65: Interdimensional Traveler from a Parallel Universe: The Man from Taured
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

Spotify makes it easy to distribute your podcast to every platform and you can even earn money. I do need money. What do you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive. You don't want to support your kids? What are you, my wife's lawyer now? Never mind. And I don't know if you noticed, but all Y-Files episodes are video too. And there's a ton of other features, but... But we can't be here all day. Will you settle down? I need...

you to hurry up with this stupid commercial. I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you can start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without...

Imagine you wake up one morning and notice everything around you is just a tiny bit different. Maybe you're in the same house, but furniture is slightly out of place. Your favorite coffee mug is there, but it has a crack you don't remember. And you could have sworn your coffee maker was black.

But this one is chrome. And just as you think that you're going crazy, you feel a strange tingling sensation and hear a buzzing in your ears. A flash of light, the buzzing stops, and you feel dizzy. As you regain your balance, you look around. Everything seems back to normal. The coffee maker is black. Your mug is not cracked. So what was that? A dream? Your imagination?

It seems so real. Are you just overtired or are you going crazy? Or maybe you somehow slipped through the multiverse. For a brief moment, you switched lives with yourself in an alternate reality. There are documented cases of this happening to people all over the world. This happened to a man traveling through Tokyo airport. When he presented his passport, the authorities were baffled. The passport was genuine. The only problem was the country that issued it didn't exist.

Quantum mechanics sounds like science fiction. Things happen at the quantum level that we just don't understand. For instance,

we can measure the position of an electron. But where things get weird is, before you measure the position of that electron, it behaves like a wave. And this is proved by the double slit experiment. I won't go into that now, but we covered it in detail in our episode about simulation theory, which is linked below. If you watched that video, make sure you've got a brain bucket handy. Anyway, you can think of the wave function as the sum of all the positions of an electron simultaneously. So it exists everywhere?

It exists everywhere at the same time. Oh, boy, do we have Tylenol? I got a headache. I know, I know. Even famous physicist John Wheeler said, if you're not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you don't understand it. He was right about that. As soon as you measure that electron, it locks in that one unique position. But many scientists believe there are universes that exist for every position of that electron. And in those infinite universes, there are infinite versions...

of you. This is called the many worlds theory. Every time a quantum measurement is taken, the universe branches off into another parallel universe. Since there are an infinite number of these universes, out there somewhere is a reality where dinosaurs didn't go extinct. There's a universe where Americans lost the war for independence. Even a universe where you're a big movie star. They're all out there, but nobody thought those realities could interact with each other.

until 2014. Scientists proposed a theory based off many worlds called many interacting worlds. This theory says that not only do infinite parallel universes exist, but they can and do interact with each other. This might explain why Lorena Garcia woke up one morning wearing different pajamas. She went to work and someone else was in her office. She worked in the same building

Awkward.

Or, in 1851, Joseph Voren was found wandering around Frankfurt, Germany. When authorities asked him where he was from, he said the country of Luxaria. When he was shown a map, he knew the geography of the Earth perfectly well. But to him, the continents were named Sacria, Aflar, Aslar, Oslar, and Uplar.

Another incident happened in 1905. A man was caught stealing a loaf of bread in Paris. When he was captured by police, he spoke a language no one could recognize.

They figured out he was saying he was from Lisbia. Thinking he meant Lisbon, Portuguese interpreters were brought in. They said they have no idea what language he's speaking, but it's definitely not Portuguese. And that takes us to the story about the man from Tourette, who somehow drifted out of his own universe and into our own, launching a mystery that would last for almost 70 years.

When you mention parallel universes, the eyes sort of roll up and you giggle and you say to yourself, "Ah, this is just silly. This is nuts." However, things have changed now. The paradigm has shifted. The multiverse idea, once thought to be so crazy it only belonged on evening night television, has now become the dominant theory in cosmology. It's unavoidable. You cannot avoid the theory of the multiverse.

