When the accused was cross-examined he said that it was a State of 2 million population somewhere south of the Sahara. The passport is stated to have been issued in Tamanrosset the capital of the independent sovereign state of Tuarid. This man, according to the evidence, has travelled all over the world with a very impressive looking passport indeed.

Friend may know the case of John Alan Zegrus, who is at present being prosecuted in Tokio. According to Mathew (emboldenings again mine):

And the spelling is close that I can’t believe it’s a coincidence.Īntonioli also linked to a 1960 speech by British M.P.

Other than the country’s placement “south of the Sahara” rather than between France and Spain, this basically is the Taured story. gallant gesture for the individualist, unfortunately, ended with the Japanese in Tokyo. John claimed to be a “naturalized Ethiopian and an intelligent agent for Colonel Nasser.” The passport was stamped as issued at Tamanrasset, the capital of Tuared “south of the Sahara.” Any places so romantically named ought to exist, but they don’t. All these he recorded on a passport which he made himself. To impress officials, he invented a nation, a capital, a people and a language. 15, 1960, clipping from Vancouver’s The Province, which told the story of conman John Allen Kuchar Zegrus (emboldenings mine): Last year, u/NatanaelAntonioli posted to r/japan about the story. That was originally where I stopped my post, more or less.īut then I found two Reddit posts that-I can say with some certainty-cracked the entire case. Knowing what I do of Wilson, I don’t think he would have made up a reference, but he might have repeated one uncritically. That said, I do know one of the book’s authors, Colin Wilson-an interesting, intelligent, and insightful writer who nevertheless “believed almost everything he read about the paranormal, no matter how outrageous,” as skeptic Martin Gardner wrote. (We don’t know for certain, after all, that the man actually spoke Japanese.) And remember that the Wilson/Grant book says nothing more than that the man produced “papers issued by the nation of Taured.” Note that the French word for Andorra, l’Andorre, has some of the same vowel sounds as the made-up Taured. Even accepting that a man can disappear/transport back to his alternate universe from a locked and watched hotel room (paging the ghost of John Dickson Carr), why would customs officials have brought him to a random hotel in the first place? That section of the story reads like a later addition to make the reader think the guy really did come from an alternate universe.ĭid the first half happen, though? If so, the solution may be nothing more than the French-Japanese language barrier. Well, I think the entire second half can be jettisoned. I haven’t been able to find a single earlier reference. In the book, Wilson and Grant have one sentence on our Tauredian traveler:Īnd in 1954 a passport check in Japan is alleged to have produced a man with papers issued by the nation of Taured. This tale was posted here in 2014, and u/Meginsanity found what I think is the earliest-known reference to the story, in Colin Wilson and John Grant’s The Directory of Possibilities (1981). It’s now more or less a copypasta, with little variation between retellings. No one has ever been able to find any Haneda Airport documentation or contemporary newspaper articles about it-or any evidence whatsoever. The guards swear he never came out the door, and the only way out is through the window-which is not only on the hotel’s top floor but also locked.Īs you’ve probably guessed, this fun Twilight Zone-esque story is almost definitely bogus. Officials go back to the room-and the man has vanished. The hotel at which he claims to have booked a reservation never received one from him. The company for which he claims to work has never heard of him. Officials take him to a nearby hotel room, on the top floor, and put him under guard. He can speak Japanese and says his native language is French. He claims he has a business meeting in Tokyo. His passport has multiple stamps, including Japanese ones, and appears real. He has money from several different (real) European countries. Someone brings out a map, and the man identifies Taured as a location between France and Spain-where the real-world microstate of Andorra is.Īn interrogator asks him if he means Andorra. Officials take the man aside and start interrogating him. The passport shows him coming from a country called Taured, you see.

Everything seems to be going normally until the man gives customs officials his passport. In 1954, a well-dressed Caucasian man arrives at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land…” I have always found this an interesting case, especially if it was true.Īnd by chance I now stumble across this fab report!

Tokyo quickmap