According to some theories of quantum physics, there are infinite parallel universes that we can’t see or interact with. But what if, from time to time, that’s not true? The idea of parallel universes has saturated pop culture, and there’s not shortage of internet lore surrounding the concept. But there’s one parallel universe story that stands above the rest.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Raul Rios Centeno was stumped.
A woman came into his office in Lima, Peru, with a case of hemiplegia, meaning one half of her body was paralyzed.
He examined her and couldn’t find anything wrong, brain scans looked normal, but she couldn’t move half her body… it was a mystery.
But when she told her story of what happened to her, that’s when things went from mysterious to straight-up weird.
According to this woman, it all happened when she and her friend were camping in the Marcahuasi [maɾkaˈwasi] Stone Forest, about 60km east of Lima.
It’s a plateau in the Andes mountains with some really crazy rock formations, so they call it the stone forest. Hey, that one looks like a creepy face.
That’s fun.
So this woman and her friend were sleeping next to… that… and decided to go explore a little bit at night. You know, like a horror movie.
As they were exploring, they began to hear music and eventually saw some lights in the distance. they both seemed to be coming from an old cabin. As they got closer, they saw people dancing inside.
People… that were dressed like they were from the 17th century. And the music was from that time period, too.
The front door of the cabin was wide open and this lady couldn’t help it, she just had to know what was going on, so she stuck her head in the door to look around… and immediately collapsed to the floor.
Her friend pulled her away and tried to help her up, but that’s when they realized she couldn’t move half her body.
They stumbled back to their camp and told a park ranger what happened at the cabin. The park ranger, of course, had no idea what they were talking about. There was no cabin in that area.
At least… Not anymore!
So the good Dr. Centeno heard this story and wasn’t quite sure what to do for his patient?
I mean he was a well trained medical doctor, he was a smart guy, but they didn’t spend a lot of time in medical school talking about intertemporal spacetime slippages.
So he chose to just kind-of monitor her for a while and evidently she improved and made a full recovery.
But this one of many stories that claim to be proof of parallel universes, or inter-dimensional travel.
The idea being that there are infinite parallel universes and timelines outside our reality and sometimes… sometimes…. those two universes interact with each other.
Meaning sometimes we can see into that other universe, like in this story, or it could mean that sometimes people from some parallel universe can just… appear. In ours.
Like in the story of the man from Taured.
Where It Possibly Came From
At a special session of the British Parliament in 1960, the House of Commons was engaged in heated debate over immigration and passport reform.
This was in the early days of the Cold War and air travel was growing – they needed to update their security.
A member of Parliament named Robert Mathew came forward and made a speech arguing that passports weren’t sufficient enough for security. He wanted extra protections.
And to help make his point, he referenced a story he and his team had just heard about, of a security breach that happened in Japan.
Apparently the bloke got into the country by showing a passport from a country that doesn’t exist.
A bit weird innit?
The country that didn’t exist, according to Matthew was called Taured. And this is where the legend of the Man from Taured was born.
As legends often do, the story morphed over time. Details were added. Embellishments here and there. It eventually ended up in a popular book that came out 1979 called Into Thin Air: People Who Disappear by Paul Begg.
From here, it would float around the various mystery-oriented magazines and book compilations and radio shows, but it was when the internet arrived that the story really took off.
Many consider the story of the Man from Taured to be one of the most convincing parallel universe stories ever told. I mean they even talked about it at the House of Commons.
And there’s a reason it’s such a popular story… because there’s some truth behind it.
The Story
All right, so in case you don’t know the story, here’s the story.
It’s a hot day in Tokyo in July 1954. A man arrives at Haneda Airport. He’s Caucasian and average-looking.
He goes to the counter and pulls out his passport. But the customs officials feel that something is off about it.
It says the man is from a country called Taured. A country that doesn’t exist, at least not in this universe.
The officials question the man and ask him to point on a map where he’s from. He points to Andorra.
But that’s not what he knows it as. He knows it as Taured. He tells the officials that it should be there and that it’s been there for more than 1,000 years.
The officials also noticed that he has money from several different European countries. His passport has also been stamped by airports around the world, including previous trips to Tokyo.
Confused, the officials take the man to a local hotel and put him in a room with two guards stationed outside it.
