How Police Arrested a Man From a Parallel Universe

**Sanitized Transcript:**

**July 1954. Tokyo.** The sun glimmers off the polished metal fuselages of planes lazily descending onto the tarmac. The air ripples from the heat. Inside passport control, a large map of the world hangs above rows of desks. Takei Amaya fans himself with papers and adjusts the uniform that feels too tight around his neck. It is important to present oneself properly, especially when you are the first point of contact for many arriving in Japan. Maintaining an immaculate presentation is crucial for making a good impression, though he wishes he could loosen his collar, even for a moment.

The flow of passengers seems to move slower than the descending planes outside. Open passport, check details, ask questions, ensure a good likeness with the photo, stamp, ‘welcome to Tokyo,’ next person. Mr. Takei has been 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 monotonous, and it’s vital he doesn’t lose focus. Foreign powers, spies, military officials, political opponents—anyone could pass in front of him at any moment. He has to stay vigilant.

But the woman in front of him is no spy. Just a housewife from Korea. “Welcome to Tokyo.” Next, a well-dressed man steps forward, likely an American. He smiles at Mr. Takei and hands over his passport, casually returning his hands to his pockets. Mr. Takei studies the passport. Name: John Allen Kuchar Zegrus. Strange-sounding name. Perhaps he is not American after all. The date of birth looks about right, the photograph matches, the passport number seems legitimate…

“Do you speak much Japanese?”

“Some. I have been studying hard to improve ahead of my visit. I prefer French.”

His Japanese is good—stiff, but he can hold a conversation. Mr. Takei flips through the pages of the passport. Plenty of stamps: 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’s not a question; it’s 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 is well-traveled, which arouses suspicion, but his passport looks 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 evident on 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 to the map above them. “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 attention 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 escort 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 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 next 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 long and confusing day, built on an utterly ridiculous claim. Working at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Public Security Bureau, he is often shocked at the number of days wasted on chasing farcical leads. 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 ensure he doesn’t escape. He is being kept in downtown Tokyo, on the thirteenth floor of a hotel block. Mr. Atsuyuki has been drafted in 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 have studied his passport over and over. It appears to be entirely legitimate, except for the glaring error that it is from a 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 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 children. South of the Sahara? In Europe?

What a ridiculous claim to make with such fervor. The man was either confused 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 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 empty. The window is closed, and the bathroom is open. No air vents. A perfect indent is left on the neatly made bed in the shape of a person. Only there is 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 fundamental to our existence that we 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 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 illustrate this mind-bending concept, Erwin Schrodinger created a 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 poison. This poison will be released when the radioactive substance in its trigger decays through a subatomic process. Since the cat’s life hinges 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 gives us a 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? While 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 TikTok?

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 or another. Each one spawning another parallel thread. Universes branching off from universes.

It’s a concept we are all familiar with, from Marvel’s 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-rooted 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 suggest it might be.

First up, we have the Green Children of Woolpit. The oldest account 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 home. The children’s skin was 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 being spoken to them. Try as the adults might, the children just stared blankly at them. They couldn’t speak English. If this had been the streets of London, where foreign trade was common, it would be one thing, but they were deep in 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 him, 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 from 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. Twenty 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 points 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 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 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 unfamiliar and strange. He wants to return to Sakria. He is afraid and confused. 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 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 initially been local 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, told a version of the story that altered some key details. In his version of events,