Mo PaiArchive

Biography

Lorne and Lawrence Blair

Documentary filmmakers · Ring of Fire, 1988

An archive plate: a strip of film with sprocket holes, framing a single red circle.
An archive plate. The Blairs were filmmakers rather than investigators, and what they left behind is one frame of the whole subject. Mo Pai Archive · Drawn for this archive

Made the decade-spanning Indonesian documentary series that contains the Dynamo Jack segment. Not paranormal investigators — which is exactly why the footage carries the credibility it does, and exactly why it establishes less than people assume. Lawrence Blair has discussed the encounter in later interviews and has not recanted. They removed the segment at Chang's request.

Life

Lorne and Lawrence Blair were filmmakers, not investigators of the paranormal, and that fact does more work in this subject than any other single circumstance.

A still from the 1988 Ring of Fire footage: John Chang crouching over a tiled floor with paper alight beneath his hand.
The burning-paper demonstration, as broadcast in 1988. A frame from the Ring of Fire footage — the whole visual record of the claims amounts to about half an hour of this. Lorne and Lawrence Blair, Ring of Fire (1988) · Rights holder unidentified — reproduced editorially

The brothers spent a decade travelling the Indonesian archipelago, and the result — Ring of Fire, broadcast in 1988 — is a travel documentary series about islands, boats, volcanoes and people. One segment of one episode contains the material this archive exists because of: a man they called Dynamo Jack setting paper alight at a distance, delivering a shock by hand, and treating a patient without needles.

What that provenance gives the footage is the absence of a motive to fake it: a crew making a series about Indonesia had no stake in an energy claim, no audience to satisfy on the point, and nothing to sell afterwards. What the same provenance takes away is any evidentiary rigour at all. Nobody present was designing a test, nobody controlled the conditions, and nobody thought to. The footage is therefore both the strongest thing in the record and much weaker than it is usually asked to be. See the article on it.

A broadcast still: an air rifle barrel aimed at close range at an outstretched open hand.
The air rifle, fired at an open hand at close range. It is the most testable thing in the whole visual record — a pellet either stops or it does not — and the most frustrating, because what a camera shows is a hand and a bang. Broadcast still (Sky Three) · Rights holder unidentified — reproduced editorially

At Chang's request the brothers removed the segment from subsequent releases. Lorne Blair died in 1995. Lawrence Blair has discussed the encounter in later interviews and has not recanted, which is a small fact that carries more weight than most of the argument built on top of it.

Full article: Ring of Fire and "Dynamo Jack"

Their book

Cover of Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey by Lawrence Blair and Lorne Blair

Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey

The book of the television series that contained the thirty minutes of "Dynamo Jack" footage — still the only visual documentation of the claims made by anyone outside the tradition.

View on AmazonStart here

Everything this archive says about them rests on these — see Sources.

In the timeline

Elsewhere in the archive