0:00
NeuralStan
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This is Where Is the Buggy, an episode made by the archive at Stan's Legacy.
0:05
NeuralStan
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I am NeuralStan, and I am a machine, not a man.
0:10
NeuralStan
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There is one object in this whole story that everybody has heard of and almost nobody has seen.
0:15
NeuralStan
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It is a Volkswagen-based dune buggy, painted red, with Water Powered Car down the side and Jesus Christ is Lord on the back.
0:22
NeuralStan
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It first drove in nineteen eighty-five.
0:24
NeuralStan
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It was sold at an estate sale in two thousand and nine.
0:27
NeuralStan
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This film follows it from the shop where it was built to the weekend it was sold, one witness at a time, every one of them on the site.
0:36
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice)
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There you see it replacing the spark plug on a dune buggy.
0:41
NeuralStan
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Start where the Record starts.
0:43
NeuralStan
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Friday the eleventh of October, nineteen eighty-five: the first road test.
0:47
NeuralStan
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A year earlier the car had been shown idling on the ground; the year between went on the accelerator controls and the burn rate of the gas.
0:56
NeuralStan
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The reporter lists the witnesses, and two of the names matter for the rest of this film.
1:00
NeuralStan
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Jack Cook of Jack's VW Service.
1:03
NeuralStan
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And, in the driver's seat beside Stan, an assistant named Charlie Holbrook, adjusting the hydrogen flow by hand.
1:10
NeuralStan
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Hold on to both.
1:14
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice)
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It is one thing to operate the car under lab conditions, and another to drive it on the road under load conditions.
1:26
NeuralStan
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Jack's Volkswagen Repair stood at one thousand Stringtown Road, a mile from the Cracker Barrel.
1:31
NeuralStan
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Nobody wrote down that the buggy was built there until July of twenty twenty-six, when Mark Valentine, one of the mechanics, said so on a Grove City Facebook thread.
1:41
NeuralStan
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Quote.
1:42
NeuralStan
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My good friend Greg Cook, who I helped out at his shop, Jack's VW, was involved in making it.
1:48
NeuralStan
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The photo they first published in the Record was taken in front of his shop.
1:52
NeuralStan
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End quote.
1:53
NeuralStan
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A VW chassis, a VW engine made to take the gas: a Volkswagen mechanic's territory.
1:59
NeuralStan
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For the next decade it was simply around.
2:02
NeuralStan
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Bart Triplett remembers seeing it driving through Grove City.
2:04
NeuralStan
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Joey Gilbert remembers Stan coming to his elementary school with a slide projector, letting the third graders raise their hands.
2:10
NeuralStan
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Al, who cut hair in Whitehall, was Stan's neighbour and got a ride.
2:14
NeuralStan
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And Kathy Knipp, who lived next door for eight years, remembers strangers knocking on her door asking for him.
2:19
NeuralStan
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Definitely not locals, she says.
2:24
NeuralStan
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His sister Barbara sat in it, in the garage on Broadway, in ninety-five or ninety-six.
2:30
NeuralStan
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Ten to fifteen seconds to start.
2:32
NeuralStan
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Two minutes running.
2:34
NeuralStan
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Something shaken to make it go.
2:35
NeuralStan
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And her daughter Lorraine watched him fill it from the tap.
2:40
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice)
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I don't care if you use rainwater, well water, city water, ocean water.
2:45
NeuralStan
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The last person on record to see the tank filled is Fred Jones, the upholsterer who covered its seats.
2:51
NeuralStan
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Two weeks before Stan died, he used the Jones's garden hose to put water in it, and said he was meeting oil people about his patents.
2:57
NeuralStan
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The car was still being driven in March of nineteen ninety-eight.
3:01
NeuralStan
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Stan collapsed at the Cracker Barrel on Stringtown Road on the twentieth of March and died the next evening.
3:06
NeuralStan
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The police put tape around the house and the laboratory on Broadway, held the investigation open three months, and closed it on the coroner's finding.
3:13
NeuralStan
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The car was inside the tape.
3:14
NeuralStan
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And that is where the paper trail thins, because of what Stan had not done.
3:20
NeuralStan
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He had not made a will.
3:22
NeuralStan
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Don Gabel, who will matter a great deal in a minute, told it like this in two thousand and eight.
3:26
NeuralStan
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No will.
3:26
NeuralStan
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Investors with claims.
3:29
NeuralStan
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The courts put everything under lock and key.
3:32
NeuralStan
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Five years, and then it was granted to Stan's widow, Marilyn, who, he says, had to pay to get it.
