You.
Yeah you!
You ever dreamt of travelling through time?
Would you go to the future or to the past?
Rudolf Fentz didn't choose the time, he simply found himself in Times Square, hardly recognizing
anything: people in unusual clothes, strange noisy machines he'd never seen before, lights
everywhere.
What happened?
It was in the summer of 1951.
At about 11:15, passers-by in Times Square noticed a young man in his twenties.
He was dressed in the fashion of the late 19th century.
He looked lost and clueless, and obviously had no idea how he’d gotten to the crossroad.
Where did he come from?
Nobody saw it, he just appeared in that spot as if out of thin air.
When he finally started walking, he was struck by a car.
He was badly injured, and didn’t survive.
Later, his clothes were searched and the following things were found in his pockets:
- A copper token for beverages worth 5 cents.
It had the name of a restaurant, which the locals didn’t recognize.
- A bill for the care of a horse and a carriage wash.
It was issued by a horse stable on Lexington Avenue.
There was no horse stable there at that time.
- Old bank notes worth $70.
- Business cards with the name Rudolf Fentz, and an address on 5th Avenue.
- A letter sent to this man at the same address from the business cards in June, 1876 in Philadelphia.
All these things looked brand new, not like they’d been around for 75 years.
The case was given to Captain Hubert V. Rihm, of the Missing Persons Department of NYPD.
He found the address on the business-card, but there was a commercial firm there, whose
owner had never heard of Rudolf Fentz.
Fentz’s name also wasn’t mentioned in the address book, his fingerprints weren’t
found in any records, and nobody had reported a missing person to the police with this name
or having a similar description.
Could the man have false documents with him?
Was it just a prank that ended badly?
Rihm continued his investigation and finally found Rudolf Fentz Junior in a telephone book
from 1939.
Rihm questioned the residents who lived at the listed address and managed to learn that
Rudolf Fentz did live here once and worked nearby.
Having retired in 1940, he’d moved away.
The policeman found the widow of Rudolf Fentz Junior in Florida; she’d lost him 5 years
earlier.
She said that her father-in-law, Rudolf Fentz Senior, went missing in 1876 at the age of
29 years.
He just went out for an evening stroll and nobody ever saw him again.
Searches gave no results.
Rihm looked through the widow’s albums and found Fentz’s picture there.
You guessed it: the man in the picture looked identical to the stranger from Times Square.
The whole story looked weird, and Captain Rihm failed to find any explanation for it
that would make sense.
He decided not to mention these details in the official reports, and Rudolf Fentz’s
case was never solved.
Interest for this story grew again after 1972, when it was mentioned in books and articles
related to this subject as proof of travelling through time.
In 2000, a Spanish magazine, Mas Alla, published a 6-page article devoted to the incident.
The author of the article was Carlos Canales.
By that time, he'd written 2 books studying paranormal events and folklore.
Another researcher of folklore, Chris Aubeck, was really interested in the article, and
conducted his own investigation.
He studied the magazines of that time, and found similar stories, passing from one country
to another – from Sweden to Norway, Italy, Spain and France.
But he also noticed that there was never any proof or solid facts mentioned, and the details
were different; sometimes even contradictory in different countries.
Later, he came to the conclusion that the legend started from the article about Fentz
in a June issue of Journal of Borderland Research in 1972, which depicted the story as a true
one.
The journal had a questionable reputation, and its target audience was mostly UFO and
paranormal event fans.
It, in its turn, referred to Ralph Holland's book, "A Voice from the Gallery", from 1952.
Aubeck believed that this actually gave birth to the urban legend.
After Aubeck publicized the results of his investigation in the Akron Beacon Journal,
he was addressed by science fiction fan George Murphy.
He explained that the original source of the legend was actually even older.
As a result, they found out that the legend was inspired by a short story, written by
Jack Finney in 1950, and first published under the title “I’m scared” in 1951.
