Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey was a documentary series by the brothers Lorne and Lawrence Blair, released in 1988, drawn from roughly a decade of filming across the Indonesian archipelago. It is a genuinely admired piece of travel documentary, broadcast by the BBC and PBS, and most of it has nothing to do with any of this.
In one segment of the episode East of Krakatoa, the brothers filmed a man they called Dynamo Jack. He shocks Lawrence Blair with a touch. He ignites paper. He performs healing work. He asks not to be named or located. The segment runs a few minutes.
Why it mattered so much
Because it was not a paranormal programme. The Blairs were not psychic investigators, the series had no interest in proving anything, and the segment arrives without fanfare in the middle of an anthropological travelogue. That context gave the footage a credibility no dedicated paranormal production could have bought, and it is the reason the clip has outlived every comparable piece of film.
What the Blairs recorded, they recorded as travellers rather than investigators: they filmed what they were shown, in a house they had been invited into, in the middle of a much longer journey through the Indonesian archipelago. The segment is short, unannounced, and framed like everything else in the series — which is precisely why it landed the way it did.
The withdrawal
Chang subsequently asked for the segment to be removed, and it was. Later releases of the series circulate without it. The footage survives in copies of the original broadcast and, inevitably, all over the internet.
Lawrence Blair has spoken about the episode in later interviews, confirming the request and describing his own view of what he witnessed with a mixture of conviction and appropriate uncertainty. He has not recanted.
Its position in the record
It remains the only visual documentation of the tradition's claims made by anyone outside it. Everything else — every book, every student account, every forum post, every later video — is either testimony from within the community or of unestablished provenance. Twenty-five years of argument have been conducted over a few minutes of 1980s television, and no comparable footage has been produced since by anyone, including by practitioners who claim the same abilities.
