The Man from Taured

by Brian Dunning
November 5, 2024

The Man from Taured is one of those perennial Internet legends that never goes away. You can find it on archives from 20 years ago, and you can find it being refreshed and reposted on TikTok today. It concerns a man who flew into Japan and happily presented his passport, but suddenly found himself in a country where nobody recognized his homeland, nobody spoke his language, and suddenly he was under arrest. Incredibly, nobody accepted his explanation of where he came from. Soon he found himself imprisoned for illegal entry. But when the authorities went to check on him, he had vanished — according to some, back to his own parallel universe.

Here is one of the countless versions of the story you can easily find on the Internet today:

It's July 1954; a hot day. A man arrives at Tokyo airport in Japan. He's of Caucasian appearance and conventional-looking. But the officials are suspicious. On checking his passport, they see that he hails from a country called Taured. The passport looked genuine, except for the fact that there is no such country as Taured — well, at least in our dimension.

The man is interrogated, and asked to point out where his country supposedly exists on a map.

He immediately points his finger towards the Principality of Andorra, but becomes angry and confused. He's never heard of Andorra, and can't understand why his homeland of Taured isn't there. According to him it should have been, for it had existed for more than 1,000 years!

Customs officials found him in possession of money from several different European currencies. His passport had been stamped by many airports around the globe, including previous visits to Tokyo.

Baffled, they took him to a local hotel and placed him in a room with two guards outside until they could get to the bottom of the mystery. The company he claimed to work for had no knowledge of him, although he had copious amounts of documentation to prove his point.

The hotel he claimed to have a reservation for had never heard of him either. The company officials in Tokyo he was there to do business with? Yup, you've guessed it — they just shook their heads too. Later, when the hotel room he was held in was opened, the man had disappeared. The police established that he could not have escaped out of the window — the room was several floors up, and there was no balcony.

He was never seen again, and the mystery was never solved.

And if you're among those who prefer brevity, here's the text from one meme image, an AI-generated jpeg of some guy with the following text:

In 1954, a regular businessman arrived at Tokyo airport with a passport issued by a country named Taured, which simply doesn't exist in our World. He claimed that his country is 1000 years old and he also had records showing that he had visited Japan multiple times before. However, police kept him locked in a high secure room for further inspection, until he got vanished & never found again. Experts said that he came from a parallel universe.

It all seems so incredible. Some might say that the mystery man being from another dimension or parallel universe is the only reasonable explanation. But is that the first place we go here on Skeptoid? I think you know the answer.

Luckily, The Man from Taured is actually a true story, and is thoroughly documented in the Japanese press. At least, parts of it are a true story — the rest has been atrociously exaggerated and expanded. The reason we have the true story traces back not only to contemporary Japanese newspaper articles, but also to one of the police officials who was involved with the actual case. Atsuyuki Sasa had been Japan's first Director General of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, and also wrote several books, including the 2016 The Spies Who Passed Me By. It's only available in Japanese, but in it, Sasa told the complete story of the case that was handed to him early in his career, when he was an officer in the Metropolitan Police Department's Public Security Bureau.

In October 1959 (not 1954, as the Internet memes say), a 36-year-old caucasian man traveling with his 30-year-old Korean common-law wife — apparently not legally married — flew from Taipei, Taiwan to Japan's Haneda Airport. This does not seem to have raised any red flags, so they probably entered the country legally, presumably with valid passports.

In fact, the first sign of any trouble didn't come until three months later when he attempted to cash some ¥350,000 in travelers checks from two different banks in Tokyo, using a passport as identification that appeared to be forged. The banks called the authorities and the man was arrested. Upon his arrest, he claimed to be a diplomat representing the country of Negusi-Habesi, and so his case was transferred to Atsuyuki Sasa.

The man presented the passport in question identifying him as John Zegrus. Sasa wrote that the passport was very obviously an amateurish homemade fake at first glance, and its stamps from previous entries into various countries had also been clumsily forged. The obvious inference that Sasa made was that this man did his best to cobble together something good enough to fool a junior bank teller, and didn't do quite a good enough job. And so he was charged with attempted bank fraud.

As the man did not present any reliable identification, he was thenceforth known only by the probably-fake name on his definitely-fake passport, John Zegrus. Zegrus gave a backstory that would have spun Ian Fleming's head. He claimed to have been born in the United States, then moved to Germany, then to Czechoslovakia, then to England, where he became a fighter pilot during World War II. He was shot down and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp. Then after the war, he lived in South America. Next he somehow became an intelligence agent for the United States working in Korea; then was a fighter pilot for Thailand, then for Vietnam. Finally he joined the Arab Coalition — because why not — and became a citizen of Negusi-Habesi, which ordered him to Japan to recruit Japanese volunteers for the Arab Coalition. And to top it off, he was also somehow working for both the FBI and the CIA.

