July 1954. Tokyo. The sun dances off the polished metal
fuselages of the planes lazily descending onto the tarmac. The air itself ripples
from the heat. Inside passport control, a huge map of the world overhangs rows of desks.
Takei Amaya fans himself with papers and tugs at the uniform clinging too tight around his neck.
It is important to present oneself properly, particularly when you are the first point
of contact many from the outside world will make with Japan. It is important to
maintain an immaculate presentation to make a good impression, but he still wishes
he could loosen his collar even for a moment. The flow of passengers seems to move even slower
than the gradually descending planes outside. Open passport, check details, ask questions,
stare the person down, ensure a good likeness with the photo, stamp, ‘welcome to Tokyo’, next
person. Mr Takei has sat in this same booth since the end of the war. At what point would he check
his millionth passport? Had he done it already? He pulls himself back to reality. Stamping
passports can become so monotonous you stop checking them at all, and just go
through the motions. It’s vital he doesn’t do that. Foreign powers, spies,
military officials, political opponents, anybody could pass in front of him at
any moment. He has to stay vigilant. But this woman in front of him is
no spy. Just a housewife from Korea. ‘Welcome to Tokyo.’ Next, A white man steps forward. Well dressed in a
suit with a short beard. Likely an American. Here for business, there has been an uptick of
them since the end of the war. The man smiles at Mr Takei and hands over his passport before
returning his hands casually to his pockets. Mr Takei studies the passport. Name: John Allen Kuchar Zegrus Strange sounding name. Perhaps he is not
American after all. Date of birth looks about right, the photograph matches,
the passport number looks legitimate… ‘Do you speak much Japanese?’ ‘Some. I have been studying hard to improve
ahead of my visit. I prefer French.’ His Japanese was good. A bit stiff, but he
could clearly hold a conversation. Mr Takei flicks through the pages of the passport.
Plenty of stamps in here already. UK, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Ethiopia, Chile,
the US, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, United Arab Republic. Mr Takei is not
familiar with some of these stamps. There aren’t many visitors to Japan from some
of these countries. He studies each in detail. ‘Very widely traveled. What do you do for
work sir, if you don’t mind my asking?’ It wasn’t a question. It was a command. ‘I am a businessman. I trade in plastics, mostly.’ ‘And you are here for business?’ ‘Yes.’ It all seems to check out. Mr Zegrus was
well traveled certainly, and that always aroused suspicion, but his passport looks utterly
genuine. There are no grounds for detaining him. ‘If you will, sir,’ Mr Zegrus says. ‘My wife
has just gone through. May I go and join her?’ Mr Takei comes out of his stupor and
nods. He flips the passport closed and hands it across the desk. But when
Mr Zegrus reaches out to take it, the Japanese man does not let go. His eyes are
fixed on the seal embossed on the front of the passport. Mr Takei snatches it back and
stares at Mr Zegrus with fierce suspicion. ‘Is there a problem, sir?’ Mr Zegrus asks,
confusion and fear written across his face. Mr Takei takes the passport and stares at the name
of the country written on the front. Taured. He flips the document around and points at the
country name on it. Mr Zegrus looks puzzled. ‘Taured, yes. That is where I am from.’ Mr Takei tries to explain as politely
but directly as possible that there is no such country as Taured.
