(camera focusing)
(bug skittering)
- [Voiceover] This here is a darkling beetle.
It lives out here in the vast desert of northwest Utah.
And he is on the move.
Where to?
I don't have a clue.
But I can tell you about the town he's leaving behind.
(quiet country-western music)
Welcome to Lucin, Utah.
There's abandoned cars, weeds.
Once in a while, a train will pass through.
(distant train whistle)
Yep, there's not a whole lot here in Lucin.
Well, except for this man.
(eagle screech, rattlesnake rattle)
(bouncy orchestral music)
But who is this man?
This man who lives in an airplane hangar,
who flies a Cessna to get to his closest friends,
who is this man?
This man who lives in the middle of nowhere?
Who lives 25 miles from this bar with this man inside?
Who owns a bunch of guns, works with machines,
and made this thing?
Who is this man?
- [Ivo] My name is Ivo Zdarky and this is where I live.
(quiet orchestral music)
- [Voiceover] As you've gathered,
this man isn't from around Lucin.
He grew up in Czechoslovakia before the fall of the USSR.
He didn't like it much.
- [Ivo] It's kind of hard to do anything.
The communists were in power there.
You cannot have your own business.
It's kind of difficult to fly there, so
I kind of didn't feel like I could be myself.
- [Voiceover] He really wanted to leave the country,
but it wasn't easy.
- [Ivo] There was Iron Curtain.
They like, have machine gun towers
and barbed wire to keep you in.
They like to keep you.
- [Voiceover] So when he was 24,
he escaped the country the only way he knew how.
By flying across the border in his self-built airplane.
(ominous orchestral music)
- So I drove up close to the border between Austria
and sometime like at three o'clock in the morning
I took off, and I just glided over to Austria
and I found myself Vienna International Airport,
and I landed there.
And then I just showed them my expired passport,
and I asked for asylum.
- [Voiceover] And the world took notice.
(ominous music crescendos)
- [Ivo] I guess they'd never seen anything like that before.
So I think they liked it.
I liked it.
(laughs)
- [Voiceover] Ivo then moved
to Los Angeles, and built up a successful
airplane propeller business.
(thunder crashes)
But even LA. couldn't fit his big ideas.
- [Ivo] I kind of needed a place to test my other idea
which is hard to do it in the middle of the city,
that's how I found this place in Utah.
It was for sale, so I bought it,
and I've been here for, like, eight years.
- [Voiceover] And what was Ivo's big idea
that brought him to Lucin?
Well, it's behind that door over there.
("Trovatore, Act II, Vedi, Le Fosche Notturne")
Inside sits an eight-propeller flying machine,
able to lift off and land vertically.
It's basically an airplane-helicopter hybrid of sorts.
It's kind of funny looking,
but the damn thing actually flies.
So what's Ivo's next big project?
A solar-powered aircraft?
An innovative propeller design?
Some kind of new way to fly?
- [Ivo] The next big one is the spear gun idea
which actually, it works better than I thought.
That doesn't always work that way.
Sometimes I get really bad ideas.
(laughs)
(drumming)
- [Voiceover] Even while inventing
new spear guns and the like,
Ivo still finds the time to get out of the house.
In fact, that's him over there,
hiking on the side of a mountain.
It's just him, nature, and his customized rifle.
- [Ivo] I take the gun with me
because of the mountain lions.
(lion growls)
(symbol clap)
(footsteps)
- [Voiceover] However treacherous the hike,
it's always worth it.
You get a good view of Lucin.
It actually looks pretty nice from here, don't it?
(quiet country-western music)
You know, I still wonder,
why did that darkling beetle ever leave this place?
Maybe Lucin wasn't right for the little guy.
Maybe it's escaping to the next place
where it can be itself.
For Ivo, though, looks like this might be his last stop.
- [Ivo] Kind of realized that this is what I always wanted.
I kept escaping until I escaped to Lucin,
and now I don't have anywhere else to escape.
I'm kind of stuck here.
(laughs)
- [Off Camera voice] That was a great answer.
(laughter)
- Well, no, it's also a truth, if you think about it.