Mysterious World

Man without a Country: Who Was The Mystery Man from Taured?
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One of the most perplexing events of the 20th Century did not involve flying saucers, conspiracy theories, a criminal act, or even strange creature sightings. It took place on a seemingly normal day in one of the most tedious, mundane places one could imagine: Airport. Yet to this day, no one knows exactly what happened there, or why one average business traveler became the heart of an enigma largely forgotten by our modern world.

Haneda Airport, as it appeared in 1954, photographed by Rodney Stich.
Haneda Airport, as it appeared in 1954, photographed by Rodney Stich.

The year 1954 was hotter than normal in Tokyo, but at Haneda Airport it was business as usual. That is, of course, until one unknown date when a routine European inbound plane dropped off its passengers. As the crowd made its way through customs, a neatly-dressed middle-aged Caucasian man stepped up and told officials this was just a normal business trip or him, one of three so far this year to Japan. His primary language was French, yet he spoke Japanese and several other languages. In his wallet was a variety of currencies from various European countries, as if to verify his frequent flyer tendencies.

When they asked him for his country of origin, things became strange. He casually stated that he was from Taured, on the border between France and Spain. The officials told him that Taured didn’t exist, but he presented them with his passport—issued by the nonexistent country of Taured—which also showed visa stamps corroborating his previous business travels to Japan and other countries. Yet when they called the company he said he was having a meeting with, they had never heard of him or his company ever before that moment. The hotel he had reserved a room at had no reservation for such a person, and the bank listed on his checkbook appeared not to exist.

Map of the country of Andorra, believed to be "Taured".
Map of the country of Andorra, believed to be “Taured”.

The bearded man scoffed; surely, this was some elaborate practical joke for his benefit. Customs officials showed him a world map and pointed to the tiny country of Andorra. Perhaps that was his real country of origin and somehow he was either mistaken or having his own little joke? The man became irate, saying that Andorra didn’t exist but it was right where Taured should be. His proud country had existed for a thousand years. Still in shock over his misplaced homeland, the mystery man was detained by customs and given a room at a nearby hotel for the night while officials tried to figure out what was going on.

The following morning, the mystery deepened. Taured’s one and only known resident completely vanished from his hotel room which had been guarded by immigration officials all night long. And to make matters worse, all of his personal documents—including his passport and drivers license issued by the mystery country—vanished from the airport’s security room. Police and airport officials searched in vain for the mysterious man. It was as if the whole encounter had never actually happened.

No documentation verifying this story has yet surfaced, but it was mentioned in several books, including The Directory of Possibilities (1981, p. 86) and Strange But True: Mysterious and Bizarre People (1999, p. 64). And given its puzzling ending, I doubt that any official would have written up a report concluding that the man and all his documented evidence simply vanished.

dimensions-traveler
Could this man and other out-of-place travelers be from another dimension?

Surprisingly, misplaced travelers such as the business man from Taured have appeared on many occasions. In 1851, a man was found wandering Frankfurt an der Oder in northeast Germany who claimed he was from a country called Laxaria on the continent of Sakria. Another young man who spoke a completely unrecognizable language was caught stealing a loaf of bread in Paris in 1905; he said he was from Lizbia, which authorities assumed was Lisbon—or Lisboa in Portuguese, yet his language was not Portuguese nor did he recognize a map of Portugal as his homeland.

Is Taured out there somewhere? And what about Laxaria or Liziba? Did these men fall backward through time or pass through dimensions? Or were they simply perpetrating a hoax or mentally ill?

Better X-Ray Vision inspired from Lobster Eyes
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X-rays are difficult to work with, which is why the X-ray machines at airports are so bulky. However, scientists are now copying a technique used by lobster eyes to gain better X-ray vision. Instead of refraction, or the bending of light by a lens, lobsters see using reflection. Their eyes are covered in squares, similar to flat mirrors, which reflect light at precise angles to form pictures from any direction.This design proves useful to astronomers, who yearn for telescopes that can focus X-rays from certain areas in space. While an ordinary mirror would only allow X-rays to pass through, the shapes of the lobster’s eyes are used to create arrays of tiny, square, hollow tubes made of lead glass. Curved into eyelike spheres, the material reflects X-rays and is packed into telescopes.These crustaceans have inspired other inventions as well, such as microchips and the Lobster Eye X-ray Imaging Device, a “flashlight” that can see through steel walls 8 centimeters (3 in) thick.When the device sends out a string of low-power X-rays through a wall, a few bounce back off the objects on the other side. These signals are funneled through the tubes and create images just like the lobsters’ eyes do. This invention may prove important in locating stolen or illegal goods.

Australian Convicts Case
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During the 19th century, the British government tattooed and branded inmates to enforce the idea that the state was “all-knowing” and had total control over them. Many inmates sent to the Australian penal colony showed up already marked as criminals. However, some of them flipped this around by accessorizing their tattoos. One man named Aaron Page turned the “D” on his chest (marking him as a deserter) into a Union Jack. This was clever because it concealed a symbol of treason with one of patriotism. British authorities in Australia soon grew wise to this practice and ordered that convicts never be tattooed at night, as that gave them free time to pick at the fresh scab and change the tattoo.

Byzantine Empire Case
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In AD 793, the Armeniac province revolted against the Byzantine Empire. The rebels were defeated by Emperor Constantine VI, who killed their leaders and punished the survivors with fines and confiscations. To add ink to injury, he had at least 1,000 of them tattooed with the phrase “Armeniakon traitor.” A few decades later, another emperor punished two monks charged with idolatry by tattooing them with 12 lines of iambic verse. The subject of this painful poem? The story of their crime and its punishment. Just like the Greeks, both emperors had these punishing marks inked into their subjects’ foreheads for maximum awkwardness at family gatherings.