Mr Zegrus laughs in surprise. ‘Why of course there is.’ He points a hand to the map up
above them. To Southern Europe. ‘It is right there.’ ‘Sir, that is Spain.’ ‘No, not Spain. Above it, sandwiched
between Spain and France.’ ‘Andorra.’ ‘No, Taured!’ Mr Zegrus is getting increasingly exasperated. His
raised voice draws the eyes of fellow passengers and security guards alike. Mr Takei quietly
presses a silent alarm button under his desk. ‘My country has a long rich
history. We have existed for over 1,000 years. We are a European superpower!’ A pair of guards appear at his shoulders and
wrap their arms through his, hauling him away. ‘What is going on? How do
you not know of Taured?!’ He starts speaking in French, shouting
at the guards and appealing to all his fellow passengers, until he disappears behind a pair of doors as the atrium falls silent
once again. Mr Takei takes a deep sigh. ‘Next, please.’ But as the Kyoto businessman shuffles forward, Mr
Takei can’t help but glance up at the map. Taured? * Atsuyuki Sassa rubs his temples as he steps
into the hotel elevator. It had been a very long and very confusing day, all built on
an utterly ridiculous lie. Working at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Public
Security Bureau, you would be shocked at the number of days wasted on chasing farcical leads
around. This latest case has been no exception. Mr Zegrus has been taken to a hotel
to be held under investigation. Two guards stand ready outside his door day
and night to make sure he doesn’t escape. He is being kept in downtown Tokyo, on
the thirteenth floor of a hotel block. Mr Atsuyuki had been drafted in to
try to make sense of what to do with him. No matter how much he or anyone
else tries to explain it to Mr Zegrus, the foreign man refuses to accept that
he is from a country that does not exist. They had studied his passport over and
over. It appears to be entirely legitimate, except for the glaring error that it is from
a totally fictional nation. Why would a forger go to all this effort to expertly make
a passport so convincing in every detail only to make it such an obvious fake? Unless
they were out of touch with European politics, perhaps. Mr Atsuyuki had been on the phone all
afternoon with Japanese embassies in France, Spain, and Andorra, where each time they were
met with more confusion at the mention of Taured. ‘My passport was issued at Tamanrasset, the
capital of Taured south of the Sahara.’ John Zegrus had explained as if talking to infant
children. South of the Sahara? In Europe? What a ridiculous lie to tell with such fervor.
The man was either insane or in way over his head with something. Or… Mr Atsuyuki laughed to
himself. He had been reading too much science fiction. The other explanation that had popped
into his head had been almost too ridiculous to even think about. But as he stepped out onto the
carpeted hotel hallway, his imagination started to fill in the gaps on the only theory that would
make sense. Except, of course, it was impossible. What if Mr Zegrus is actually from a parallel
universe? What if he somehow got on a flight in one universe and touched down in another? A
universe where his home country never existed, and now he was trapped here, confused and afraid. Mr Atsuyuki laughs to himself again. The guards
stationed by the door smile, asking what is so funny, but he brushes their questions aside.
Just his imagination running away with itself. He unlocks the door and steps into the room. ‘Good evening, Mr Zegrus. I was wondering
if you would be able to answer some more…’ But the room is totally empty. The window
is closed, and the bathroom is open. No air vents. A perfect indent was left on the neatly
made bed in precisely the shape of a person. Only there was no person left. * When you get down to the subatomic level, the
rules governing our universe start to break down. Logic, mathematics, time and space, cause
and effect, the laws of physics. These are all things that we cling to tightly at our level of
existence. Even the most spiritual anti-scientific minds rely on these basic things to get through
life. They are so fundamental to our existence that we simply cannot comprehend a world where
their laws are even twisted, let alone broken. Take for example, Werner Heisenberg’s
‘uncertainty principle’. It’s quite an apt name for how it makes you feel. Heisenberg
posits that you can either know the position or the speed of a particle, but not both. This
is ridiculous to our minds. Imagine you are meeting with a friend and you call them to
ask how close they are. They tell you that they can either tell you precisely where
they are or how quickly they are driving, but not both. If they so much as look at
a street sign then all of a sudden their speedometer will go haywire. Or if they look at
the dash then Google Maps will uninstall itself. And yet, that appears to be
how the quantum realm works. This is the idea that also underpins what
is called ‘superposition.’ A particle, until it is observed, does not have a fixed
location. Like refusing to look at Google Maps on your phone. You could be absolutely
anywhere. But it’s a step further than that. Until you look at Google Maps, your car is
somehow everywhere possible at the same time, both at home and in your friend’s driveway and
all the way along the route between the two. To try to illustrate this mind-bending concept,
Erwin Schrodinger created a very famous conceptual experiment. You place a cat in a box. The box
is closed with no way of observing what is happening inside. Also in the box with the cat is
a small vial of gaseous poison. This poison will be released when the radioactive substance
in its trigger decays through a subatomic process. Since the cat’s life is hinging
on the position of a subatomic particle, and we cannot see in the box, the particle exists
in a state of superposition. It is both released and unreleased at the same time. So the poison