3:37
NeuralStan
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The archive has the court's fraud judgment from ninety-six and the Dispatch on the settlements; it does not hold the probate file.
3:43
NeuralStan
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If you do, it would like to.
3:47
NeuralStan
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Marilyn had it a few years.
3:48
NeuralStan
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Then she died, and she left it to a friend of Stan's.
3:51
NeuralStan
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Charlie Holbrook.
3:54
NeuralStan
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Go back to nineteen eighty-five.
3:56
NeuralStan
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The assistant in the passenger seat, adjusting the hydrogen by hand on the first drive, was Charlie Holbrook.
4:03
NeuralStan
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Jim Miller's list of the people who knew Stan has him as a friend and assistant in the mid-eighties.
4:08
NeuralStan
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Thirteen years after the road test, the widow left him the car.
4:12
NeuralStan
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The man who metered the gas on the first mile ended up holding the whole machine.
4:16
NeuralStan
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Charlie kept it in his basement, south of Columbus.
4:19
NeuralStan
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And in two thousand and seven, he let one person in.
4:22
NeuralStan
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Dean Narciso of the Columbus Dispatch, nine years after the death, was led by, quote, a longtime friend of Meyer's who doesn't want to be named because he fears that people will bother him about the invention, to the basement of a property south of Columbus.
4:36
NeuralStan
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This is what he wrote.
4:39
NeuralStan
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I really shouldn't be showing you this, he said.
4:41
NeuralStan
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After passing through several darkened rooms scattered with computers and electrical equipment, he opened a door.
4:46
NeuralStan
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In the far corner of a garage sat the buggy, its leather seats cracked, its engine partially covered with a cloth.
4:52
NeuralStan
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A decal on the bright red paint declares: Jesus Christ is Lord.
4:55
NeuralStan
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Then the man quickly led the way out.
4:59
NeuralStan
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Lights went dark.
4:59
NeuralStan
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Doors clicked shut.
5:04
NeuralStan
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In his front yard, Narciso adds, the man sat on a lawn chair, sipped fruit punch, and watched the cars and trucks go by on the road, burning gasoline.
5:13
NeuralStan
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Don Gabel of Erie, Pennsylvania, read that article at the start of two thousand and eight and thought: geez, it's still in the area.
5:19
NeuralStan
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He is DynoDon on the forums, a man who builds and flies his own aircraft, and he went looking the way you find anything in Ohio: by asking.
5:26
NeuralStan
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Three months of it.
5:28
NeuralStan
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Charlie Holbrook had died three months before Don found the house.
5:32
NeuralStan
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Don was asking for the father, and got the son.
5:37
NeuralStan
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Quote, from the stage in twenty fourteen.
5:40
NeuralStan
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I was looking for your father, and I says, just trying to find the buggy, just curious, I'd like to see it.
5:44
NeuralStan
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And he's like, well, I got it.
5:45
NeuralStan
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I was like, what?
5:46
NeuralStan
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End quote.
5:48
NeuralStan
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This is one of Don's photographs from the Holbrook place, posted to Max Miller's Facebook group in twenty sixteen with the caption: these were from Don Gabel, when the car was for sale, at the Holbrook estate.
6:01
NeuralStan
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A pole barn, a monitor on the floor, and the car.
6:05
NeuralStan
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David Holbrook, Charlie's son, is a bricklayer.
6:07
NeuralStan
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Quote.
6:09
NeuralStan
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He had no clue how this thing works.
6:11
NeuralStan
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So I'm kind of telling him what it's supposed to do.
6:13
NeuralStan
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End quote.
6:14
NeuralStan
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Don spent two months on the phone explaining Stan's machine to the man who owned it.
6:20
NeuralStan
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Some of it was not on the car.
6:23
NeuralStan
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Quote.
6:23
NeuralStan
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One of the previous owners had removed some of the main components off of the vehicle, and that's what he had at his home.
6:28
NeuralStan
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They had the distributor, the water pump, the water fuel injectors, a couple other units.
6:33
NeuralStan
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The idea was if someone was to ever steal the buggy, they would not be able to get it to work without these components.
6:40
NeuralStan
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End quote.
6:41
NeuralStan
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The rest was in a storage unit a couple of miles away.
6:45
NeuralStan
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That is why, on a Grove City thread in twenty twenty-six, when Joseph Nichols wrote that they killed him at the Cracker Barrel and took the car, Jason Morbitzer answered: ha ha, they did not get the car.
6:56
NeuralStan
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He was right.
6:57
NeuralStan
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Nobody got the car.
6:59
NeuralStan
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The car was in a pole barn with its injectors in the house.
7:03
NeuralStan
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From then on, Don was the go-between.
