ARTC :: Unresolved Mysteries: Solved While You Wait

Unresolved Mysteries: Solved While You Wait

(One of the smaller series in the ARTC repertory is "Unresolved Mysteries -- Solved While U Wait!" "UM" has not yet appeared on any tapes, but has been a staple of live ARTC performances. We talked with Ron Butler, who originated the series and wrote most (though not all) of the extant scripts.)

ARTC:	What is "Unresolved Mysteries -- Solved While U Wait!"? In a few words...
RNB:	I like to think of it as "In Search of..." if somebody had dumped scopolamine in Leonard Nimoy's coffee.

ARTC:	I get this psychic vibe that you're not too fond of paranormal reality TV shows.
RNB:	Not to make any bones about it, I think linking "paranormal" and "reality" gives you an instant oxymoron.

ARTC:	A little uptight, aren't we? Isn't belief in the paranormal harmless?
RNB:	Oh, generally, yes. On the other hand, ask Andy Kaufman about Filipino psychic surgeons.

ARTC:	Andy Kaufman? "Taxi"? I thought he was dead.
RNB:	He is. Went to the Philippines to have his lung cancer winkled out by a psychic surgeon, came home "cured," and was dead two weeks later.

ARTC:	Urg. But most people don't go that far. It's just -- well, a hobby.
RNB:	I know that. Public belief in silly stuff isn't something I brood on. I'm a small-s skeptic the same way I'm a small-l libertarian. I used to subscribe to "Skeptical Inquirer" until it got dust-dull and self-obsessed. I still pick up "The Skeptic" when I run across it on the newsstand, but I think Michael Shermer needs to be In Search Of somebody with some experience with magazine layout.

ARTC:	Is "Unresolved Mysteries" something out of your CSICOP days?
RNB:	Actually, the first germ of "UM" was a sarcastic come-back in an apa.

ARTC:	Apa?
RNB:	Literally, "amateur press association," but that really doesn't tell you much. Think of it as a very-small-circulation magazine. The contributors are the only people who get copies, and the content is mostly people talking back and forth about their lives, their opinions -- with a month or six weeks between exchanges. Daniel Taylor [ARTC writer] once called it "The Very Slow Cocktail Party," and I always thought that was a dead-perfect description.

ARTC:	Sounds -- excruciating.
RNB:	It can be. But there are good cocktail parties and bad cocktail parties, too. "UM" grew out of a bad cocktail party moment -- an argument between me and a truly committed UFO-believer that took most of a year. It would have taken about thirty seconds face-time, but wouldn't have been nearly as coherent. Well, on my side anyway.

ARTC:	How can you stay mad enough with anyone to sustain an argument for a year?
RNB:	It takes someone really annoying. I won't go into the ins and outs -- you'd get only my side of things, anyway -- but the seminal moment for "UM" came when I wrote back to the guy that I figured he was so constitutionally credulous that no amount of evidence would suffice to convince him that any given paranormal phenomenon didn't exist. And I typed out a half-dozen lines of radio dialog about draining Loch Ness to see if there was anything really in there.

ARTC:	Was it radio? Or did you see a movie in your head?
RNB:	I think -- think -- that I had only recently started hanging out with ARTC, so it was radio I was thinking of. But I didn't turn right around and take it to the next ARTC meeting. That sort of thing would come later. The first script I brought to ARTC was a draft of "A Case of Abuse." [Originally available on "Into the Labyrinth 3", currently out of print.] But that's for somewhere else and sometime else.

ARTC:	What happens in "Loch Ness?"
RNB:	About what it sounded like above. Daniel and Clair Kiernan -- intrepid "Unresolved Mysteries" co-hosts -- are at Loch Ness to solve the mystery of the LN monster, once and for all. A Royal Air Force plane swoops in, drops a nuke on the mouth of the loch, and the water all gurgles out. Revealing a plesiosaur thrashing in the mud.

ARTC:	Do I detect an echo of Stan Freberg's gigantic hot fudge sundae?
RNB:	Absolutely. Only steal from the very best. That's the great thing about radio. You can do absolutely outrageous things for nearly no money. Like nuking Nessie.

