celebrities have shared accounts of the active afterlife of the Whaley family.
06:37Regis Philbin had a local TV show here in San Diego.
06:39This is how he started his career.
06:41And he and Bill Rankin, who was a colonel from the Marine Corps, were granted permission to spend the night here.
06:47And about 2.30 in the morning, Regis and Colonel Bill Rankin were sitting up and saw what appeared to be a green energy ball moving from the back part of the study.
06:57And it began to materialize and move from the back study through the music room door towards them.
07:02Regis grabbed the flashlight, trained it on what he now says was Anna Whaley, and it was gone.
07:09Everything from the smell of Tom Whaley's cigars to the sight of swinging meat cleavers to the bark of the Whaley's dog has been experienced here.
07:22Many ghost stories have unfolded within these rooms.
07:26And the spirits seem to have their own favorite, haunts.
07:31There seems to be a lot of activity in the stairway area at the top of the landing.
07:36Thomas Whaley has been seen there many times, pivoting from side to side.
07:40We also hear his walking upstairs there.
07:42Some people moving halfway up on the stairs get the feeling they're being pushed aside.
07:46Again, going back to the night, I think that the county records were seized by force.
07:49There's some emotional hold there after all these years.
07:54It was a warm day, I had a white shirt on, and all of a sudden I felt a tugging of the back of my shirt.
07:59And when I turned around, there was no one there.
08:03I think that it was Annabelle Weisburn, because she's kind of a prankster, likes to play jokes.
08:09And several children, while I've been here on the weekends, have experienced the little girl in a white dress standing next to them.
08:18They'll ask the person to follow them out to the garden area, and then they'll disappear.
08:24The Whaley House has so many unusual occurrences here, I believe, because of the emotional bond between the family.
08:31The fact that five generations were born in the back study.
08:34The fact that one of their children died here.
08:37There is an emotional bond here.
08:39I mean, you get the feeling that you're never alone here at the house.
08:42And my feeling has always been it's their home.
08:46It's an experience that is amusing, if a little disconcerting.
08:52A place where mysterious forces play inexplicable tricks.
08:57Where the deceased have become the centerpiece of this house of mystery.
09:03It is a phenomenon that is beyond bizarre.
09:09There is something quite comforting about collecting personal treasures of various kinds.
09:18Those who spend years assembling an array of coins, stamps, movie memorabilia, and other things.
09:28Those who spend years assembling an array of coins, stamps, movie memorabilia, or even cars.
09:40Take pleasure in bringing together a large sampling of familiar objects.
09:47But the collections we are about to examine are of artifacts that are hardly commonplace.
09:55For many, their strangeness makes them anything but comforting.
10:05The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
10:10Proprietor and curator, Bob McCoy, spends his days demonstrating deceptive and fraudulent devices once sold as miracle cures.
10:21The museum started kind of as an accident in 1984.
10:24A friend of mine who had some phrenology machines that measured the shape of your head gave them to me.
10:29I didn't know what to do with them. I tried selling them. Nobody wanted them.
10:33So my kids who were in high school would come in the evening at a local mall.
10:37We'd set them up and read people's heads.
10:39Let's see what this says about you.
10:41You're generally an agreeable person. Not a strong art lover, however.
10:46We have a wide range of things from the 1790s to even something from 1999.
10:51So the wide range of things, the fact that we demonstrate things and give people opportunities to try out some of them,
10:58to give them test drives, that's what makes us unique.
11:01These are spectrochromes. These were used during the 1930s.
11:04And the way they work is that each color light treats you of a different type of problem.
11:09One color makes your heart stronger. One color makes your bones stronger.
11:13One color builds strong muscles.
11:16And the way that it works, you sit in front of the machine facing north during certain cycles of the moon at night with all of your clothes off.
11:25And that's your treatment.
11:27This is the Thompson and Plaster electric cabinet from the 1880s.
11:30It's kind of a one-man medical band.
11:33It gives off current here to cauterize wounds.
11:36These two electrodes make your muscles tense and relax.
11:39So this switch produces very high voltage to produce all kinds of wondrous cures.
11:45Everything in the museum here works.
11:47That doesn't mean it does what it claims to do, but it actually works.
11:51People bought these over the years.
11:53They still would buy them if we offered them on the market.
11:55And they were misled into thinking often that they would produce miracle cures.
11:59These are two hair growers from the 1940s.
12:02This first one was manufactured by the Crosley Company.