is both triggered and contained. The cat is both alive and dead. Only when we open the box
and look inside will the superposition end, and the cat will either look up
at us in confusion or lie still. What does this have to do with John Zegrus? Schrodinger's Cat is our glimpse into the
possible reality of parallel universes. In that moment of superposition, as the
cat is both alive and dead in the box, there are two realities
coexisting with one another. Think of reality like a piece of string. As the
cat is in the box, the string comes apart and separates into two threads, each previously
joined but now apart. It’s the same reality, the same string, but in that moment there are
two versions of it coexisting. You open the box and one of the threads continues becoming the
true reality, while the other withers away into a loose end. Except the universe does not work
like this. Reality does not just stop existing. It’s not that one of those versions of reality was
really true the whole time and we just couldn’t tell which it was. They were both as true as
each other. When you look at our world now, it doesn’t just blink out of existence
at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t just stop out of nowhere. So what is
happening to that loose thread? What if it doesn’t just disappear? What if that thread is still going, but has just
separated off away from us? What if while you open the box and burst into tears at the sight of Mr
Tibbles lying dead because you played with poison, there is another version of you at the same
time lifting their beloved cat out of the box and promising never to do that again? How would
your lives diverge from that point? Whilst one of you is digging a little grave in your garden
and answering some harsh but fair questions from your family, the other you is dressing Mr Tibbles
in a bowtie and raking in brand deals on Tik Tok? Now imagine, every little moment of uncertainty
in the world led to a moment like this. Anytime particles were in superposition and
then forced to take one location of another. Each one spawning another parallel
thread. Universes coming off universes. It’s a concept we are all familiar with,
from Marvel’s escapades in the multiverse, to Rick and Morty leaping through portals, all the
way back to Plato and earlier. Heaven and Hell, Jannah and Jahannam, Valkyrie. We have always
had a deep lying concept of another reality running parallel to our own. As much
as it blows our minds to think about, there is clearly something deep-rooted
in us that is drawn to the idea. What we’ve always wanted to do is cross that line, from one parallel universe into
another. So is it possible? There are a number of cases throughout history that tell that perhaps it could be.
Let’s take a look at three of them. First up, we have the Green Children of Woolpit.
The oldest of our accounts of parallel universe travelers, this tale takes us back to England
in the 12th century. One night in the town of Woolpit in Suffolk, a pair of scared and
sickly children wandered into the common. One boy and one girl. Some locals rushed out to
help them but were shocked at what they saw when they brought the children into their candlelit
home. The childrens’ skin was totally green. They wrapped blankets around the
children and asked them where they had come from. Who were
their parents? Were they sick? But question after question, the children would
not respond. They seemed not to understand the words that were being spoken to them. Try
as the adults might, the children would just stare blankly at them. They couldn’t speak
English. If this had been the streets of London, where foreign trade was common, and ships
were arriving and departing all the time, it would be one thing, but they were deep
into the countryside and far from any ports. Concerned at the children’s apparent ill health,
they offered them food: bread, potatoes, meat, stews, milk. But the children did not eat any
of it. They looked at the food with the same confused expressions they’d worn as they were
being spoken to. Despairing, the adults offered them everything in their pantry and eventually
found something the little girl would eat: beans. But the boy still would not take a bite.
No matter what they tried to feed the boy, he simply refused, and within a few days, his
sickness overcame him, and he died. The girl, on the other hand, seemed to improve. The
more she ate, and the longer she stayed, the less green her skin became
until she eventually looked no different to any other girl. She was
baptized and steadily learned English. Once she was able to, she explained where she had
come from. It was a place she called ‘St Martin’s Land’. There it was always dark. She and her
brother had lived underground, as did everyone else, and everything there was green in color.
They had been out playing and discovered a cave. Walking through it, they found themselves
in Woolpit with no way of returning home. She went on to live the
rest of her life in Woolpit, never quite understanding what had happened
and always feeling rebellious and angry. Our next account comes from the 1800s and hinges
around an important event in world history, the split between the US and UK. In the 19th
century, the eccentric British inventor William Cantelo was working on his latest project: a
gun that would reload itself and fire again instantly in rapid succession. Like a
machine in a factory. A machine-gun. Thrilled with his prototype finally working in the
1880s, Cantelo announced to his sons that he was taking the weapon to market and left his home
in Southampton. Cantelo was never seen again. But here’s where the real mystery comes
in. 20 years later, an American inventor by the name of Hiram Maxim came along with
his own prototype. It’s a machine gun, just like the one Cantelo invented. But
that’s not the strange part, this is: Henry Maxim looks identical to the missing William
Cantelo, so much so that Cantelo’s own sons could barely tell the difference between the two men.