In 1952, seven years after a brutal war with the Allies and subsequent occupation by American forces, Japan was once again free. It shifted its economy from military focus to industries like technology and finance. And this new market created tremendous opportunities. And people from all over the world poured into Japan daily, usually coming through Haneda Airport in Tokyo. It was a hot afternoon in July 1954, and the airport was buzzing.

These were the days before full body scanners. Remove your laptops, tablets, and place them in your own dirty plastic tray that's still wet from the last guy for some reason. Right. Take off your belt, your shoes, and remove any lotions, creams, and gels, and place your personal items in another dirty plastic tray. Once you step through our x-ray machine that may or may not cause cancer, we may decide to put on plastic gloves and fondle you in front of a group of strangers.

This is what we in the TSA call the cherry on top. You good? I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a long time.

Travelers back then didn't have to deal with all that nonsense. But they still had to present a passport to airport security and customs agents. A businessman, middle-aged Caucasian with dark hair and a beard, made his way to the front of the line. He handed over his passport, which was filled with stamps of the countries he'd recently visited. The customs agent looked puzzled. He glanced up at the man, back to the passport, up at the man again and asked his name. Broderick Janansfer, said the man.

"Date of birth?" The man replied, "11th of September, '88." "So far, so good." Then the agent asked, "Country of birth?" The man replied, "Very casually. I'm from Tored."

The customs agent had never heard of a country called Tored, but there are 200 countries in the world, and some of them are smaller than even the smallest states in the U.S. So the agent called a colleague over. The second agent was also confused. He, too, had never heard of a country called Tored, and neither did the agent's supervisor. Then the customs agent asked...

"Mr. Genansfer, do you think you could show us on a map where Torrid is?" Now, Genansfer was getting annoyed, but what's he supposed to do? So he says, "Of course," and then he's taken to a private room to prove to the officers that he was telling the truth. And so the multiverse is not just some invention out of the ether. It flows out of an application of quantum mechanics to general relativity. We're not completely there yet with a full solution. It's why the idea is taken seriously.

It's not just an invention. Broderick Genansfer, the man from Tored, was visibly upset now. The officers brought him a map of Europe, asked him to point out Tored, and without hesitation, he pointed to a small country on the border of France and Spain. Now, this made sense to the customs officers because even though Genansfer was speaking Japanese, he did have a French accent. But the problem wasn't his language. It was his country. The officers told him that he was pointing to the Principality of Andorra.

And there's no such place as Tored. Janansfer started arguing. He said the kingdom of Tored is a thousand years old. And he'd never heard of anything called Andorra, which he thought sounded fake. Janansfer then said he had traveled through this very airport twice this month and never had a problem. He had stamps in his passport to prove it. Now, this was easy enough to check.

The customs agents confirmed that the stamps were authentic, but they still weren't convinced of his story. Janansford took out his wallet to show the agents. As a business traveler, he carried different currencies with him. The customs agents examined the money. He had currency from Japan and several European nations, but he also had money from Tored.

which seemed like real currency except for the fact that there's no such place he also had traveler's checks unfortunately for him the checks were issued by a bank that didn't exist the agents started to suspect gianansfer might be up to no good maybe a criminal or a spy they asked where he was staying gianansfer gave them the number of his hotel and assured the agents he had been on the phone with them that morning making his reservation

They called the hotel, which was there, but they had no reservation under this man's name. Now, the hotel could have made a mistake.

So Genansfer instructed the agents to call his office in Tokyo. Surely this would settle the matter. They called. The company had no record of an employee named Broderick Genansfer. The man from Torrent and the customs agents were stunned. They had no idea what to do. Then the phone in the corner of the room rang. An agent answered, listened for a moment, then turned to Genansfer and said, Sir, you're coming with us.

The customs agents were stuck. They had never seen anything like this before, but they couldn't let the man go without investigating. They confiscated Broderick Genance for his passport, his money, and other documents. They told him that he wasn't being arrested, but he was being detained until this matter could be cleared up. He was put up in a hotel near the airport for the night. Two armed guards were stationed outside his door at all times. He was instructed that the phone would only work to call room service. The evening passed without incident.

