A Strange Man From An Alternative Reality Arrived In Japan 1954 |

A Strange Man From An Alternative Reality Arrived In Japan 1954

April 23, 2012

This is one of the classic time-rip cases, that once a while pops up. always very mysterious and totally unexplainable. This is about the Tokyo time-traveler. The man who arrived in Japan that day in 1954 was certainly a stranger in a strange land. A Westerner in the land of the East, he towered above most of the Japanese people milling about the Tokyo airport complex. But soon, amazed customs officials found the man was more than just a stranger in their midst. The impossible man was a stranger from a stranger world—a world that existed in another universe entirely!

There have been many reports of visitors from elsewhere dropping in on this island Earth from time to time. In 1954, the Japanese authorities detained a man trying to enter the country with a passport that revealed he was from an unheard country named ‘Taured’. A thorough check was made by the customs officials to see if there was such a place anywhere on Earth, but they drew a blank. The stranger refused to throw light on the whereabouts of the mysterious nation of Taured and quickly left Japan. An incident smacking of very high strangeness occurred almost 60 years ago in Japan. Parts of the story were related in several books about the weird and strange published during the 1950s. A brief reference to the incident appears online at various Dark Stories. Gathering together as many of the details as possible (some may be forever lost in history), the tale takes on an eerie aspect and certainly qualifies as one more possible glimpse into the infinite worlds of the multiverse.

Japan Airlines – Haneda (Tokyo International) Airport, 1954

Flight from nowhere

The day started like any other for the men and women of the Japanese customs. They bowed to their superiors and took their places behind the counters of the facility located near the staging area of the international arrivals terminal. As the airliners from other nations arrived and passengers deplaned, the new arrivals queued as they always did—waiting for the interviews, inspections and the anticipation of having their passports and visas stamped so they could embark on their way towards the hustle and bustle of a Toyko now back to normal nine years after the end of World War Two.

But what started out normally soon devolved into puzzlement, and then amazement, when one of the arrivals that had flown from Europe presented his passport. The travel document claimed he was from a country none had heard of in their careers. Even the most senior customs officials were stymied by the passport that, in every other respect, looked authentic.
According to the passport, the man was from a country named Taured. They pulled the traveler aside and escorted him to an interrogation room for an interview while they conducted a background check. The mystery man appeared Caucasian, said his country was in Europe and carried legal currency from several European countries in a well-made, over-sized billfold.

Confusion and anger

While the customs officials were confused, the subject of their bewilderment grew increasingly angry. He claimed he was in Japan on business, the third such trip that year. He’d been traveling to Japan for more than five years and his company was a subsidiary of a growing international conglomerate.

While it was true that the man’s passport corroborated his story—the document had many previous custom’s and visa stamps—no record of his country existed. And when the company he claimed to have pending meetings with was contacted they stated categorically they never heard of him, nor of the company he said he represented. Equally puzzling were the man’s other documents: he carried a drivers license issued by his country—but the country didn’t exist. He also had an international drivers license, but that too was invalid. A checkbook contained checks for an account with an unknown bank. The hotel he insisted he had reservations with had no record whatsoever of him.

Truly a stranger in a strange world.

The man spoke several languages including Japanese. He said his native language was French and when shown a map of the world expressed what seemed to be genuine shock that his country wasn’t on it. He told officials that Taured was located where the Principality of Andorra, part of Spain, and part of France was shown on the map. He was adamant that no such country as Andorra existed and his country had existed for almost 1,000 years. Had the entire world gone mad? he must have wondered. The Japanese wondered themselves as they stared back at the impossible man who certainly appeared well-traveled.

Right airport, wrong world

Hours passed and instead of gleaning answers, the puzzle only deepened. Finally, the man demanded to see higher government authorities. By then he thought a massive and cruel practical joke was being played on him. After being detained in the airport’s cramped security room for almost eight hours, the customs officials took pity on him. They sent him to a nearby hotel with orders that the mystery visitor wait until a decision was reached on the matter.