12:05It uses a vacuum to take away any excess debris, preventing your hair from growing.
12:10It fits on top of your head.
12:12You'd wear it twice a day for a half hour each time.
12:14And the vacuum also increases blood flow to your head.
12:17And it's supposed to make your hair grow.
12:19This interesting pink device was from beauty shops.
12:22It's called the Allure.
12:24And its purpose was to enhance a woman's breasts and also prevent her from getting breast cancer.
12:29When I plug up the lines here, you'll see here this gauge shows it's treating the left breast.
12:34And then it goes to treat the right breast back and forth.
12:37And supposedly this prevented women from getting breast cancer.
12:40And they claimed it even augmented the sizes of their breasts, both claims which are incorrect.
12:47This is the electro-metabograph.
12:49It was used during the early 20th century.
12:51And it cures you by the numbers.
12:53There are about 190 different types of diseases from homesickness to sweaty palms.
12:58And you push the button here that corresponds to the number of the problem that you have.
13:03You put your hand here, and an invisible, undetectable, imaginary energy flows through the cord here and treats you.
13:12Like a lot of devices here, it has lots of dials and knobs and bright lights.
13:17They don't do anything.
13:18They're just there to make it look technical.
13:20A lot of the things we have today, which we look back on in the 20s and 30s as being useless,
13:26are being marketed today again with a new life.
13:29Your viewers, I'm sure, have seen the expansion of magnets being used.
13:34We can show you lots of ads in 1899 where magnets are the great benefactor of mankind, curing all these wonderful things.
13:42But in 1999, people are falling for the same kinds of things.
13:47Donna, this is a device that utilizes magnetism, which you read a lot about as being a great health benefit.
13:53This was made in Southern California by Gaylord Wilshire.
13:56And I'm going to put it over your shoulder like this.
13:58Now we're magnetizing the iron in your blood to make you healthy and beautiful.
14:02Not that you need that, but to demonstrate this, his salesman had a gimmick,
14:06which I'll put in your hand here and just pass that through here.
14:10And look at all that magnetism that's going through your body.
14:13The inventor of this, Gaylord Wilshire, bought a heck of a lot of Los Angeles from the success of these magnetic belts.
14:20Some of the things we have here were started by true believers.
14:23The phrenology machines, the people who started those, they really believed in phrenology.
14:27A couple of the devices we have were started by people who wanted to make money,
14:31but then began to realize that what they're doing was unethical, and they took them off the market.
14:36But some people, even though you could demonstrate to them they were worthless,
14:40they continued on because they were making such big money in selling things like the stimulator and things of that sort.
14:46Don is in our McGregor Rejuvenator, a device patented in 1926.
14:51It's supposed to reverse the aging process, uses radio waves, magnetism, infrared, and ultraviolet.
14:57You ready for this?
14:58Yes, sir. Anytime you are.
15:00All right. Now we're going to slide them in here on rails.
15:08You ready? I'm going to turn it on, set the timer. Here we go.
15:12How far back do you want to go?
15:14Oh, I think about mid-40s.
15:18People are surprised at the red tank at the front entrance.
15:20They think it's either an iron lung or an MRI.
15:23I tell them those are both legitimate devices. We wouldn't have them in this place.
15:28This is the most powerful, low-tech device we have in the museum.
15:32It's called the Solarama Bedboard.
15:34It looks just like plain floor tile, but what you can't see, on this top surface,
15:39it has a very special chemical coating that affects the rays when you slip this under your mattress and plug it in.
15:45It has the amazing ability of regenerating missing organs, regrows missing limbs,
15:50cures high blood pressure, brain tumors, eases the pain of childbirth, hemorrhoids.
15:54Whatever you got, the Solarama Bedboard will cure you.
15:58In 1976, 150,000 people bought these by mail for $150 apiece.
16:05And it says on the green label at the bottom of the board,
16:07use only the genuine Solarama Board. Don't accept any substitutes.
16:12We have a device called a prostate gland warmer that's supposedly to excite a man's abdominal brain.
16:18It was patented in 1918.
16:20It does produce a rather severe reaction from viewers,
16:24and I don't think people would be using that again today if it were available.
16:29And although we can look back at our past and laugh at our lack of sophistication,
16:35this museum reminds us to be ever wary of fantastic medical claims that are beyond bizarre.
16:48Archaeology is a discipline whose work is never done.
16:53Sometimes discoveries can radically rewrite the history of entire cultures.