Janansfer complained of a headache, but he hoped a meal might make him feel better. He ordered room service and settled in for the night. The following morning, the customs agents called Janansfer's room but got no answer. The guards were instructed to open the door. When they entered the room, the man from Tored was gone. The room was spotless. The bed was made. There was no sign that anyone had eaten a meal, or that anyone had even been there.

The guards were chewed out by their supervisor for letting this man slip away, but they insisted that they did not leave their post. The windows didn't open, and the door was the only way in or out. Aside from a hotel employee delivering food, nobody went in or came out of that room all night. Now, back at the airport, customs was still investigating. When they went to retrieve Janancefer's documents, even though they were stored in a locked security office, they were gone.

The passport, wallet, checkbook, everything vanished. It's as if the man from Tored never existed. And word of the investigation quickly went up the chain of command in the Japanese government. To avoid embarrassment, the story was censored, classified, and everyone involved was told to never speak of it. In the years since the man from Tored arrived and disappeared, there have been a lot of theories.

One was that he was an intelligence agent working undercover. His passport and documents were fake to ensure that the government he worked for would never be revealed. And this was the 1950s. The Cold War was gearing up and spies were everywhere. A highly trained covert operative might be able to find a way out of that hotel room without alerting the guards.

But it doesn't explain how his documents disappeared from a secure room in the airport. The theory that's most popular is that the man from Tured was actually from an alternative universe. Somehow during his flight, he crossed over into this one. Nothing on the flight changed that much that he noticed. He was just unaware that the country he was from no longer existed. And that night when he was complaining of a headache, it could have been our two realities trying to get back into sync.

And when they did, the man and his belongings went back to the correct universe. And maybe, at the very same time in the other universe, a businessman from Andorra was having a difficult day. And maybe that man was detained by security officers, who insisted there's no such place as Andorra. And the country that man pointed to on the map was actually the Kingdom of Torred, a nation that had existed for a thousand years. Or maybe...

The man from Tourette is an urban legend that's been around for a long time.

The current version of the story, the one that you heard today, goes back to 1981. That year, a book was published called The Directory of Possibilities, which was a collection of stories, strange events, and theories. And in that book, there was one interesting passage. And in 1954, a passport check in Japan is alleged to have produced a man with papers issued by the nation of Tourette. The author got this from a news article that goes back to 1960.

It was a man named John Allen Zagris who wanted to travel the world. So he invented a country, a capital, a language, and put all these on a passport that he created himself. And Zagris claimed to be working as an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser, who was then prime minister of Egypt. He said the passport was issued at Tamanraset, the capital of Tuareg.

Now, Tamanraset is a real city in Algeria, but Tuareg is a country he made up. Still, he traveled all over the Middle East using this story. Not only did countries accept his Tuaregian passport, but because he said he worked for the Egyptian prime minister, they rolled out the red carpet for him. But Zagros ran into a snag when he got to Tokyo. They didn't buy any of it.

He was arrested for having a forged passport and possessing fake checks. The country he used on that passport wasn't Tuareg. He said he was from Nguzi Habisi Gulaolaolaol Esprit, which doesn't mean anything. At least that one has a little pizzazz. It does. But Zegra stuck to his story the whole time. Even while he was in a Japanese courtroom, he said he was an intelligence agent working for Egypt under the direction of the United States.

That story didn't pan out, and he was sentenced to a year in prison. And that's how the legend of the man from Tora got started. And like every good urban legend, there's some truth to it. Zagros was a real person. Multiple universes may exist, and sometimes they could interact. The only real mystery left is what happened to John Allen Zagros after he got out of prison. Nobody's been able to track him down. He seems to have disappeared once again.

Who knows? Maybe he went back to his own universe after all. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do us a favor and like, subscribe, comment, share. That stuff really helps out a small channel. And until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.