The Vanishing act

At the hotel, two immigration officials were given orders not to permit the man to leave his room. After eating a small supper provided by the hotels’ room service, the man without a country retired for the evening. The guards maintained their post in the hallway outside the hotel room throughout the wee morning hours. At no time did they hear any sounds coming from within the room. The next morning the guards discovered the odd European had vanished. The only exit from the room was the door they watched and the only window had no outside ledge and was located far above a busy street.

Did the man from another world find his way home?

Customs and immigration officials, and the Tokyo police, mounted an intensive search for the incredible traveler, but finally gave it up. The man from the country that didn’t exist was not seen again. Hopefully, he found his way back home.

Similar incidents just as weird!

A similar incident occurred in 1851 when a man calling himself Joseph Vorin was found wandering in the German village of Frankfurt-an-der Oder. When the German authorities asked the man where he was from, Vorin told them that he was from Laxaria, a country on the continent of Sakria. This baffled the authorities because neither of the places existed anywhere on their map of the world!

In 1905, a young man who was arrested in Paris for stealing a loaf was found to speak an unknown language, and after a lengthy interrogation session, the man managed to convey that he was from a place called Lizbia. Thinking he meant Lisbon, the man was shown a map of Portugal, and a Portugese interpreter was brought in to talk to the young offender, but it was soon established that the man was not from Lisbon. The language the youth spoke was not an invented babble either; it had all the consistent syntactial rules of a language similar to Esperanto. Eventually, the strange-speaking man was released – never to be seen again.

The great student of the unexplained, Charles Fort once commented on the subject of visitors from other planets: “If there have ever been instances of teleportations of human beings from somewhere else to this Earth, an examination of infirmaries and workhouses an asylums might lead to some marvellous disclosures. Early in the year 1928, a man did appear in a town in New Jersey, and did tell that he had come from the planet Mars. Wherever he came from, everybody knows where he went after telling that.”

The Best Case

One of the best documented reports of a possible visitant from another world landing in Earth came from the little French town of Alencon, which is situated about thirty miles north of Le Mans. The town is nowadays solely famous because of its fine lace, but over two hundred years ago, Alencon became renowned for something much less mundane that occurred within its vicinity.

At around 5 a.m. on June 12th, 1790, peasants watched in awe as a huge metal sphere descended from the sky, moving with a strange undulating motion. The globe crash-landed onto a hilltop, and the violent impact threw up soil and vegetation which showered the hillside. The hull of the globe was so hot (possibly from a rocket motor or because of the rapid descent through the atmosphere) that it ignited the surrounding dry flora, and a grass fire quickly broke out. The peasants rushed up the hill carrying pails of water, and within a short time, the fires were extinguished.

A large crowd encircled the crashed globe, and some of the more adventurous people present stepped forward to touch the hull of the unearthly craft to discover that it was quite warm. A physician, two mayors from nearby towns and a number of officials turned up to see what had descended from the morning sky, and these important witnesses arrived just in time to see something sensational.

A hatch of some sort slid open in the lower hemisphere of the globe, and a man in an outlandish, tight-fitting costume emerged through the hatchway and surveyed the observers with an apprehensive look. He started mumbling something in a strange language and gestured for the crowd to get away from him and his vehicle. A few people stepped back, and the man ran through the break in the circle of spectators and fled into the local woods. Some of the peasants ran away from the globe, sensing that something dangerous was about to happen. The remainder of the crowd decided to follow suit, and seconds after the last members of the multitude had retreated from the sphere, it exploded with a peculiar muffled sound, creating a miniature mushroom-shaped cloud. The debris from the craft ‘sizzled’ in the grass, and gradually turned to powder.

A police inspector named Liabeuf traveled over a hundred miles from Paris to investigate the crash, and he quizzed many of the witnesses, including the mayors and physician who had been present at the strange spectacle. The inspector organized a thorough search of the woods where the oddly-dressed man had taken refuge, but the hunt resulted in nothing. There stranger seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived.

In the report to his superiors, Inspector Liabeuf put forward the suggestion that the man who had landed in the globe could have been ‘a being from another world’ – but the high-ups in Paris dismissed the intimation as ‘a ludicrous idea’. Yeah sure!