Old reality TV show footage falsely linked to urban legend about traveller from non-existent nation

“She Arrived at JFK Airport with a Passport from a Country That Doesn’t Exist,” reads a Facebook post published on October 11, 2025, and shared more than 400 times.

The post claims that “something strange happened recently at JFK International Airport” where “a woman reportedly arrived on a flight from Tokyo” carrying a passport from a non-existent country called “Torenza”.

According to the post, immigration officials couldn’t find any record of the nation, and the woman allegedly said, “Then this isn’t my world,” before being detained. By morning, she and her luggage had allegedly vanished, with “security footage from the holding area missing too”.

The post concludes that it’s “a reminder that this world still holds mysteries science can’t explain”.

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on October 15, 2025

The post features images of a woman wearing a long garment with a head-covering resembling a hijab and a passport displaying immigration stamps.

Similar claims were published elsewhere on X and in video format on Facebook and TikTok.

The claims appear to be a reimagined version of the “Man from Taured,” a decades-old urban legend about a mysterious traveller who supposedly arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the 1950s, with a passport from a non-existent country called “Taured” (archived here).

The tale is often cited as proof of parallel universes and interdimensional travel.

However, the posts about a woman who supposedly owned a passport from “Torenza” are false.

Reality show footage

AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches in combination with keyword searches and found that the screenshots of the woman were lifted from a mid-2000s reality TV show.

The woman appears in footage published on the A&E YouTube channel on November 8, 2024, with the title: “Airline: Best Full Episodes of 2024 MARATHON | A&E.”

The video is restricted to viewers in the United States. 

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Screenshots taken on October 15, 2025, showing the original footage of the passenger published by A&E

Airline is an American reality TV series that first aired on A&E between 2004-2005, following staff members of Southwest Airlines and their daily interactions with passengers (archived here).

The elderly woman in question is a non-English speaking passenger who had flown from Baltimore to Los Angeles – not JFK in New York as alleged – and an airline staff member is seen trying to assist her.

Based on her passport, which is not in English, the airline employee identifies her as an Arabic speaker.

The employee is heard asking, “Saudi Arabia, they speak Arabic, right?” There is no mention of “Torenza” anywhere in the footage.

Staff then connect the passenger with another employee who speaks the Arabic, and her nephew later arrives to pick her up.

“Torenza” does not exist on any known records, databases or maps.

We also found no credible reports or information from JFK and US immigration authorities on any such incident taking place.

Man from Taured

Just like the recent online posts, the legend of the “Man from Taured” goes that he was detained overnight while officials investigated his alleged origins. By morning, both the man and his belongings had supposedly vanished, sparking claims that he had slipped into a parallel universe.

There is no credible evidence to support this story.

However, researchers later linked the myth to a real case involving John Zegrus, a fraudster arrested in Tokyo with a fake passport from an invented nation.

The case was a subject of debate on border control measures in the British House of Commons in 1960 and was also reported in newspapers at the time (archived here and here).

According to a foreign radio broadcast summary from 1961, Zegrus had even posed as a US intelligence agent and received a one-year sentence (archived here).

 “The Tokyo District Court 22 December sentenced John Allen K. Zegrus, a man without nationality, to one year imprisonment for having illegally entered Japan and passing phony checks,” it reads. “Zegrus, self-styled American who has professedly acted as an agent for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, entered this country in 1959 on a bogus passport.”