In his autobiography, released late in his life, Maxim recounts how he had spent years
being plagued by a man ‘impersonating’ him. Could it be that this mysterious
coincidence could, in fact, point to something greater? That one
of these two parallel inventors living parallel lives may have accidentally
crossed from one universe into another? Well, that may be precisely what happened to
this historical figure. For this one we are going to 1851 in Frankfurt, Germany. Late at
night, a pair of police officers spot a man wandering through the streets looking scared
and confused. Assuming he has had a big night, officers approach him and try to talk to him.
Very quickly, they realize that he speaks almost no German. His name is Jophar Vorin. The police
have to speak very slowly and simply, using a lot of hand gestures to help him understand, but
yet Vorin seems to be totally present mentally. He tells them that he is from Laxaria. When
they tell him they don’t know that country, he tells them it is on the continent of Sakria.
The man is not intoxicated or mentally unwell. He states these facts quite plainly, surprised that
the men do not recognize the words he is saying. They get European officials to question the
man, to try and help him find his way home. Interviewer after interviewer tries language
after language but they cannot find a tongue that Vorin is comfortable with. Broken
English is the closest they can get to his native language. He tells them he speaks Laxarian
and Abramian fluently. Neither language exists. He explains calmly and confidently that
Laxarian is spoken only by clerics. The police are even more confused. He is a
Christian, he tells them. They ask what denomination. Ipatian. Again, another
answer that does not appear to be real. He tells them that he has come to Germany
in search of a missing relative but was shipwrecked on his way here. Since
the shipwreck, everything has been so unfamiliar and strange. He wants to return
to Sakria. He is afraid and confused. And soon after his interrogation he disappears,
never to be seen or heard from again. Which brings us back to our main
story here: Mr John Zegrus. The man from Taured who disappeared from his
hotel room. The man with a perfectly real passport for a place that does not exist.
The traveler from another parallel universe… Will we ever get to the bottom of
what happened in Tokyo in 1954? Yes. And it starts with our first shocking twist
of many. This did not happen in 1954 at all. It happened five years later, in 1959. The
mysterious story, which had at first been local only to Japan, was picked up by international
writers several years later who changed some of the key details. Jacques Bergier, a writer,
journalist, chemical engineer, and spy (what a resume!) told a version of the story that altered
some of the key details. In his version of events, John Zegrus claimed that Taured was a nation that
‘stretched from Mauritania to Sudan and included a large part of Algeria.’ This did not happen.
Bergier also said that Zegrus was locked up in a psychiatric institution where he revealed that
he was in Tokyo to secretly ‘buy arms for the true Arab Legion.’ As fantastical and exciting
as this version of events is, it’s not true. So what is true? Well, Atsuyuki Sassa really did work on the case.
He was a member of the TMPD Public Security Bureau and was tasked with investigating a man
with a fake passport. Thankfully for us, Mr Atsuyuki wrote a memoir. In it, he documents
his encounters with John Zegrus and the mystery surrounding the whole situation. Here
is where we can find out the truth! Was John Zegrus really from another parallel
universe? Or is the truth even more exciting? This is where we have to admit to some small
deception on our own part. Upon entering the country, John Zegrus had not been stopped by
passport control at all. Modern accounts and urban legends tell that version of the tale, but
it differs from the official records. In reality, in October 1959 (not July 1954, sorry) John Zegrus
was able to enter the country freely along with his wife from Korea. The couple kept a low profile
in the country for three months, with little known about their movements or activities. Suspicion
came, as it always does, when money was involved. Mr Zegrus, in the new year in 1960, arrived
at the Japanese office of Chase Manhattan Bank. Doing his best to look normal, he