Since there's no such place as Negusi-Habesi, Zegrus told Sasa it was in the south of the Sahara Desert. When he hacked together his fake passport, he had probably never prepared to have to explain to a bank teller where Negusi-Habesi was.

Sasa's team contacted every foreign agency that Zegrus' story was cohesive enough to make sense about, and was unable to verify a single thing. The court easily found that he was just some tourist trying to cash forged travelers checks with a fake passport. At his sentencing in August of 1960, Zegrus tried to cut his own wrists with a small piece of glass, but it didn't work. He spent one year in a Japanese prison for bank fraud, and his Korean wife was deported back to South Korea. When Zegrus' own sentence was over, he was deported to Hong Kong, the last country they were sure enough he'd been legally. And that's where his story ends.

But John Zegrus from Negusi-Habesi is not the same as The Man from Taured. Where did Taured come from?

This is where the Internet's historical documentary researchers have really shined. About a month before the sentencing, news reports about the case had already crisscrossed the world. A British Member of Parliament, Robert Mathew, made a speech in the House of Commons arguing that passports are insufficient for ensuring security, and he gave the case of John Zegrus as an example. He just got a few things wrong, and whether that's his own shortcutting or an error in the translation of the news reports, we'll probably never know. Mathews' speech is where the elements of the nation of Taured, and the city of the fake passport's issue, Tamanrasset, first became a part of the documented urban legend that we have today. Neither Taured nor Tamanrasset appear in any of the original Japanese reports.

So let's speculate how this could have happened. Mathew is planning his speech, he finds an example from these radio reports coming out of Japan that supports the point he wants to make. This is pure speculation, but if I may: One of his aides listens to the radio, maybe they find an article, maybe all they catch is that the guy said he came from a country in the middle of the Sahara. The fact is that there doesn't seem to be any record of where Mathew got the place names Taured and Tamanrasset, but he did. And once he did, and gave his speech, they made it into print and into the English language literature for the first time, providing the source material for today's urban legend.

Most of Northern Africa is the Sahara Desert, an endless sea of sand dunes where international borders are hardly relevant. Just west of the center of the Sahara is the largest province of the North African nation of Algeria, and it's called Tamanrasset, the place where Mathew said Zegrus' passport was issued. Tamanrasset is a name that Mathew or his staff easily could have gotten from a map of the Sahara desert, while trying to flesh out the Zegrus story to write the speech for Parliament.

For more than 500 miles in all directions from Tamanrasset is the approximate range of the Tuareg people. The Tuareg are a traditionally nomadic society, with a complex 1500-year history with roots in Berberism. Today mostly Islamic, some 2.5 million Tuareg are spread across at least five countries in the Sahara, and have their own nobility, clans, and castes. They have their own music, art, cuisine, clothing; their own university (in Tamanrasset); their own trade industry, languages and dialects, stories, architecture, and everything else that makes up a society. What they don't have are borders, and scarcely know or care what African nation they might currently be in. They even had a car named after them: the Volkswagen Touareg SUV.

Is it possible that Mathew or his staff found some map of Africa with the range of the Tuareg people outlined, and with Tamanrasset in the middle? Search the Internet for "map of Tuareg" and you'll find there have been countless such maps made.

But Taured is not the same word as Tuareg. However, there are many different variations of the Tuareg name, and various spellings of each, and who knows what maps or books Mathew may have found it in. It's also not outside the realm of possibility that he simply copied it down wrong. All of this is just speculation, of course, but it's consistent with all the facts in the urban legend, and consistent with Zegrus' assertion that his passport was from a country in the Sahara.

Some people feel that the most probable explanation for the nonexistence of a country called Taured is that John Zegrus must have come from another dimension. Applying Occam's Razor, we may want to allow for the possibility that a simple transcription error, or a quick fudge to finish writing a speech, are also possibilities which don't require us to redefine the nature of the universe to accommodate them.

Regardless, the exact nature of whatever human error took us from Negusi-Habesi to Taured and Tamanrasset hardly matters. We know how the story started in Japan, we know how it entered the English language literature, and we know that it's now being manipulated and tweaked to make it ever stranger by social media influencers looking for clicks and views.

The longevity of The Man from Taured as an urban legend in the English language owes a lot to one simple fact about it: the original source material is both obscure and in Japanese, making it virtually inaccessible to English language content consumers, and very hard to fact check; thus, the vast, vast majority of what's written about it online is the fake version where he vanished from a hotel and came from another dimension. So don't expect to see it fade from the Interwebz anytime soon.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning