Another day at work. You never exactly dreamed of working in border
control at an airport when you were growing up – in fact, you hoped to become a world-renowned
chef – but it’s 1956 in Tokyo, and you had to take what you could get to support
your family. So, here you are. Pretending to thoroughly examine the passports
placed in front of you when really there’s no doubt in your mind that the person in front
of you matches their photo. Smiling and playing along when another annoying
tourist greets you by saying ‘Konnichiwa.’ Your mind is off in another world dreaming
of crème brûlée when a smart-looking white guy in a nice suit approaches you. Nothing out of the ordinary there – but
something catches your eye. His passport looks kind of…weird. It’s blue, but it has almost a purple tinge
to it. And that’s not the only thing – you don’t
recognize the design on the front either. Is that a flower? A lion? Who knows? As someone who works day in and day out checking
the passports of visitors to Tokyo, you thought you’d seen pretty much every passport under
the sun – but this one has got you curious. As Mr. Suave approaches, you notice he’s
looking slightly disoriented, but you assume it’s probably just jetlag. After all, he must be from a pretty exotic
and far-off location for you of all people to not recognize his passport. As he passes the passport over, you do a double-take. Wait, what? The document states very clearly that it’s
issued by the country of Taured. Now, you can’t claim to know every country
in the world without fail, but you’re pretty sure there’s nowhere in the world called
Taured. Starting to think you’re going insane, you
consult your documents to check you’ve not had a minor case of amnesia – but nope,
Taured isn’t listed as a nation. Could it be one of those places caught up
in a weird dispute about its sovereignty? Are you just being dumb and actually Taured
is a way of saying Namibia in Afrikaans? Conversing with you in fluent Japanese, he
assures you that he’s from Taured, thank you very much. Getting slightly irritated, he says he came
to this very airport two times already this year and never had any issue getting through
security before. Sure enough, he has passport stamps from Japan
and other locations across the world, as well as having various currencies in his wallet. When you tell him you don’t believe Taured
to be a country, he looks at you in disgust like you’re the crazy one and says his nation
has existed for a thousand years and is one of the most prosperous in the world. Ok, boomer. You sit in silence for a few seconds and try
to process what’s happening. Could this be some sort of elaborate hoax? Maybe, but who would be stupid enough to pull
on a prank on a border control officer? Besides, this guy looks just as stressed as
you are – he’s either an incredible actor, or he’s genuinely from a country that doesn’t
exist. Oh, hang on a minute, what are you even saying? Realizing you need some backup – and maybe
some moral support too – you call your boss over. He doesn’t know where Taured is either,
which is slightly reassuring as it proves that you’re not the one going insane, but
it does raise some larger questions. Who the hell is this guy, how did he get here,
and why do his documents look kind of legit? Your boss produces a map to ask the man where
Taured is. What an ideas man – you can see why he’s
in charge and not you. You expect him to point to the middle of the
Indian Ocean or something, but much to your surprise, he places his finger on the border
between France and Spain. Isn’t there that other country nobody ever
talks about that’s between the border of France and Spain? Andorra? Oh, wait, he’s literally pointing at Andorra. Nice try, bud. This is getting ridiculous now – yet he
remains indignant that Taured does exist. You’re both sat there scratching your heads,
but this guy is starting to get angry. He explains he has a business meeting tomorrow
and would like to get to his hotel soon, thank you very much. Curious, you ask to see the supposed reservation. He smugly hands you a handwritten note with
the phone number and the name of the hotel. You’ve heard of the place, actually – but
when you ring, the hotel says they have no reservation in the name given. He asks you to ring the man he has a business
meeting with tomorrow instead – but the same thing happens. Even the bank in his checkbook doesn’t exist. At this point, the man has completely lost
his original swagger and is visibly shaken, his face turned pale. He begs you to let him leave the airport,
saying he doesn’t know what’s happening but he has nothing to hide and just needs
to rest. Of course, it’s not that simple. You’re actually starting to feel bad for
the guy, but you have no choice but to detain him in a nearby hotel guarded by immigration
officials. When you go home that night, you can’t stop
thinking about what just happened. Maybe you’ll wake up the next morning and
there will suddenly be a logical explanation for everything. Or maybe your boss will tell you it was all
some kind of joke or weird protocol and he can’t believe you fell for it. Instead, you wake up to some alarming news. The man has disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Evaporated. Gone in a poof. Okay, you get the idea. The immigration officials who were guarding
his room last night went to check on him in the morning and found he was nowhere to be
seen. They claimed they stayed awake the whole night
and barely heard a single noise from within the room. Well, accidents happen. Freak accidents happen. But get a load of this – his personal documents
were gone too. Even if you’re willing to believe that the
guards somehow fell asleep, or the man escaped through the window, how would he have retrieved
his things? They were being held in an entirely separate
location. How would he have even known where they were? It makes no sense. It’s almost like it didn’t happen… funny
that… but anyway. There are reports of similar incidents taking
place. When I say reports, I don’t mean police
reports or anything along those lines – just that some tale started going around. There’s one report of a man found wandering
around Germany in 1850 who claimed to be from a country called Laxaria on the continent
of Sakria. Because that totally doesn’t sound like
a load of letters flung together to create a made-up word. The man could only speak a form of broken
German and knew no other major European languages. In his imperfect German, he explained that
he’d traveled from Laxaria across oceans to find his long-lost brother but had suffered
a shipwreck and was now unable to find where he was or where he had come from on a map. Similarly, in 1905 a man caught stealing bread
in Paris started speaking an unrecognizable language and claiming to be from a place called
Lizbia. And I mean, we’d have no reason not to trust
a man who just got caught committing a crime. But apparently, the language he spoke appeared
to have a real structure rather than being jibber jabber. So, how can we explain these strange, unbelievable
events? Some have pointed to the Mandela Effect. Remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison back
in the 80s? If your answer is yes, then you’re not the
only one. Many people from across the world claim to
have seen TV and newspaper clips about Mandela passing away all those years ago, yet a quick
Google search confirms that he was released from prison and died only in 2013. The Mandela Effect describes phenomena like
this where numerous people share the same false memory. Some claim the effect is easily explained
by being people misremembering facts – maybe they just have a memory of Mandela being stuck
in prison for a long time and assumed he died. Wow, way to spoil all the fun. But still, there are some strange details
that are harder to explain – why do so many people seem to remember the same exact details
from his funeral? Put aside your logical explanations for a
second and embrace the suspension of disbelief. Imagine that we exist within an infinite number
of parallel universes. Many of these universes are practically identically
save for a few minor details. So, in this universe, I’m narrating a video
for the Infographics Show about a man from a country called Taured that doesn’t exist,
and in another, I’m narrating a video about a man from a country called Andorra that doesn’t
exist. Trippy. It sounds a little crazy, but there are a
few cases of people seemingly entering different dimensions. One woman, called Lerina Garcia Gordo, woke
up one day in pajamas she didn’t recognize. Most aspects of her life appeared to be the
same – she lived in the same house and took the same route to work in the same car. Yet as her day went on, she noticed many more
minor inconsistencies and experienced a severe case of jamais vu. When Lerina arrived at work, she noticed some
people she didn’t recognize in the building. Bizarrely, the door of her office had the
wrong name on the front. After checking her IDs, she found that every
single card had the same wrong name on it, too. Worse of all, when she tried to ring her boyfriend,
she couldn’t find his name on her phone. Instead, it seemed that she was still with
her ex-boyfriend – someone she’d broken up with years ago. Thinking she might have suffered amnesia,
Lerina checked the news, expecting to see completely different stories to those she
had read last night. Eerily, everything was exactly the same. There was only one explanation: she was now
in a different dimension. How did she get there? One idea is that wormholes allow us to slide
between different parallel universes. Did Lerina and the travelers from unknown
countries all fall into wormholes by accident? Maybe the man from Taured found another wormhole
and was able to return – or travel to yet another dimension. If you think that’s wacky, there are even
stranger theories. Maybe there was a glitch in the matrix causing
the people to appear and then eventually the Matrix, erm, realized its mistake and sucked
them straight back. Alternatively, it could be true that when
we die in one dimension, we move to another so we can continue living. Perhaps Lerina died in her sleep in one reality
and woke up in another? Some people have even proposed time travel. It seems unlikely that Lerina and the other
men were time travelers themselves, but they could have been affected by someone else traveling
back in time and changing the timeline of one universe. So, Taured could be from the past or the future. Although, the man didn’t seem to stand out
in the airport in a way you’d expect someone who just arrived from hundreds of years in
the future. But could the timelines have been reversed
so much that 1950s Japan in one universe is equivalent to Japan in year 3000 in another? Sheesh, this is getting complex. Of course, there is another explanation behind
all of this. I hate to be a party pooper, but it’s totally
possible that the whole thing is just, well, made up. You might have been wondering what original
source or evidence I’ve been using, and I’ve got to admit, I got nothing. The story about the man from Taured was first
mentioned in ‘The Directory of Possibilities,’ a reference book about paranormal phenomena
like ghosts and healing. The book has no evidence to prove this shocking
tale really happened, and it doesn’t make much sense that an event that supposedly happened
back in the 1950s only came to light almost thirty years later. But who can say it isn’t real? After all, the airport officials would never
have made an official record of such a confusing event due to the controversy it would originate,
right? Well, irrational as it sounds, I’m a sucker
for a conspiracy theory myself. If you’re with me on that one, why not check
out our videos about whether aliens are watching your right now and if the earth could really
be flat.
