The Man From Taured - Proof of the Multiverse, or Con
We've all had those days when you wake up and feel like the world has gone insane. Nothing seems to work the way you expect it to. Now imagine you wake up and things actually are very different. That's what has been reported by a handful of people over the decades. Do their stories prove that the Multiverse is real?
The Man from Taured is the name given to the apocryphal tale of a phantom traveler. His surprise was matched only by the customs agents when he produced a passport from a country that doesn't exist, and never has. This mystery has been haunting humanity for decades, but now it might finally be solved.
The Man from Nowhere and Everywhere
In 1954 a passenger plane landed at the Haneda Airport, in Tokyo. Customs agents went to work getting all the weary passengers checked in. This isn't the kind of job that comes with many surprises, not usually that is.
On this day a European man came up to the customs agents. He confidently produced a passport that at first glance looked like a standard European travel book. The agents quickly realized that things were a bit off when they checked his nationality. According to this document, the bearer came from a country called Taured.
The customs agents questioned the man about his country, as they had never heard of it before. He was rather indignant, replying that Taured was a proud kingdom that had stood for over 1000 years. Furthermore, he had passed through this same airport several times over the past 5 years, and many other airports all over the world.
Not wanting to just let the man from nowhere into their country, the customs agents sent for their manager. When working in customer service it is always wise to defer tough customers to your manager. That way you get out of the line of fire and the customer gets to feel important.
Mr Manager came and the man from Taured was taken to one of those customs cube-cells for further questioning. The stranger protested that he was going to be late for his critical business meetings and that he was expected at his hotel. Mr Manager had the hotel called and found that there was no booking for the man from Taured. Similarly, when they contacted the company he was to have a meeting at, they claimed to have never heard of the man or the company he claimed to work for.
By this point the man was nearly frothing at the mouth with frustration. The manager had a map brought in so that the man could identify Taured. He confidently pointed at a spot on the border between France and Spain. That area is the region of Andorra in France.
Shock set in, and the man became a mess. They had him put up in the airport hotel. He was to be kept strictly guarded by customs security agents. The room he was put in was on the sixth floor, so much too high to leap down.
Somehow, when officials returned later to check on the man, he had vanished. The guards swore that he had not gone through the door. Jumping down would also have been obvious, because the fall would render him dead.
This mystery has led people to jump on misunderstood notions of multiple dimensions to conclude that the man slipped through from a parallel universe. He hung out in our reality for a day before popping back to his own as though he was America Chavez.
Reddit Cracks the Case – Because of Course They Did
In 2021, the Reddit user u/Nalkarj posted in the Unresolved Mysteries community. They had cracked the case open so wide that all the whimsy fell out. I'm not saying I preferred the Multiverse of Madness theories full of the words quantum and Mandela Effect, but they were fun.
u/Nalkarj found a post in the Japan Subreddit by another user named u/NatanaelAntonioli. They had found a clipping from a Vancouver newspaper, The Province. According to the article a man name Allan Kuchar Zegrus had been caught using a fake passport to travel the world.
"John claimed to be a "naturalized Ethiopian and an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser." The passport was stamped as issued at Tamanrasset, the capital of Tuared "south of the Sahara."
Allan was captured in Japan after having successfully traveled through several countries already. He was taken to court in Japan and likely faced charges of garden-variety fraud.
Some discrepancies exist between the urban legend of the man from Taured and the real case of Allan Kuchar Zegrus. The name of his fictional country is Tuared, instead of Taured (which just sounds nicer). He also claims that Tuared is located south of the Sahara, instead of in Andorra.
In the original post, u/Nalkarj added that according to two other Reddit users, u/vegetepal and u/tropical chancer, had pointed out that Tamanrasset is a real town in Algeria with a large population of Tuareg people.
The Reddit user u/taraiochi found and translated a Japanese article about the Man from Taured's trial. His translation went as follows:
A mysterious foreigner of unknown nationality and background, accused of illegal entry and fraud, tried to commit suicide in front of the judge who handed down the verdict, at the Tokyo District Court on April 10. The defendant, John Allen K. Ziegler [sic] (36), was sentenced by Judge Yamagishi to one year of imprisonment…Zieglass [sic] and his Korean wife entered Haneda Airport with a forged passport from Taipei on October 24 last year, and in December of the same year, he stole about 200,000 yen and $140 in traveler's checks from the Tokyo branch of the [Chase Manhattan Bank], and another 100,000 yen from the Tokyo branch of the Bank of Korea. The forged passport used to enter the country was handmade and the name of the country, Negusi Habesi Ghouloulouloul Esprit, was completely fictitious, and the characters written on it were also unclear, even after being authenticated by a specialist, as to what language it was written in. J The defendant spoke 14 countries, and in response to the investigation, he stated that he had come to Japan on orders from an Arab-related agency and was working for a U.S. intelligence agency, but there was no such fact, and the district prosecutor, troubled by the fact that the nationality of the defendant was unknown, prosecuted the case. The identity of the riddle was not revealed at the trial, and the English newspaper reported that he was a "mystery man"
The original person to put all of this information together was a poster on this forum on the Charles Fort Institute website, AnonyJoolz. Their article on the subject appeared in The Fortean Times magazine at some point.
Case closed, time to pack up all of your poorly understood ideas about quantum states, waves turning into particles and Schrödinger's cat. If some guru is using quantum physics to make your mother believe his nonsense, just remember that there have been con men for as long as there have been marks. has gone insane.
