ccording to Google, there are 195 countries in the world. In most cases, the people from these countries can travel to the other countries around as long as they have a passport, and sometimes a visa. What happens when somebody has a seemingly legitimate passport form a country that doesn’t even exist? You get the incredible story of the man from Taured.
The strange case of the man from Taured
One day in 1954, at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, life was going on as usual. Flights were coming in and out. Some tourists were landing, others were going home.
And then there appeared the man from Taured.
Apart from seeming a little stressed. Which is not unusual for business travelers rushing from one place to another. The man was well dressed and looked like any other high-level businessman on his way to close a deal in Tokyo.
The problem with this man was that the customs officer did not recognize his passport or the country it claimed to be from.
After checking with his supervisor, it was confirmed; there is no such place as Taured.
The man took offense at this and demanded, in fluent Japanese, that the customs officers look closer at his passport. Here they would see the passport stamps from the two previous trips he had made to Haneda Airport in the past.
Sure enough, the stamps were there, but this did mean that Taured was a real place.
Taured does exist
Slightly confused about what was going on, the customs officers asked the man from Taured to show them where on the map that Tuared was located. They expected him to point to some non-existent place in the middle of nowhere. Still, they were surprised when the man immediately pointed at Andorra.
Of course, Andorra in the Pyrenees between France and Spain does exist. It is small, but it’s legitimate. The man assured them this place was Taured, not Andorra, and he could not understand how they were refusing to recognize his very real country.
The plot thickens
In an attempt to get to the bottom of things, the customs officials made inquiries with the people the man from Taured was due to meet in Tokyo. The company he had a meeting with did exist, but the people there had never heard of the man from Taured or his company. The hotel where the man was supposed to stay had no record of his booking. And his checkbook didn’t belong to any known bank either.
The Japenese authorities decided to take the man to a hotel for the evening while they looked into who he really was. It is unknown whether the authorities were ever able to find any clues to the man from Taured’s identity, but the following morning he was gone. Despite having being confined to his room with guards outside, the man from Taured vanished into thin air. The even creepier thing is that his possessions that were being held at the airport also disappeared.
For all intents and purposes, the man from Taured had never existed at all. No official documentation relating to this story exists either, but the story still abides. Did the man from Taured really exist, or is this all some elaborate myth? If he did exist, where did he vanish to, and how?
The answers to these questions will most likely never be answered. At least not until the man from Taured returns and lets us in on his mysterious secret.