Ancient Greece Case
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Slaves who misbehaved in ancient Greece were often tattooed with the name of their crime. This was used instead of branding because a more wordy crime like “theft and aggravated assault” would take long time to brand and could put the victim’s life at risk. As slaves were only valuable to their owners alive, tattooing provided a happy (if still upsetting) medium. Similar tattoos were given to free citizens found guilty of crimes. When the island of Samos was at war with Athens, each side tattooed its prisoners of war to mark them as conquered. Athenians marked Samian prisoners with owls, a symbol of the city’s patron goddess Athena. Samians retaliated by marking their Athenian prisoners with a samaina, a kind of Samian ship. The forehead was an especially dehumanizing place to tattoo a captive because of the increased pain and the fact that it was hard to cover up. (Sweatbands weren’t too common back in the day.)

Andrea Jerome Walker
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In 2006, a black man was convicted in Toronto after being caught with $10 worth of crack co***ne. Authorities could not have guessed that this routine drug bust would open the doors to a bizarre mystery that has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. One year earlier, the man had arrived in Canada using an American passport stating his name as “Andrea Jerome Walker.” However, when the Canada Border Services Agency now tried to deport him back to the United States, they learned the passport was fraudulent and Andrea Jerome Walker was not his real name. As a result, “Walker” was incarcerated in an immigration detention facility while officials tried to uncover his true identity. He has since earned the moniker “The Man with No Name.”Walker has remained in immigration detention for nearly nine years because authorities cannot figure out what to do with him.He cannot be deported back to his home country until it can be determined which country he actually originated from. A fingerprint check has revealed that Walker has lived under at least eight different identities in numerous countries. After years of confinement, Walker finally revealed that one of these identities, “Michael Mvogo,” was his real name, and he originally hailed from Cameroon. However, since Walker has already lied about his identity on multiple occasions, the Cameroon government will not accept him without definitive proof that he is Michael Mvogo. Even after making a failed attempt at a constitutional challenge to secure his release, Andrea Jerome Walker continues to remain in limbo as a man without an identity.

The Charfield Railway Disaster Children
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In the early morning hours of October 13, 1928, the village of Charfield, England became the site of a terrible tragedy. A mail train was traveling from Leeds to Bristol with 50 passengers aboard, but because of the thick fog, the crew failed to see a red signal before reaching Charfield railway station. They wound up crashing into a freight train, and the derailment ignited some gas cylinders, causing a massive fire. A total of 15 passengers lost their lives, and 23 others were injured. This incident would open up a most unexpected mystery after it was discovered that two of the deceased passengers were an unidentified young boy and girl. The fire burned these two children beyond recognition. They could not be matched to any of the other passengers, and no one ever came forward to claim them. There were even some far-fetched theories that the charred victims were not even children but a pair of small jockeys or some ventriloquist’s dummies. After the crash, a memorial to victims was built in Charfield, and the two children were buried there. According to local legend, an unidentified woman wearing a long, black robe would show up at the memorial on the anniversary of the crash every year and place flowers on the children’s graves. The last appearance of this woman is believed to be sometime during the early 1960s. By this time, word had spread about her appearances, so members of the media showed up in Charfield on the anniversary date. When they tried to approach the woman one year, she took off and has not been seen since.

Masabumi Hosono Was Fired For Surviving
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Masabumi Hosono was the only Japanese man on the Titanic. He worked for the Ministry of Transportation and had been sent to Russia to research their railway system. His long trip back involved stops in England and then a first-class trip on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.When the ship started to sink, Hosono intended to sacrifice his own life to save others. Then he saw another man hop on a lifeboat. If nobody else was going to be noble, Hosono figured, there was no sense in being the only man stupid enough to go down with the boat.But Hosono suffered for his survival. The Japanese press called him a coward who had “betrayed the samurai spirit of self-sacrifice.” Hosono lost his job for the disgrace of surviving.

The Scandal That Ended A Country
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In ancient China, a notorious s*x scandal destroyed the state of Chen. According to the Commentary of Zuo, the married Xia Ji was having affairs with Duke Ling of Chen and two of his ministers, who frequently wore her underwear under their clothes. All three openly bragged about the relationship, which enraged Xia Ji’s son Xia Zengshu. In 599 BC, the three men were drunkenly partying at Xia Ji’s house when Xia Zengshu appeared. Duke Ling turned to one of his ministers and joked that the young man looked suspiciously like the minister. “He also looks like you,” the minister joked back. At which point, Xia Zengshu snapped and murdered the duke. In the chaos, the two ministers escaped and fled to King Zhuang of Chu, who used the incident as an excuse to conquer Chen. Xia Zengshu was executed, and all China learned a valuable lesson about “your mom” jokes.

The Greek Historian Strabo Said Moses Was An Egyptian Priest
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The story of Moses and the Ten Commandments is one of the best-known stories of the Bible. With God’s help, the Bible says, Moses brought plagues upon Egypt until the pharaoh set the Jews free.According to the Greeks, though, Moses wasn’t even Jewish. He was an Egyptian priest. Strabo tells us that Moses didn’t like Egypt’s institutions. He believed that God was in all things and so couldn’t take the form of an animal or a person. This wasn’t divine revelation. Here, it’s just presented as a philosophical musing.In Strabo’s version, Moses didn’t talk to God or fight the pharaoh. Moses just convinced a lot of people that he was right, and they emigrated freely to Jerusalem.After Moses’s death, Strabo wrote that Jerusalem was taken over by superstitious, violent people who brought in “tyrannical” laws like kosher diets and circumcision. “Their beginning was good,” Strabo wrote, “but they degenerated.”