attempted to cash a 200,000 yen cheque (worth just over $500 at the time) and a
second US cheque for a further $140. Today, those values would be roughly 10x as much
due to inflation. He then had a cheque for another 100,000 yen that he tried to cash
at the Japanese office of the Bank of Korea. A strange man, with little documentation
and reason for being in Japan suddenly cashing foreign cheques without
explanation. Red flags were raised, an investigation was launched
and John Zegrus was arrested on suspicion of identity fraud. The man in
charge of the case was Atsuyuki Sassa. The TMPD Public Security Bureau reviewed his
documentation, including his passport. He was widely traveled, with stamps in it from Japanese
embassies all across East Asia. At first glance it would look totally convincing. But when
they actually started to study it in detail, it quickly became apparent that the
passport was a fake. A good one but a fake. Only two people have fake passports: spies and
conmen. Atsuyuki’s heartbeat quickened. Had they just caught an international spy
trying to enter Japan’s capital city? He sat down in the interrogation room with
Zegrus and grilled him. They had the fake passport. They had suspicious cheques. They
already had all they needed to prosecute him for his crimes. But there was a lingering
question still in the air. Who was he? And before long, Zegrus cracked. He spilled
everything to Atsuyuki about his past and why he was there. He had been born in the US but
was moved around all through his childhood. First the UK, then Czechoslovakia, before
ending up in Germany where he went to high school. At the start of the war however,
he had returned to the UK to fight for the Allies as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. In
a fierce battle, his plane had been shot down and he was captured and held by the Nazis
until the end of the war. Finally free, he decided to escape the chaos of Europe and lived
briefly in Latin America before getting involved with the Americans based in South Korea. They
recruited him as a spy and sent him off to be a pilot in Thailand and Vietnam. Finally he ended
up in the United Arab Republic where he was given the special mission that he was in the middle
of at that very moment. He had been sent to Japan to recruit military volunteers from the
inside to fight for the United Arab republic. Finally Zegrus stopped talking and
Atsuyuki sat back in his chair rubbing his temples. That had been such a barrage of
information he didn’t know where to start. * Some months later, a news story broke in a small
Canadian newspaper under the title ‘The Man With His Own Country’. It told of a foreigner who had
arrived on Japanese soil with a false passport. The man had claimed to be ‘a naturalized Ethiopian
and an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser’, and was carrying a passport ‘issued at Tamanrasset,
the capital of Taured south of the Sahara’. This story had changed a number of details from
the case already and contained in it one crucial spelling error: Taured. In reality, it should
have read ‘Taureg’ which is the name of an ethnic group or Berbers from the Saharan region.
Tamanrasset is a real province in Algeria. From this news story, urban legends sprung up.
Taured, the unknown country. Fictional account after fictional account told through second hand
sources layered levels and levels of mystery on top of the story, carrying it steadily further
and further from the reality of what happened. Whether ‘Taured’ was a misspelling by the
newspaper, a source they were interviewing, or a misspelling in the passport itself
that tipped off its illegitimacy, who knows? What we do know is that there have been so many
regurgitated accounts of the ‘Man from Taured’ that supernatural or science fiction explanations
are required to make sense of what happened. So what happened to John Zegrus? Did he really disappear from a hotel room
like the urban legends state? Atsuyuki Sassa worked hard to check all of the
facts that John Zergus had presented to him in the interrogation room. From his birth in the US,
through his membership in different militaries, work as a spy, and travels all around the
world. Atsuyuki called embassy after embassy, looking for verification that this
man’s story of his life was true. And phone call after phone call he
was met with disappointment. No, they had not heard of a John Zegrus.