In 1952 it was included in the anthology of science-fiction writing "Tomorrow, The Stars".
The plot of the short-story is identical to what became the urban legend later.
The narrator of the story is captain Hubert Rihm.
Since that time, the story of Rudolf Fentz became one of the most popular urban legends
of the 70s and was repeated many times later.
The spread of the Internet in the 90s gave another life to it.
It started being mentioned again as fact, and proof of the existance of time travellers.
It’s a great example of how urban legends come into being.
People love unusual stories and are eager to believe in them.
It’s always been like that, but the progress of technology made it much easier for rumors
and unproved facts to circulate on the Internet, among thousands of people.
Another example of how urban legends appeared is the radio play based on Orson Welles’s
“War of the Worlds”.
In 1938, before Halloween, radio network CBS aired the play.
In the book, the action takes place in London at the end of the 19th century, but the actors
of “Mercury Theater” decided to transfer the setting to New Jersey, 1939.
In fact, they enacted a Martian invasion of Earth.
One of the actors announced the beginning of the radio play.
After that, there was a weather forecast, and then a concert.
Soon, the music was interrupted by urgent news that strange flashes were observed on
Mars.
After that, Orson Welles himself made a report as a renowned professor from Princeton, Richard
Pierson.
He said that life on the red planet was impossible.
The concert continued, but soon it was again interrupted by an urgent newscast.
A CBS reporter broadcasted a play-by-play about the landing of a metallic cylinder in
Grover’s Mill of Mercer County.
Soon, a huge war machine escaped the cylinder and started burning everything to ashes with
heat rays.
The reporter and other gawkers turned their backs on the invaders, and the broadcast stopped
cold.
Professor Pierson got in touch with the radio and talked about the technical level of the
Martians.
After that, the head of the National Guard announced a defense emergency in the Mercer
and Middlesex Counties and sent 4 units of New Jersey National Guard to evacuate civilians.
The Earthly weapons failed to stand against the aliens.
New machines kept landing and destroying everything and everyone around them.
Dozens of people were running away from the invaders.
The Secretary of State for Home Affairs, whose name wasn’t mentioned, addressed the nation.
The radio network forbid anyone portraying President Roosevelt, but the actor spoke in
a very similar voice all the same.
Soon, another reporter got in touch.
He was broadcasting from the cannon unit that was attacking the Martians.
The aliens used toxic gases, and the local report went dead again.
It wasn’t until 40 minutes after the beginning of the show that the speaker reminded everyone
that the described events were just a fantasy.
After that, Professor Pierson told the audience about the end of the alien attack: they couldn’t
survive on Earth since they had no immunity for the local illnesses.
At the end of the hour, Welles introduced himself.
As newspapers wrote later, 6 million people listened to the play and most of them took
it all in good faith.
But many of them either hadn’t heard the notification about the play, or forgot about
it after the concert began.
Mercury Theater on Air had no sponsors at that time and the play wasn’t interrupted
by ads.
By the 40th minute of the show, when the speaker reminded everyone that it was a show, many
people had already stopped listening to the radio.
They were gathering things to move to the West, or barricaded in the basements of their
houses.
There were even cases of people coming to police departments, ready to help the officers
defend the nation against the aliens.
Telephone lines were 5 times busier than usual, the traffic jams from New York, Trenton and
Philadelphia were almost 60 miles long.
New York police got more than 2000 calls for 15 minutes, and the New Jersey National Guard
was mobilized.
Some people claimed that they’d seen the flashing lights and smelled the odor from
the toxic gases.
The audio play was broadcast on the West coast too.
At the climactic moment, the power station went out in Concrete, Washington.
The listeners thought that it’d been destroyed by the aliens.
Many of them brought legal action against the radio station.
All of them were rejected, but Welles insisted on paying compensation to the man who ruined
his new shoes running from Martians.
Oh gosh.
How about you.
Do you know any other urban legends that people take for real facts?
Let me know down in the comments!
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