ARTC:	Why the Kiernans?
RNB:	Why not? They're both good comic actors, and I liked the husband / wife chemistry they added to the script.

ARTC:	They're in most of the "UM" scripts.
RNB:	All the ones where something paranormal happens.

ARTC:	There are scripts where nothing happens?
RNB:	Absolutely. One of the most humorous things about the paranormal is the way it seems to evaporate when you look at it hard. The shows where that happens are hosted by "Randy Zwinge," usually played by Jerry Page [Atlanta-area pulp fiction aficionado].

ARTC:	"Randy Zwinge"? Funky name. Should I recognize it?
RNB:	Probably not. How about "The Amazing Randi"?

ARTC:	The psychic debunker? The magician who got sued by Uri Geller?
RNB:	-- and won. The same. His offstage name is James Zwinge. Jerry always played him as a gravelly curmudgeon, which -- I gather -- isn't too far off the mark.

ARTC:	Is there an "Unresolved Mysteries" tape in the future?
RNB:	I doubt it. The things are only three to five minutes long, so it would take a dozen or more to make up one sixty-minute tape. Mostly they've been filler during live performances, so they might be found on "Coffeehouse of the Air" tapes. They're not likely to grow to any length -- making something longer generally makes it less funny, not more.

ARTC:	Think you could pass that along to the writers at "Saturday Night Live"?
RNB:	I'm at least a decade too late. "UM" did give me and the Kiernans our first nude scene. Wait a minute. That sounds distinctly kinky. Say -- "UM" let me write the Kiernans their first nude scene.

ARTC:	[Riffling through episode list.] Where is that?
RNB:	"UFO Abductions." Daniel and Clair make ver-r-ry careful arrangements to be abducted by a UFO, and end up getting tagged like deer for their trouble.

ARTC:	Was that ARTC's first nude scene?
RNB:	Not by a long shot. I understand there was a wet t-shirt / topless fund-raising commercial years before I came along. And Thomas Fuller's "Dancer in the Dark" has naked occult dancing. There may be a little nudity in Thomas Fuller's "Brides of Dracula," but mostly it's just lesbian vampire group sex.

ARTC:	Wow! Uh -- I mean: "Somewhat interesting."
RNB:	Look, this ain't "Teletubbies -- the Audio" we're doing, necessarily.

ARTC:	What paranormal subjects have you lampooned in "UM"?
RNB:	Let's see -- UFO abductions, like I said. Past lives regression.

ARTC:	I take it you don't believe in reincarnation.
RNB:	Ever notice how few people were farmers or peasants in their past lives? Priests, royals, and mighty-thewed warriors seem to be grossly over-represented. Daniel and Clair seem to have been together throughout the ages -- as Cleopatra and a certain bosom buddy of hers. Romeo and Juliet.

ARTC:	Wait a minute. I'm more than moderately sure that Romeo and Juliet were fictional.
RNB:	Well, let's say the real-life persons on whose lives Shakespeare based his play.

ARTC:	I don't --
RNB:	Rhett and Scarlett --

ARTC:	Now just a frinkin' minute! Rhett and Scarlett are not only fictional, they're still copyrighted!
RNB:	You just don't have the makings of a real New Age-er. It's the residuum of logical thinking processes, I think. We've also "done" phrenology.

ARTC:	Phren-what?
RNB:	Phrenology. The pseudoscience of reading someone's personality traits by inspecting the bumps on his head.

ARTC:	Is this something new?
RNB:	No, it's from last century. The nineteenth, that is. We're still in the twentieth, of course.

ARTC:	Oh, you're one of those, are you?
RNB:	People who can count past one hundred, I presume you mean. I saw a photo once of a "phrenological apparatus," an inverted bowl you stuck your head in. Rods at various points were slid in until they touched, then the operator read your personality profile off a chart.

ARTC:	So that's what your script is about?
RNB:	Actually, I got to thinking, "What if, instead of little rods, those were little electric-solenoid hammers?" I mean, if somebody doesn't have the right bumps on his head, maybe we can put them there!

ARTC:	Ow! That sounds painful.
RNB:	Oh, it is. Lucky thing we're just doing it on the radio. The sound effects really make the script.

ARTC:	What else?
RNB:	Mystery airplanes --

ARTC:	I don't follow.
RNB:	Area 51?