17:01Stories of lost civilizations have ranged from the evidence of the Indus peoples of the ancient Middle East
17:10to the persistent legends of Atlantis.
17:14Beneath the waters of a lake in Wisconsin,
17:17they lay clues to the existence of a culture far older than conventional science suggests.
17:27A culture whose origins could compel archaeologists to completely rework their understanding of the entire ancient world.
17:41At first glance, Rock Lake, Wisconsin, appears to be little more than a scenic setting for family recreation.
17:50Beneath these friendly waters lie tantalizing clues to an archaeological puzzle that has haunted the lake for over a century.
18:01Archie Eshbourne, co-founder of the Rock Lake Research Society,
18:06sets the stage for a mystery that began some 200 years ago.
18:12When the first settlers arrived in the Rock Lake area,
18:16they actually saw things sticking out of the lake,
18:20and when they asked the local Indians,
18:22what are these structures that are appearing out of the lake,
18:25the Indians told them these are the rock teepees of the ancient ones.
18:29Of course, at that time, the settlers were probably more interested in survival and enterprise,
18:34and they started to create some mills around the lake,
18:37which, of course, rose the water by at least 20 to 30 feet,
18:40at that point covering up any structures that would have been seen at that time.
18:45We have ancient accounts of Indians that talk about strangers to the area that built these sites,
18:52and to this day, Rock Lake is probably one of the most sacred sites in North America to the indigenous people.
18:59The notion of ancient pyramid builders inhabiting Wisconsin centuries ago is a tangible reality.
19:07Only three miles from Rock Lake is Aztalan, the nexus of an ancient center of mining and trade.
19:15So says Lloyd Hornsbostel, a credentialed geologist who has studied the lake for the past 25 years.
19:24Aztalan is a site that developed from the Mississippian cultures,
19:31who were forced up here from the southwest at the period in the 1300s.
19:36Their agricultural economy essentially dried up.
19:40It's our feeling that they already knew of this area because of the people that had been here before.
19:46But who were these earlier people, who Native Americans called the ancient foreigner kings?
19:55And did they actually build pyramidal structures on land that has since been flooded by the lake?
20:02Lloyd points out that such structures exist on dry land throughout the Rock Lake vicinity.
20:09We're at a site which we call Missouri Hill, which is a prehistoric stonehenge.
20:14Missouri Hill has two connections with Rock Lake.
20:18First of all, it's built of stone, which is similar to the structures we have in the lake.
20:23It probably is about the same time period.
20:26And it has the classic orientations that these people used for their religious purposes,
20:32which we find the major structures in Rock Lake also have similar orientations.
20:37One that's particularly interesting is this circle of stones, which at one time was probably a chimney.
20:45So are these tales of monuments in the lake really so far-fetched?
20:51Stories of pyramid discoveries abound.
20:55During a drought in the early 1900s, two brothers who were out fishing
21:00told of seeing a pyramid peak just below the lake surface.
21:05During World War II, bomber pilots flying practice missions over the lake
21:10reported sightings of underwater structures.
21:15And scuba divers also brought back tales of stone monuments
21:19seen in the murky, weed-clotted waters.
21:24But a new interest in the mystery was sparked in 1967
21:28when scuba diver John Kennedy came upon the story of rocky cones found at the bottom of the lake.
21:35Intrigued by this story, Kennedy went to look for himself.
21:40I took a dive team into this lake looking for supposed effigies and pyramids and cones.
21:50I had been up to Aztlan.
21:52We had seen pyramids above ground, and we had heard that there might be something in the water.
21:58And on that dive, I hit the wall.
22:01And the wall was a sloping wall about 45 degrees.
22:05It was constructed of small rocks.
22:09And they were pretty well arranged.
22:12I knew immediately that it was a man-made structure.
22:17Kennedy's discovery created something of a stir among the local residents.
22:22And in 1989, Frank Joseph put together a diving expedition to explore the lake bottom.
22:29The investigation was inconclusive.
22:32The sonar did register a number of anomalies that could not be explained.
22:38Elsewhere, engineer Hugh Harrelson studied the famous pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City
22:46and discovered a geometric system based on the layout of the ancient capital.
22:52He sent diver Kathy Kasdan thousands of miles away
22:56to where these calculations indicated another sacred Aztec site.
23:02The calculations end up over this lake.
23:06Okay, and I'm saying, Hugh, this is a lake.