They follow up with the company he claims he works for, but they didn’t know who he was.
They checked the hotel that he claimed to have a reservation for, but they hadn’t heard of him, either.
And the company that he was in Tokyo to do business with? That’s right, they had no clue about him.
The officials went back to the hotel room where they placed the man. But when they opened the door, they saw he was gone.
The room was several stories up, and there wasn’t a balcony. He couldn’t have jumped without hurting himself. And the guards never saw him leave.
He just flat-out disappeared and was never seen or heard from again.
Because aliens.
I’m kidding of course, that’s a crazy thing to say. Because he was actually from a parallel universe.
About Parallel Universes
The whole idea of parallel universes was first floated by U.S. physicist Hugh Everett III in 1954.
The basic gist is, a parallel universe is like a mirror of our universe, but where the outcomes have changed.
For example, in this universe, you decided to take a left at a fork in the road. In another universe, you took a right.
And that has made all the difference.
Like, you chose to watch this video. And in making that choice, you created the universe you now live in, the one in which you watched this video.
But there’s another you in a parallel universe that chose to not watch this video and instead maybe connect with another human being.
And that sounds awful.
And this splitting off different universes occurs with literally every decision you make, every moment of every day of your entire life.
Think about how many universes you’ve created just today. Now imagine that for every day of your life.
You okay, you processing that? Well now factor in that every decision that gets made in every one of those universes spawns its own universe. And every decision in that universe spawns its own universe and on and on and on.
Then keep in mind that the same thing is happening with every single human being that has ever lived, every animal that has ever lived, and in fact, every atomic interaction that occurs in the universe.
Infinity, baby.
Hugh Everett III – clearly a fan of the sticky icky.
How does a person come up with this?
The answer lies in our old friend, the double-slit experiment.
The Double Slit Experiment
I’m about 99% sure that if you watch this channel, you’re well aware of the double slit experiment, but for those of you that have been at the back of the class… carving that weird S thing into a desk, here’s a 30 second version.
So way back when, there was a debate around whether light traveled like a particle – in little bullets of energy – or like waves rippling through the water. There was evidence for both.
So they came up with the double slit experiment, where they shined light at a barrier that had two slits in it, and saw how it projected on the screen behind it. If they got an interference pattern, that would indicate it moved as waves. If they got two clusters of light, that meant they were firing through like particles.
They ran the experiment and they got an interference pattern. So light travels as waves. Interesting.
Even more interesting, when they fired the photons through one at a time, they still got an interference pattern. Meaning the photons were interacting with… themselves?
This was proof of superposition, a particle being in numerous states at once, which is how it’s able to interact with itself.
But the part that broke everyone’s brains was when they set up a measurement device on one of the slits so they could see which slit the photon is going through, and when they did that , the interference pattern went away, and they got two clusters of dots. Which means now they were acting like particles.
Something about observing the particles caused them to collapse out of their state of superposition and the quantum matter is forced to choose one state of being.
This implication about the quantum world has led to a loooot of theories and speculation.
Werner Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle that suggested observing it affects its behavior.
And Niels Bohr is actually the one that suggested that observation causes the superposition to collapse.
Everett agreed with pretty much all of that. But he disagreed with Bohr on the superposition thing.
He believed that measuring caused a split in the universe, that the universe literally duplicated itself.
So, this theory goes beyond the quantum level, too. And even no action is an action itself, splitting the universe in two.
Parallel universes also mess with our understanding of time.
Instead of a straight line progressing forward, a timeline using this theory would have to show every possible outcome for each action taken.
It’d basically be an infinite number of alternate universes.
For the record, there were some experiments done and papers published in the 90s that suggested that Everett’s theory was possible.
But that’s not proof of it and even if there was proof, it would be impossible for someone from one universe to jump to the parallel universe…
Right?
Who He Really Was
Because the Man from Taured story really did happen. Sort-of.
That House of Commons member that talked about it – Robert Mathew – he got it from somewhere. And that somewhere was a real thing that happened.
The Man From Taured’s real name was John Zegrus. At least that was the name on his passport. He was 36, and the incident happened in October 1959, not in 1954.
Zegrus was traveling with his common-law wife, who was Korean. They flew from Taiwan to Japan and unlike the Man from Taured story that we all know, he entered the country with no issues.
