The mystery man from Taured

JULIA LOUIS turns online fortean detective to solve a long-running mystery

There are some mysteries that will probably never be solved: What happened aboard the Mary Celeste? Who was DB Cooper? What occurred at the Flannan Isles lighthouse? However, some mysteries can be solved with just a computer and an inquiring mind.

You may have come across ‘The Man from Taured’ on the Internet, the tale of a mysterious traveller seemingly not quite of this world: In 1954 a man arrives on a flight into Tokyo airport. He presents his passport, but the immigration officials are baffled – they have never heard of Taured, its country of issue. Asked to locate it on a map, the passenger points to the tiny principality of Andorra, and mentions that his country has been in existence for over 2,000 years. He is insistent that the name of the country is Taured, not Andorra, and that it has never had any other name. The baffled officials put him in a hotel room for the night, with police downstairs. In the morning, the room is empty and there is no trace of the ‘Man from Taured’. Was he a temporary visitor from an alternative universe where Andorra is named Taured?

I’m a member of an online fortean forum. As I am somewhat disabled, my research mostly takes place in my home office. When I read about the ‘Man From Taured’ I sensed that this was a case that could be solved with online resources. I’ve been experimenting with Internet search terms for years, which has taught me to tweak and tinker with research inputs. Using various spellings, mis-spellings, plus/minus this-orthat word often drops a precious nugget of information into one’s virtual lap.

The first piece of the puzzle, confirming the story may have been based on an actual event, came from the Hansard record of the UK Parliament, 29 July 1960 (vol. 627). Robert Mathew, MP for Honiton, was speaking about the relative security value of passports: “My hon. Friend may know the case of John Alan Zegrus, who is at present being prosecuted in Tokyo. In evidence, he describes himself as an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser and a naturalised Ethiopian. This man, according to the evidence, has travelled all over the world with a very impressive looking passport indeed. It is written in a language unknown and it has remained unidentified although it has been studied for a long time by philologists.

The passport is stated to have been issued in Tamanrosset the capital of the independent sovereign State of Tuarid. Neither the country nor the language can be identified, although a great deal of time has been spent in the attempt. When the accused was cross-examined he said that it was a State of 2 million population somewhere south of the Sahara. This man has been round the world on this passport without hindrance, a passport which as far as we know is written in the invented language of an invented country. I would stress, therefore, that passports are not very good security checks.”

This alternative spelling of ‘Taured’ as Tuarid, the location of the incident being named as Tokyo and the validity of the source put me onto a possible trail. The date was curious: 1960 – six years later than given in the stories. I wondered if the date of 1954 was erroneous and concentrated my research on the range 1958-1962.

I then turned up this curious little press clipping from the Province newspaper of Vancouver, British Columbia, dated 15 Aug 1960, about the man from ‘Tuared’ (note the variation in spelling). It adds some extra context about the sojourner’s modus operandi and the most useful piece of information so far. A name!

It’s a curious one: John Alan/ Allen Kuchar Zegrus. ‘Kuchar’ is perhaps eastern European or Slavic in origin and ‘Zegrus’ is vanishingly rare as a surname. So rare in fact, that I was able to narrow it down to an individual mentioned in two separate US intelligence documents from 1960 and 1961. Both were published under the title of ‘Daily Report Foreign Radio Broadcasts by US Government agencies’. These documents – digests of contemporary radio news bulletins from Asia – provide evidence that a Mr JAK Zegrus was indeed apprehended on arrival at Tokyo airport in 1959. He carried an unusual, home-made passport he’d used on his globe-trotting adventure; now his journey ended with his arrest. When his case was heard on 10 August 1960 and he was found guilty, the man attempted suicide in the courtroom with a concealed weapon, according to the Daily Report Issue 156-160 of 1960. There is then a gap of over a year in the sources before Mr Zegrus crops up again. On 22 December 1961 he was sentenced to one year in jail; and from that point the online trail goes cold.

It’s interesting to note how a simple transposition of an ‘a’ and a ‘u’ and a shifting of the date backwards to 1954 has resulted in a minor myth of the online age being born, alongside the almost total erasure of the real man.

All current mentions of the story seem to have as their source the Directory of Possibilities (1981) by Paul Begg (co-edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant). It’s a scant reference, scarcely more than a line on p.86, giving the date of 1954, the man’s appearance at Tokyo airport and the country of ‘Taured’.

The detail of his ‘passport’ being issued at Tamanrasset and the issuing country being Tuared does bring to mind North African associations inherent in the name of the similarly-named Tuareg peoples. Tamanrasset (variously spelled Tamanghasset or Tamenghest) is the name of a province and city in Algeria and Mr Zegrus is mentioned in Hansard as a self-described Ethiopian, but the mystery passenger’s given name while in custody seems to be an odd combination of American and eastern European.

Arguably, the real events are weirder than the original story. Who was John Allen/Allan/Alan Kuchar Zegrus? Where was he from? How many countries had he bluffed his way into? Where did go after his jail time in Japan? The CIA radio broadcast report documents tell us he was a stateless yet ‘self-styled’ American – very odd terminology. Mr Zegrus professed to work for both the FBI and Colonel Nasser of Egypt. Was he a Walter Mittystyle fantasist with some kind of psychological condition or did he indeed have clandestine service connections? The report of his suicide attempt does hint that he was in mental distress, but beyond that we cannot speculate. Unless further information about Mr Kuchar Zegrus comes to light we can trace his path no further, and the mystery of the man from Tuared remains; but we can now confidently say that the riddle of the mythical ‘Man from Taured’ has been well and truly solved.

✒ JULIA LOUIS has been fascinated by mysteries from an early age. Her interests include plant sciences, horticulture, IT, ceramics, early British history and the cultures of South Asia. When not travelling to Nepal and India, she lives in Somerset.