He did not show up in any of their official documents. The man was not
an RAF pilot, the man was not a spy. Remember, there are only two people who would
carry a fake passport: spies and conmen. Atsuyuki had ruled one of those out definitively. All
of the remaining evidence - the frequent lies, the delusions of grandeur, the travel, the
suspicious cheques - pointed to one thing. John Zegrus was nothing more
than a conman. Now the only question remaining was what to do with him? * But before we get to that, is travelling to
another universe like Zegrus claimed to do in this misinterpreted story actually possible? The
stories we have covered in this video are all most likely urban legends. The story of the Woolpit
Children is likely either local folklore or a story passed through such a long chain of Chinese
whispers that it has lost all connection with reality. The story of William Costelo and Hiram
Maxim was likely just a coincidence. Jophar Vorin could have been mentally ill, concussed,
or just playing a trick on the police. There are rational explanations to each account. But that doesn’t scratch the itch. Could
you actually travel to a parallel universe? In a way we already are. Every second
of every day we are making decisions. These decisions created new branching
pathways, each one springing off into a new parallel universe. Do you get a flat white
or a cappuccino? Do you sit on the bus or stand? Every moment of our lives we are traversing
a multiverse. In a moment of decision we are taking one path while another version of
yourself is taking another. So technically we are taking all of the paths. But
that isn’t very satisfying. We have no awareness of the other paths and
can’t see what’s going on with that version of yourself that did decide to quit
their job to pursue a career in parkour. Sadly there is no easy solution that we
can see as of yet that will allow us to simply pop our heads through into a parallel
universe and check out what’s going on. Our brains and bodies just aren’t built for that but
there is a lot more hope than you might think. Because we already have access to brains
that can do that: quantum computers. A traditional computer at its most
fundamental level works in binary. Everything is a one or a zero. Our
computers, designed by our minds, work like we do. There is a set logic
that is fixed and understandable to us. But quantum computers break those rules. Remember when we explained earlier in the
video briefly how superposition works? Subatomic particles can occupy
two states of being at once, both equally valid until our observation
forces them to be one or the other. Build a computer around that principle and
you end up with something very strange. A computer that doesn’t see a one or a
zero, but can see both at the same time. A simple string of binary code, like
00001, is made up of five bits. A bit is just the smallest possible measure of
data the computer can have. A 1 or a 0. But with a quantum computer you suddenly
are not dealing with bits anymore, but with qubits. The simple bit suddenly
explodes with complexity as each digit can be either or both at the same time in a
qubit. You can now conduct exponentially more calculations as they are all happening at
the same time within the same line of binary. Does that make sense? It doesn’t,
does it. And that’s why quantum computing could be our answer to
seeing into parallel universes. It sounds like the stuff of science
fiction but quantum computers already exist. They are very difficult to
operate and quite crude compared to where they will end up in a few decades
time, but they are real and functional. To give you an illustration
of how fast they can operate, Google conducted an experiment with their
quantum computer in 2019. They gave it a calculation that would take the world’s
fastest conventional supercomputer over 10,000 years to work through. Their quantum
computer had it solved in 200 seconds. This is a bit scary. Take the messages on
your phone. They are probably encrypted end to end so that only you and the person you are
messaging can read them. Essentially encryption in a nutshell is just a way of putting a really
long hidden password on each message that would take a ridiculously long time to crack. A quantum
computer would have no problem cracking it. But it’s not just your WhatsApp messages that are
encrypted. Banking data, nuclear launch codes, presidential correspondence, military plans,
our entire world is built on encryption. So how are these quantum computers so scary fast? By operating in these seemingly parallel worlds.
The qubits within the quantum computer exist in superposition, they are both 1 and 0 at the same
time. When we try to observe one or the other, the superposition collapses and we are
locked into our timeline. A quantum computer does not have this issue. It runs
its code in our timeline and in the other timeline at the same time. The reason
it can be as fast as it is is because it is literally existing and operating
in multiple parallel universes at once. So how can we use that? One disturbing science fiction
idea that is creeping closer and closer to us in the background of the
AI races and Neuralink controversies, is mind-uploading. Replacing your brain with
a computer. Uploading your consciousness. What if slowly over time you replaced components
of your brain with tiny computerized versions of them? You maintain your consciousness and
sense of self the whole time. First your hippocampus. You still feel like you, but now
there’s a computer that’s picked up where the neurons left off. Then your hypothalamus.
No change. Like the ship of Theseus, you replace one thing at a time until none
of the original remains. Eventually every part of your brain is now a tiny quantum
computer, but you are still you… right? Now, all of these pesky neurons with their
binary limitations and inability to perceive what could be beyond have been replaced. Qubits
are the building blocks of your mind. And with them you can finally understand, finally
see directly, into a parallel universe… * On 10 August 1960, five days after the
rumor mill had already started spinning with the publication of the inaccurate news
story in Canada, the Tokyo District Court sentenced John Zegrus to a year in prison for
identity fraud. He was distraught and afraid. After a year in prison, he was deported to Hong
Kong. His wife was deported to South Korea. And that is the last that the world heard
about John Zegrus, but chillingly it may not be the last time we hear about a person
who has seen into a parallel universe… Now check out “Weirdest Unsolved
Mysteries.” Or watch this video instead!
