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Common classes of paranormal tales are accounts of persons who have mysteriously appeared (e.g., from the past, the future, other worlds, other dimensions) and those who have mysteriously vanished (to no one knows where). One example of this genre that has proved popular over the last few decades. the Mystery of the Man from Taured, involves both of these elements: The report of the man from a parallel universe who inexplicably showed up at a Tokyo airport in 1954 bearing a passport from the nonexistent country of Taured and then just as bafflingly disappeared from police custody is typically related in a number of mostly similar variant forms, such as the following account of the supposed mystery man from Taured: This story seems to be one that was inspired by a real-life incident, but its modern form is a greatly embellished and fantastical version of the far less sensational real story. A debate in the British House of Commons on July 29, 1960, on the subject of frontier formalities (i.e., the administrative process by which a person enters the territory of another country) included mention of a man named John Alan Zegrus, who was then being prosecuted in Japan for using a false passport: As unusual as this account may seem in our modern security-conscious era -- that a man had been successful in moving about the world using a fabricated passport issued by a made-up country and bearing writing in a nonsensical language -- it was borne out by contemporaneous reporting, such as the following August 1960 newspaper article: A summary of a Japanese radio broadcast from December 1961 suggested that Zegrus had not only been making use of a phony passport, but he had also been passing bad checks and claiming to be an agent of both the FBI and CIA: A user with the screen name of taraiochi located and posted some Japanese newspaper articles from 1960-61 about the mystery man from Taured, who had entered Japan from Taiwan along with his Korean wife using an obviously fake passport and was arrested after cashing forged checks to cover the cost of his stay there: Additional articles suggested Zegrus was eventually released on time served and left Japan vowing to embark upon a new life in a new country, the enigma of who he really was and where he came from unresolved (and his ultimate fate unknown). Over the years, this instance of an unusual but explicable fraudster -- whose story did not require the existence of additional dimensions or defy our understanding of time and space -- came to be adorned with additional contrived details (e.g., the subject's agitation over not being able to locate on a modern map a country that had existed for more than 1,000 years where Andorra is now; his unfathomable disappearance from a guarded hotel room) that transformed it from a real-life criminal immigration/fraud case into a fictional tale of a mysteriously vanished visitor from another dimension. Although variations in orthography and spelling in different accounts of Zegrus' exploits make matters even more confusing, we note that Tamanrasset is the name of a province and city in Algeria, and Tuareg is the name of a group of people and languages in and around the country of Algeria, it's possible Zegrus hailed from (or claimed to hail from) that region of the world. Regardless of his precise origins, the mystery man from Taured was definitely neither an extraterrestrial nor an interdimensional, time-traveling being.
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