ARTC:	You mean that secret base out in Nevada where the Air Force tests captured UFO's?
RNB:	It's nice to see that you keep up with current affairs. Groom Lake -- which is closer to being the real name of the place -- has been the site of flight testing of a number of for-real classified aircraft programs over the years, from the first flight of the U-2 spyplane to the F-117A Stealth Fighter.

ARTC:	So this is an "Unresolved Mysteries" that's for real?
RNB:	Not when I get through with it. And, no, I don't believe in the "captured flying saucers" bit.

ARTC:	Spoilsport. Will there be more "UM" coming?
RNB:	Almost certainly. In fact, I would have sworn I'd written more than seven of the darn things. It's not like I'm going to run out of source material.

ARTC:	Like what?
RNB:	Oh, like, James van Praagh, the guy who "talks to the dead." He's something that's come along since I wrote my last "UM," and any sideshow as sleazy as that deserves to be lampooned. Or these new "zero-point energy" swindles that combine the best features of perpetual motion machines and multilevel marketing. And the way drivel spreads across the Internet at warp speed has got to be good for a laugh. Or a cry. And I should really pay some attention to Elizabeth Joyce.

ARTC:	Who?
RNB:	An Internet 'psychic.' I ran across her Web site back in 1998 by accident. I don't know if she had a bad attack of overconfidence that year or what, but it contained a huge number of predictions for 1999, many of them with dates!

ARTC:	That seems unusual.
RNB:	No kidding! There were a lot of blobby, unverifiable prophecies, of course, and predictions about show-biz celebrities that I had zero interest in, but there were enough specific forecasts that I could pick out a representative dozen and track them through the course of the year. Get a feel for Ms. Joyce's success rate.

ARTC:	You have too much time on your hands.
RNB:	Always time for a little fun. One should take a moment now and then to smell the roses, watch a sunset, kick a deserving phony in the --

ARTC:	What sort of events did your prophetess predict?
RNB:	Saddam Hussein's poison-gas attack on Israel in April 1999. The gigantic earthquake on the West Coast, followed by the even bigger one on the East Coast. The impeachment of Bill Clinton --

ARTC:	Hey! She got that one right!
RNB:	-- resulting in his removal from office and the swearing-in of President Gore.

ARTC:	Oh.
RNB:	The simultaneous explosions of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Fuji, and another Pacific Rim volcano to be named later. The bankruptcy and collapse of US Airways --

ARTC:	OK, I get your point. So you waited until New Year's 2000 and wrote a report and -- ?
RNB:	It didn't turn out that simply. In late March, I checked back on Ms. Joyce's site -- and found that the April date for Iraq's war with Israel had vanished.

ARTC:	Beg your pardon?
RNB:	It was a trend that developed as the year wore on. Either dates or the predictions themselves would disappear as the 'day of truth' approached and passed. That was amusing. But the funniest thing had to do with the list of 'Names of the Famous Likely to Pass Over This Year.'

ARTC:	Well, that sounds ghoulish.
RNB:	Too ghoulish for me, so I basically ignored it. But I was also capturing the successive versions of the 'Predictions' and reformatting them for easy comparison. While I was doing that, I noticed that the list of names seemed to have grown by one.

ARTC:	Grown?
RNB:	Not to put too fine a point on it, Ms. Joyce had added Lloyd Bridges' name to her list about the time he died.

ARTC:	What did you do with this embarrassing stuff?
RNB:	Published a series of updates on a skeptics' discussion board. A few people seemed to be as amused as I was, but mostly there was no reaction. So I wrote up my year-end article -- Ms. Joyce was pretty good at predicting Oscar-winners, but not much else -- and moved on to other things. I still have fond memories of her, though. Aside from the amusement value of her prophecies, they made me very relaxed about doomsday predictions. It would be fun to make her the subject of an "Unresolved Mystery," though.

ARTC:	Is she still out there?
RNB:	Still making a living out of selling junk jewelry and giving for-money psychic 'readings.' Check out elizabeth@new-visions.com. Right at the moment, she's predicting all-out nuclear war by October the 21st.

ARTC:	Does that worry you at all?
RNB:	I've never felt safer.