Minority Association Documents

Minority Association Documents

Illustration by Matt Rota.

In March of 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Clark DeLeon wrote a short article recounting his interview with “James Morasco.” Here it is in its entirety:

Call me skeptical, but I had a hard time buying James Morasco’s concept that the planet Jupiter would be colonized by bringing all the people on Earth who had ever died back to life and then changing Jupiter’s atmosphere to allow them to live. Is it just me, or does that strike you as hard to swallow, too? Morasco says he is a social worker in Philadelphia and came across this idea while reading a book by historian Arnold Toynbee, whose theory on bringing dead molecules back to life was depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“There are no scientific principles I’ve found that can make this possible,” Morasco said, “especially colonizing the planet Jupiter, which has a very poisonous atmosphere. The possibility of giving that planet an oxygen atmosphere is beyond even science fiction writers’ imaginations.”

Now that quote may sound as if Morasco doesn’t believe it can be done, but that’s not true. He thinks that between Toynbee and Stanley Kubrick there is a way to pull it off. That’s why he’s contacting talk shows and newspapers to spread the message. He’s even founded a Jupiter colonization organization called the Minority Association, which he said consists of, “Me, Eric, Eric’s sister who does the typing, Frank . . . ”

You may be hearing more from Morasco. And then again, you may not.


The note about “Eric’s sister who does the typing” led the Resurrect Dead crew to wonder if somewhere out there these Minority Association documents might still exist. It was fun to imagine them sitting in some anonymous shoe box in the back of a dusty old closet. 

In April 2006 Justin Duerr was interviewed on a shortwave broadcast at the Winter SWL Fest in Plymouth Meeting, PA. A listener later reached out with some unbelievable news. In the early 1980’s, he heard a Minority Association pirate broadcast, and wrote to their PO Box for more materials. Better than that, he actually got those materials and kept them for a quarter century. 

Photo by Steve Weinik.

That evening we gathered around an old desktop and received the files one-by-one. The connection was DSL at best. It took a few minutes to download and open each individual file. It was all very dramatic. 

The documents themselves aided our research and gave us some insight into the early days of the Minority Association. We held the documents back, first out of privacy concerns, and later out of neglect. Because the tiler himself has made some big steps towards sharing his story online in the last few years, we decided there wasn’t really any reason to keep withholding them.

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2 Comments on “Minority Association Documents

  1. I watch Resurrect Dead once or twice each year because I find the subject matter to be so fascinating. It’s a great documentary & the connection to shortwave radio makes it that much more interesting to me.

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