The Man From Taured

Haneda International Airport, Tokyo, Japan, July 1954

It's just another day at work for you as one of the immigration agents at passport control. Even back in the 50's, thousands of people pass through Tokyo's Haneda airport every day, with rarely anything out of the ordinary ever happening. Traveler after traveler hands over their passport, and you take a quick look at it, with you fully expecting them to match their passport photos.

But today wouldn't be one of those days. This all changed when a smartly dressed, European looking businessman walks up to the passport control counter and hands over his passport. At first glance the passport looks kinda weird, the color is unlike any you've seen before, and you don't recognize the design on the front either. As someone who checks passports day in and day out, you thought you had seen pretty much every passport in the world, but this one has got you curious.

The man himself looks a little rough, but you assume that it's probably just jet lag. After all the man must have come from a pretty exotic and far way place for him to have a passport that you don't recognize. It's then that you see the country's name on the passport, it says he's from Taured?!

Now while you can't claim to know every passport in the world, you're pretty sure that Taured isn't a country. The officer double checks to see if Taured is listed anywhere as a nation, but he can't find any information about it. Could this be one of those places that's caught up in a dispute, a region that just declared independence, or is it maybe just written in a different language?

The officer asks the man if he's sure he is from Taured, but the man responds that of course he is from Taured. Now getting a little irritated he informs the officer that this is his third time traveling to Tokyo this year, and that he has never had any problems getting through security before.

Sure enough he has passport stamps from Japan and other countries across the world, as well as having multiple currencies in his wallet. When you tell him that you don't believe that Taured is a country, he looks at you mad and stunned, like you're the crazy person here! He says his nation has existed for over a thousand years, and is one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Was this an attempt to illegally cross the border? Could it be a prank? But who would be stupid enough to use a fake country or try to pull a joke on an immigration officer? The man looks just as confused as the officer by the situation. He's either an incredible actor, or maybe he's just really from Taured!

The officer realizes that he needs some backup to resolve the situation, and calls over his boss for help. But he doesn't know where Taured is either, which is slightly reassuring as it proves you're not the only one who has never heard of this strange country. But this still doesn't answer the questions of where the man is from and why his documents look legitimate.

The boss pulls out a world map and asks the man to point to Taured. You expect him to point to some far way island somewhere in the middle of the ocean, but to your surprise he puts his finger on the country of Andorra, in between France and Spain. A relatively unknown country to most people, but not to the seasoned border officers.

This is getting ridiculous now, nice try you think, but it's not gonna work. Yet the man continues to insist that Taured does exist. The man is now very angry and explains that he has an important business meeting tomorrow, and would like to get to his hotel soon.

Out of curiosity the officers ask to see his hotel reservation. With a smug look on his face he hands over a handwritten note with the name and phone number of the hotel. The officers actually know the hotel, but when they call to the hotel, the staff says they don't have a reservation in the man's name.

The man then asks the officers to call the man that he has a business meeting with tomorrow, but the same thing happens. Even the bank in his checkbook apparently doesn't exist!

At this point the man is visibly shaken by what just happened, he looks pale and shocked by the whole situation. He pleads with the officers to just let him go and says he doesn't understand what is happening. He's got nothing to hide and would like some time to rest.

Of course things aren't that simple, and while the officers feel a little bad for the man, they have no choice but to detain him at a nearby hotel guarded by immigration officials.

When the original immigration officer goes home at the end of the day, he can't stop thinking about what had happened. Was it a test? A joke? Maybe a criminal or just a simple man from a place called Taured. Why did his documents look real, but his business partner didn't recognize him? Hopefully tomorrow they can find a logical explanation for everything.

But the next day the officer wakes up to some strange news, the man has disappeared! The guards that were stationed outside the man's hotel room went in to check up on him in the morning, but he was nowhere to be seen. They claimed they stayed up the whole night and barely heard a noise coming from his room. Even stranger is that all his personal items and documents were gone too!

Those items were held in a separate location, and even if the man had somehow escaped through the window, how could he have gotten back all of his belongings? It's almost as if the man had never existed, and just like that he vanished from history, never to be seen again.

But this isn't the first time something like this has happened!

There's a report of a man called Jophar Vorin who was found wandering around Frankfurt in 1850, he claimed to be from a country called Laxaria on the continent of Sakria. He could only speak some broken German, and didn't know any other European languages. In his imperfect German he tried to explain that he traveled from Laxaria across the ocean to find his long lost brother, but had suffered a shipwreck and was now unable to find where he was or where he had come from on a map.

Another incident happened in Paris in 1905. A man got caught stealing bread who spoke an unrecognizable language. He claimed to be from a place called Lizbia. While the police at first thought he was just faking it to avoid being arrested, it was later found out that that the language he spoke appeared to have a real structure instead of being just gibberish.

What could be the explanation for all these stories?

Some people say that this is evidence of parallel universes, other dimensions, or even alternate realities.

But lets be a bit more realistic and take a look at the facts.

The problem is that there isn't much evidence for any of these stories, and since they happened so long ago, there isn't really any documentation about these incidents that we can use for proof. Basically all we got are stories, but there are some theories as to what might have happened.

In the story about the man from Taured, some people hypothesize that he spoke only French, and actually told them that he was from Andorra. He told the immigration officers that he was from "terre d’Andorra" (the land of Andorra) which the Japanese misheard as Taured. They couldn't understand him, didn't recognize his passport, and then detained him. Many mistakes were made, and he was eventually transferred to another facility by Japanese immigration where someone did speak French.

The story then became an urban legend, with all the other details added later to it, to make it sound more mysterious and interesting. However there is absolutely no documentation of the incident and there definitely should be some at least. The first mention of the story was made in the book “Strange but true: Mysterious and bizarre people” by Tom Sleman, who claims that the story is fact.

In the story of Jophar who was found wandering around in Germany, the first clue is that his German was not very good. This could mean that they simply misunderstood him when he tried to explain where he was from and what happened to him. People think that he was a Muslim from India, his name Jophar sounds like Jafar, which is Arabic for stream, and the names Laxaria and Sakria both sound very similar to the villages of Lakhariya and Sakri Nal in Rajasthan India. Jophar was also asked to name the continents of the world, which he listed as Sakria, Aflar, Astar, Auslar, Euplar, some of which sound similar to the names of Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe.

The bread thief who was arrested in 1905 told police that he was from Lizbia, which they assumed was Lisbon in Portugal. When translators realized that he could not speak Portuguese, they let him go. It is assumed that the island of Lesbos in Greece is most likely the Lizbia that he referred to. Lesbos was occupied by the Ottomans/Turkish until 1912. The unknown language spoken by the man from Lizbia was most likely Turkish.

Unfortunately all of these stories happened quite a long time ago, and it's unlikely that we will ever get all the answers to these events. Maybe they were all made up, maybe it was just a misunderstanding, or maybe just maybe they were travelers from alternate universes that ended up in our world by accident. Who knows?

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed these mysteries!