23:09There can't be anything there.
23:11And he said, well, that's where the calculations end up.
23:14So I go out to the lake.
23:17We have with us what they call side-scanning sonar.
23:21The diver that's with us says, there's something on the scope.
23:25He goes over the side.
23:27Minutes later, he's back up.
23:28He said, she put us right on top of it.
23:31Side-scan images revealed curious mounds and other formations at the bottom of the lake,
23:38seeming to verify a century of far-flung theories.
23:42Yet amazing as this was, another discovery by John Kennedy during his 1967 dive
23:50suggested an even more incredible idea.
23:54The lake had actually been raised up by 15 feet
23:59when they built a sawmill about the year 1840 or so.
24:05But some of these other effigies and structures are in 60 feet of water.
24:11This could only mean that the stones were a rainish thousands of years ago
24:17when the water was far below its present level.
24:21But who would create such structures so far back in time?
24:26Archie Eshbourne offers a tantalizing speculation.
24:31We do know that in northern Michigan,
24:33there was a tremendous amount of prehistoric copper mining.
24:36Michigan has the purest copper in the world.
24:39When we take a look at that time period,
24:41which has been documented between 3000 B.C. and 1200 B.C.,
24:45Europe, Asia Minor, was experiencing the Bronze Age.
24:48What do you need to make bronze?
24:50You need copper.
24:51Well, what's funny is if the copper mining stopped at 1200 B.C. approximately,
24:56what occurred at 1200 B.C. in Europe and Asia?
25:00That was the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.
25:04Could it be that ancient mariners found their way across the Atlantic
25:09and transported the world's purest copper deposits
25:12to the empires of the old world?
25:15Did copper exhumed from this land become forged into weapons,
25:20wielded in the Trojan War?
25:23It is an electrifying possibility.
25:26The most academic geologists dismiss this notion,
25:30and they have been pointedly uncooperative
25:33in efforts to further investigate the lake.
25:37This is a special concern of Professor James Schurz,
25:41chief researcher for the Rock Lake Research Society.
25:46If these prove to be what we think they are,
25:49we've got a very valuable archaeological time capsule
25:53that must be preserved at all costs.
25:56The jury is still out on what the reality might be
26:01about the pyramids of Rock Lake,
26:03still submerged in a mystery that is beyond bizarre.
26:11We live in a time when the role of women in society
26:16is being questioned around the world.
26:19Some cultures become, shall we say, a bit unnerved
26:25by the surprising new range of activities women engage in nowadays.
26:31In Thailand, a country steeped in its history,
26:36some of the most shocking sights are not of the women charting a new course,
26:41but rather of those following traditions that are hundreds of years old.
26:49The women of Thailand have traditionally been at the centre
26:53of the religious and cultural life of the country.
26:57Modern women are increasingly found in unusual new roles and occupations,
27:04such as this young lady who shows off her favourite pets,
27:09a host of deadly scorpions.
27:12She displays them almost as one might exhibit new jewellery.
27:16She thinks nothing of donning these poisonous arachnids
27:21for the entertainment of astonished onlookers.
27:24It's a living, more or less.
27:28But there are remote parts of the country where the role of women is truly unique.
27:36Extraordinary practice done only by women
27:41takes place in a pool in the provincial mountain town of Kanchanaburi.
27:47Here, four gifted women, imbued with the spirit of the Buddha,
27:53miraculously float in fresh water in a kind of aquatic levitation.
28:00Performing this difficult ritual for both the faithful and the curious,
28:05these sacred women may never be touched.
28:09And they are venerated for their remarkable ability
28:12to float in postures impossible for anyone else.
28:17But strange as this is, an even more fantastic tradition
28:22thrives in the jungle depths of northern Thailand.
28:29The tropical mountainous border region between Thailand and Myanmar,
28:34formerly Burma, is home to a variety of mysterious and unusual tribes.
28:40Many of them are still quite isolated from the outside world.
28:46The Karen tribal group includes an extraordinary tribe called the Padwang,
28:51a Mongolian group who migrated to the remote Kaya state
28:56and who rarely venture into the modern lowlands.
29:00Numbering only about 7,000, they possess a striking and exotic culture,
29:06noted mostly the extraordinary practice of neck stretching.
29:14This custom is an expression of feminine beauty,
29:17and the number of rings worn conveys the status and respect to the wearer's family.
29:26Legends provide a number of explanations as to why the practice began.
