Ep. 95 Taured: How a Fraudster Was Transformed Into an Interdimensional Man of Mystery

Check out zipOns from befree Adaptive Clothing here! In the 1950s a mysterious man appeared at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. He looked normal enough, just a regular looking mid-thirties white guy in a suit there on a business trip. But when he presented his passport to airport officials, they were puzzled. The passport was unlike any they had ever seen before. It listed the man as being from a nation called Taured, a nation they had never heard of, a nation they were pretty sure didn’t exist. When asked to point out Taured on a map, the man became confused. He pointed to the Principality of Andorra on the border of France and Spain. “It’s supposed to be right here,” he said “it’s been here for over a thousand years.” He couldn’t understand why his country was no longer listed on a world map. Airport officials took the man to a hotel room for the night until they could interrogate him further the next day. They placed two guards outside the room to ensure he didn’t escape but in the morning, the mystery man from Taured was gone without a trace. In the years since, many have speculated that the man from Taured came from another dimension, an alternate reality in which Taured really did exist between France and Spain. But how much of this story is actually true and how much is just the product of the game of historical telephone? Let’s fix that. 

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Sources: 

• Snopes "The Mystery of the Man from Taured"
• All That's Interesting "Inside the Legend of the Mysterious Taured Man"
• Wikipedia "John Zegrus"
• Reddit post by user taraiochi
• UK Parliament "Frontier Formalities"