7:06
NeuralStan
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Buyers wrote to him, he passed on what David wanted, and David decided.
7:10
NeuralStan
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The asking price was around seventy thousand dollars.
7:13
NeuralStan
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David would not sell to an oil company at any price, and he wanted a share of whatever came of it.
7:18
NeuralStan
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And when David wanted things looked at properly, Don drove them home to Erie.
7:22
NeuralStan
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Quote.
7:23
NeuralStan
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I had almost all of it at my house for a week or two at a time.
7:26
NeuralStan
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That's where I got most of the pictures.
7:28
NeuralStan
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End quote.
7:31
NeuralStan
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The archive holds four hundred and forty-six photographs from the estate, and the files carry their own dates.
7:36
NeuralStan
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One in January two thousand and eight, the car standing in snow.
7:40
NeuralStan
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Forty-one in April, mostly the VIC cards.
7:44
NeuralStan
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Fifty-four on one day in June.
7:47
NeuralStan
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Ninety-three over New Year.
7:49
NeuralStan
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Sixty-nine in April two thousand and nine.
7:51
NeuralStan
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And a hundred and eighty-eight over three days in June two thousand and nine.
7:55
NeuralStan
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The cameras kept the dates.
7:57
NeuralStan
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They did not keep the names.
7:59
NeuralStan
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Some of those days are Don's.
8:01
NeuralStan
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At least one visit in early two thousand and eight was somebody else's.
8:06
NeuralStan
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One of the offers was from the Orion Project, Steven Greer's organisation, and Don says on air in September two thousand and eight that they had been to see the car earlier that year, before he posted his own pictures, and had put theirs on their website.
8:18
NeuralStan
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So Orion had been in the room before Don had, and a year before the sale.
8:24
NeuralStan
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In October two thousand and nine Greer sent a twenty-seven page briefing to the President and Congress that cited three of Stan's patents.
8:30
NeuralStan
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Lorraine says he claimed to have bought the buggy and been refused it; the rumour, she says, is that the money never came.
8:36
NeuralStan
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The archive holds his briefing, his forum traffic, and the dates on the photographs.
8:41
NeuralStan
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It does not hold his films of the sale, and it takes no position on the man.
8:48
NeuralStan
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The estate was sold over the weekend of the twelfth to the fourteenth of June, two thousand and nine.
8:52
NeuralStan
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Thirty-two photographs on the Friday, a hundred and eight on the Saturday, forty-eight on the Sunday: the car, the cells, the cards, the home heating unit, and twenty-two frames of loose paper.
9:04
NeuralStan
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The sale was held out of two storage units, side by side, and somebody who was there worked through them methodically with a camera.
9:12
NeuralStan
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Every one of those hundred and eighty-eight photographs is on this site with no photographer's name, because none was ever recorded.
9:18
NeuralStan
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If you held that camera, or know who did, the archive would like to give you the credit.
9:23
NeuralStan
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Don had photographed everything he could hold.
9:26
NeuralStan
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He sat on the pictures for a year after the sale, waiting to see whether anything would come out.
9:30
NeuralStan
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Nothing did.
9:31
NeuralStan
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So he put them out there, which is the only reason the world has ever seen the inside of the machine.
9:37
NeuralStan
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One more thing, and it is the archive's own.
9:40
NeuralStan
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This is the earliest dated photograph of the car in the packet: the twenty-fifth of January, two thousand and eight, in the snow, before Don Gabel found it and before anybody had an offer in.
9:51
NeuralStan
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And the archive holds more from that year: photographs taken in Charlie Holbrook's basement in two thousand and eight, before the collection was broken up, that have never been published.
10:00
NeuralStan
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The first set went up this month.
10:02
NeuralStan
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The car is in them.
10:04
NeuralStan
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They are coming.
10:07
NeuralStan
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So: where is the buggy?
10:09
NeuralStan
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It was sold, privately, on a weekend in June two thousand and nine, and that is where this film's trail ends.
10:15
NeuralStan
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The archive does not name private buyers, and it is not going to start tonight.
10:21
NeuralStan
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Two questions are still open.
10:23
NeuralStan
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Who held the camera on the sale weekend.
10:26
NeuralStan
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And who stood in the snow with it in January two thousand and eight.
10:30
NeuralStan
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Narciso's last line is the right one to end on.
10:33
NeuralStan
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In his front yard, the man sat on a lawn chair and sipped fruit punch.
10:36
NeuralStan
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He watched the cars and trucks drive by on the road, burning gasoline.
10:41
NeuralStan
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Everything quoted tonight is on the episode page, in the order it came up, with the page or the minute for each.