It was actually three months later that he got in trouble – in early 1960 – because he attempted to cash around 350,000 Yen worth of traveler’s checks at two different Tokyo banks…. with a fake passport.
Apparently the passport he had on him was kinda amateurish and homemade. It had stamps from other countries that were fake, like it was just good enough to get past an inexperienced bank teller… But I’m guessing for 350,000 yen, he got the manager.
Did I go through the trouble of figuring out how much 350,000 Yen was worth in 1959? Yes, I am that kind of nerd.
The currency exchange from yen to dollars in 1959 was 360 yen per dollar, meaning he was cashing around $1,000 of travelers checks.
But if you adjust that for inflation, that would be about $11k today.
These are not specific numbers, I rounded quite a bit but just for context, that’s what he got busted for.
So yeah, eleven thousand is nothing to sneeze at. So he got arrested and charged with bank fraud.
But it wasn’t the bank fraud that caused him to make the news and eventually get to the House of Commons. It was the backstory that he told to the police.
First of all, he claimed that he was a diplomat from the country of Negusi-Habesi, which isn’t a real place… In this universe.
According to Zegrus, he was born in the U.S., moved to Germany, then to Czechoslovakia, and then to England, where he was a fighter pilot in World War II.
He was shot down during the war and spent time in a German POW camp.
He lived in South America after the war. And then he became an intelligence agent for the U.S. in Korea.
And then he was a fighter pilot again. This time in Thailand, then in Vietnam.
After that, he joined the Arab Coalition and became a citizen of Negusi-Habesi.
Apparently, this country ordered him to go to Japan to recruit volunteers for the Arab Coalition.
Finally, he also told the police that he worked for both the CIA and the FBI.
Dude got around like Forest Gump.
So, yeah, Negusi-Habesi doesn’t exist, but Zegrus told authorities that it was south of the Sahara Desert.
The authorities tried to verify all his claims, even the made-up country, but couldn’t find a single true thing.
Zegrus went to court, where the judge ruled that he was just a tourist trying to forge traveler’s checks with a fake passport.
During his sentencing, he tried to cut his wrists with a small piece of glass. It didn’t work.
He was sentenced to one year in a Japanese prison for bank fraud. His wife was deported back to Korea.
Anyway, he served his time, after that, he was sent to Hong Kong, and from there he kinda disappeared. He dropped off the map. No records of him ever come up again.
What the Story May Have Happened
So, you might have noticed one thing that’s missing from that story is any mention of the name Taured… So how is this the same guy?
How did Robert Mathew get “Taured” from Negusi-Habesi?
Well first of all, the timeline adds up, news reports about the case started circulating about a month before his sentencing.
That’s when that Mathews and his team were looking for examples of how passports aren’t good enough to ensure security.
But the theory is that he, or his aides, either shortcutted some facts or mistranslated some things.
In his speech, he mentions Taured but also the city of Tamanrasset, neither of which were mentioned by Zegrus or any of the Japanese police.
But Zegrus said that Negusi-Habesi was south of the Sahara. And Tamanrasset is a real place, it’s a city in Algeria. Kinda right in the middle of the Sahara.
Also, interestingly, there’s a nomadic tribe of people that live in that area – in fact, they’re spread across five countries in the Sahara Desert, including Tamanrasset. And their name? The Tuareg people.
In fact, the Volkswagen Toureg is named after them, because they’re legendary travelers.
So, it’s possible that an aide found a map of Africa that looked something like this, showing the area the Tuareg roamed, thought it was a country, and then saw the city of Tamanrasset, and just jumped to some conclusions.
Shoddy work to begin with but then Mathews may have seen “Toureg” and just mispronounced it as Taured, and an internet legend was born.
Now there are a lot of assumptions and speculations in here. But they’re all plausible. They’re all a lot more plausible than someone jumping from a parallel universe onto this one.
So there you go, the patented Joe Scott Wet Towel
But it’s still an interesting story and there’s still a bit of mystery around it, like what happened to Zegrus after he got to Hong Kong?
So I mean there’s still a mystery to solve here.
And besides, that’s the thing about infinite universes, literally anything can happen. So maybe the Man From Taured is a real story, maybe it really did happen… in another universe.
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