29:31One says it was to make the women undesirable to slave traders.
29:35A more accepted explanation is that the rings protect women from tiger attacks,
29:41which is why they are also worn on the arms and legs.
29:50Yet another reason suggests the long necks
29:54were intended to emulate the oriental dragon.
29:58Whatever the real explanation,
30:01it is not the neck that is stretched in this practice,
30:04but the rib cage that is compressed, giving the illusion of a long neck.
30:12The Padwang women begin this process at around age five.
30:16They are fitted with their first rings
30:19on a day prescribed by a horoscope reading from a local shaman.
30:24A young girl's neck is smeared with a salve,
30:28and it's massaged for hours before the first bronze ring is put in place.
30:35Throughout her youth, new rings are added, one about every two years.
30:40By this time, a Padwang woman is ready to marry.
30:44Her neck may be more than ten inches long.
30:50The rings remain on her for life.
30:53After wearing them for years, the neck muscles have atrophied
30:57to the point where she can no longer support her head without them.
31:02In fact, adultery is sometimes punished by the removal of these rings,
31:06consigning the women to a life of lying down,
31:10or otherwise supporting a head.
31:14This cruel practice has alarmed outsiders,
31:17and a debate now rages as to whether this tradition is a free choice,
31:22made by tribal women, or if it constitutes an abuse of human rights.
31:29In deciding this, we might consider the various forms of body modification,
31:34freely engaged in by Westerners,
31:37who indulge in everything from tongue-piercing to breast implants to tattoos.
31:44The Padwang themselves, who are beginning to refuse the practice,
31:48have made a pragmatic choice, generating tourist dollars
31:53by marketing their unique ornamentation.
31:57This weird tradition is just one of the many extraordinary activities
32:02engaged in by the exotic women of Thailand,
32:06vocations that are creative,
32:10industrious,
32:12and occasionally beyond bizarre.
32:20From the earliest days of civilization,
32:23artists have found an astonishing variety of media
32:27through which to express themselves.
32:30The ancient Greeks carved their gods out of marble.
32:34The Romans created dramatic mosaics and sculptures
32:38The Indians created dramatic mosaics out of ceramic tile.
32:43The Renaissance saw the brilliant use of paint and canvas,
32:48and 20th century innovators have employed everything
32:52from fiberglass to neon light to realize their creative visions.
33:02The junkyard, the wretched refuse of the industrial age,
33:07rusty in the sun, these hulking heaps of scrap iron and steel
33:12are fated to decay back into the earth from which they were forged.
33:19To add a little spark of artistic inspiration...
33:24And they are transformed into an animated army
33:28of some nightmare future cataclysm.
33:36The machine-age alchemist who breathes life into these motorized behemoths
33:42is Mark Pauline, a man with a mission.
33:46At first glance, his machine shop seems a little different
33:49from the garage of any dedicated gearhead.
33:54His San Francisco-based enterprise, Survival Research Laboratory,
33:59is a classic environment for an industrial-era tinkerer.
34:07But Mark is more than just an alchemist.
34:11He is actually an artist, and he is out to make a dramatic statement.
34:17Fed up with the false promises of mass production and mechanization,
34:22he refutes the very notion that the inventions of modern industry
34:26are as useful as they claim to be.
34:32More than that, Mark is a mechanical hobbyist.
34:38More than that, he even objects to the idea
34:42that machines should have any practical use at all.
34:47Most things that are important,
34:49there's some sort of practical import to what it is.
34:52You can say, oh, well, we've created this product,
34:54and it's helping people's lives, you know?
34:56That's sort of the facade that people hide behind
34:59in the course of pursuing their activities or making products.
35:04Why do we have to do anything practical?
35:07Why not just sort of give full reign to the impractical?
35:14And so he has been driven to assemble an intricate army of automated anarchists,
35:20machines designed for the express purpose of accomplishing nothing.
35:28SRL is really kind of the ultimate expression
35:32of the counterpoint of the shroud of practicality and purpose
35:36that usually is associated with anything that's supposed to be
35:39an improvement or a technical development or breakthrough.
35:45In a grand gesture of irony,
35:48Mark uses the products of mass production
35:51to mock the very system that produced them.
35:54Mark might be called a kind of postmodern expressionist.
35:59His brushes are the welding torch and the lug wrench.
36:03His palette is the refuse of modern manufacturing,
36:07cranes and cogs.
36:09And his canvas is any public arena that is open to a crowd
36:14and far from a fire department.
