The Man Without a Country

This is my entry for the paranormal writing contest conducted by @onstellar

 Source: Twitter  

On a warm, humid day in July 1954, thousands of people were wandering around Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport on what was supposed to be just another ordinary day. In the faceless crowd of tourists, businessmen, and military personnel, one individual stood out: a tall, dark-haired, bearded Caucasian male. 

Quite well dressed, he wore a dark business suit and was detached from those around him, in an indefinable but obvious way. He stood patiently in a line of weary passengers who had just disembarked and were waiting obediently to pass through airport security, have their passports stamped, and get permission from the authorities to move freely around the country. 

On checking his passport, it turns out that the well-dressed man had already visited Japan three times that year on business and that his primary language was French. After a short chat with him, it was discovered he could also speak other languages—including Japanese—and that he had a number of currencies on his person. Yet neither of these facts was what was unique about him. 

What was so startlingly different about this man was that he hailed from a country the staff had never heard of, a country called Taured.   

Source: Week in Weird 

His passport looked genuine and had been stamped by many airports around the globe. Everything looked pretty normal, except one little detail: there was no such country as Taured—well, at least not on Earth. Responding calmly to the many questions put to him by the airport security, the man from “Taured” explained that this was just another routine business trip to Japan and that he couldn’t understand all the trouble he was encountering. 

In an effort to ascertain whether they were dealing with a con artist, the authorities asked the strange traveler to follow them into a private room, which he did without resisting. They showed him a map and asked him to show them where his country was located. He automatically pointed his finger toward the principality of Andorra and became angry when he realized his country wasn’t on the map. 

He claimed he had never heard of Andorra before, and couldn’t understand why his homeland wasn’t on the map when, according to him, it had a history of more than a thousand years.   

Source: YouTube 

After hours of interrogation, the tired and confused man was taken to a nearby hotel to spend the night so his situation could be delved into more deeply. To ensure that the traveler would not escape, two guards were posted outside his room. 

The next morning, when the officers went to his room, they found that the man had vanished, though there were no signs of escape. Additionally, the police stated that he could not have escaped through the window because the room was several floors up and had no balcony. And, in an even more bizarre twist, all of his personal documents, including his passport, had disappeared from the airport’s security room as well.  

Source: Ancient Origins 

Adding to the mystery is that there’s no official documents verifying the story, but also no solid theories or sources that have been able to debunk the incident as a fraud. The Japanese authorities never publicly admitted to nor denied the event, and there were a few local newspapers that noted the mystery of the man from Taured.   

Aftermath 

The story eventually found its way into The Directory of Possibilities by Colin Wilson and John Grant (1989), and in Strange but True: Mysterious and Bizarre People by Thomas Sleman (1999), which both cover it as a fact.  

Source: Goodreads 

Many theories have been put forth about the occurrence, and there are those who doubt it even happened. One notable theory is that the man from Taured somehow accidentally passed through a parallel dimension and ended up at the airport. It has been suggested that, based on this explanation, there is a parallel Earth similar to ours except that our Andorra is known as Taured there.  

We will probably never know what really happened—or if it happened at all—but earlier this year scientists expressed the possibility that there is a “mirror universe” where time moves backward. This theory is still far from widely accepted, but is based on classical physics. “Time could be more like a fountain where you have lots of pairs of springs. Or just a whole host of springs flowing out of a fountain in different directions,” says physicist Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford. 

Source: amunni.com

We can’t help but wonder: Could the man from Taured have been part of a spring flowing from a fountain in a different direction, or would you prefer the reassuring answer that this story was nothing but a hoax?  

The story was first published by @tkappa on April 3, 2018 for Steemit. 

Sources: 

The Mysterious Tale of the Man from Taured – Evidence for Parallel Universes? Or an Embellishment?

Man without a Country: Who Was The Mystery Man from Taured?