36:21His protest message takes the form of violent contraptions.
36:26Fashion from leftovers found in world-class junkyards.
36:32His demonstrations, performed every year or so,
36:35are just a little bit dangerous.
36:39Cannibalizing everything from chainsaws to jet engine parts,
36:44Survival Research Laboratory produces robots
36:48and other gas-guzzling gizmos
36:51whose primary appeal is that they are fascinating,
36:55violent and useless.
37:06But even this demonstration is merely a dress rehearsal
37:10for Mark's grand masterpiece,
37:13a staged war of the machines
37:16in which robots reign supreme
37:19and humans are simply tolerated as spectators.
37:28Preparations for these events are an enormous undertaking.
37:32Mark's team of mechanical wizards
37:35sets the stage as in preparing for a military invasion.
37:40Weeks of planning now come to fruition
37:43as this squadron of witty widget-makers
37:46deploys an android army for an assault on the senses.
37:54Guided by remote switches and servo actuators
37:57that cling like ivy to the arms of the controllers,
38:01these combative contraptions stage a deafening war of the future.
38:06A hell on earth concocted out of gears and gasoline,
38:10arcing electricity and crawling flamethrowers.
38:17This pounding inferno of mechanical mayhem
38:21impacts the audience like a jackhammer.
38:26This counter-cultural war zone is calculated to enthrall audiences
38:31with a sense of personality and a sense of self-dignity.
38:35The audience is in for a real thrill.
38:38This counter-cultural war zone is calculated to enthrall audiences with a sense of personal
38:55danger.
38:58Steps are taken to ensure that this Dante-esque scene poses no real threat.
39:08Even so, viewers are asked to sign waivers, underlining the fact that they enter this
39:14demonic demolition derby at their own risk.
39:20You've got to heighten people's sense of fear or danger.
39:23Danger plays a very important part.
39:25If someone's got the s*** out of them, it's much easier for them to imagine that these
39:31machines are alive.
39:39They're more like wild animals, really.
39:41You have to really understand the machines as beings in order to be able to do it, and
39:47you have to internalize that understanding.
39:49It's not a rational understanding.
39:50You have to be so familiar with them that you become them.
39:54The decisions are split-second decisions.
39:56I mean, we have an hour, and that may seem like a long time, but when you've got all
40:00these devices running simultaneously, if you make the wrong decision, it could be very
40:05dangerous.
40:07SRL's robot tinkerers may get their construction materials from America's heavy-duty dumping
40:14grounds, but the design of these motorized monstrosities is guided by a clear, exacting
40:22vision.
40:23We have a lot of different devices, unified by the fact that any of them look like something
40:28that could scramble a person up, like a person might scramble an egg up in a pan.
40:36A lot of the devices we use previously had a military application.
40:41It is something of a point of pride that SRL's dramatic demonstrations operate on the fringes
40:50of the law.
40:52But then where else would one expect to find such a firestorm of social commentary?
40:59We've done some things that have caused problems in our relationship with the police department,
41:04but they tend to have a pretty good sense of humor.
41:07I think for them, it's like, well, it looks like people are having fun, nobody's getting
41:10hurt kind of a thing.
41:12Now, when you include the fire department, it's a very different ballgame, and there
41:16have been times when the police have protected us from the fire department because the fire
41:19department can't arrest you.
41:21At the bottom of it all is the burning question, why?
41:29There's nothing that people really crave more in a society that we live in, where everything
41:34is safe and manicured, than an extreme, intense experience that doesn't involve someone coming
41:39up behind them with a gun and saying, honey.
41:42In an era where everything is being phased out and all real things are banned or toned
41:47down, an unrestrained and extreme experience is like gold.
41:53Is it art?
41:59Is it an insightful vision of the future?
42:03Or is it just blowing up cool stuff?
42:08Whatever your interpretation, Mark Pauline makes his point loud and clear with a passion
42:27that is beyond bizarre.
42:34It's time to close our picture album of the fantastic.
42:40I'm Jay Robinson, and I hope you enjoyed the strange moments we preserved in pictures.
42:48We've exposed a world rarely caught by the camera's eye, and filtered out all but the
42:55most remarkable images, now neatly framed in your memory.
43:02Though some of them may have caused you to shudder, well, it has been our pleasure to
43:09bring such incredible events so sharply into view.
43:14A photo gallery of the fantastic, from a world that is beyond bizarre.