Norwegian police have released photographs of a mysterious man found in a snowdrift near Oslo in December 2014 in hopes of identifying him.
The man clearly suffers from amnesia and speaks four languages, including English and Russian. While the police are inclined to believe that the unknown was the victim of a criminal offense. The man himself still calls himself "John Smith".
His fingerprints were made through every possible database through Interpol, but to no avail.
“With the man there was nothing that could help establish his identity, he does not remember his name, origin, how he got to Norway and in general any details from his life,” said the police officer.
“He is definitely European, fluent in English with a slight Eastern / Central European accent, understands Czech, Slovak, Polish and Russian. The unknown is 187 cm tall, blue eyes, light brown hair."
The police estimate Smith is in his early twenties. He was found in a snowdrift of an industrial area on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital.
This kind of memory loss is usually associated with a severe head injury. Meanwhile, the unknown in everything else, which does not concern the details of his life, thinks absolutely clearly and rationally.
Something similar happened in Norway in 2003, when a man of Asian appearance was discovered - the media immediately dubbed him Mister X. The last thing he remembered was how he was going to travel from Switzerland to Norway to see the famous wooden churches.
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In the end, this man turned out to be Japanese, and only after returning to his homeland, he gradually began to piece together the "fragments" of his own personality.
Who erases people's memory?
Mysterious cases of finding people with amnesia have been discussed in the press for more than a dozen years. In the Russian media, they began to actively discuss them in the press since 2000, when people began to get to hospitals and police departments in different cities of Russia and Ukraine who said the same thing: “I don't remember anything! Who am I?"
People were found on trains, electric trains, at railway stations and on highways, and each time at a distance of hundreds and even thousands of kilometers from their homes. As a rule, no one had any documents with them.
None of them could give his name, could not remember where he came from, whether he had relatives, friends, acquaintances.
Neither treatment nor meeting with family members has any effect on memory recovery. They do not recognize their wives and mothers, do not remember that they have children, look at family albums in bewilderment.
One of these mysterious stories happened to Peter Fleck, a Russian German who emigrated to Germany from Kazakhstan 10 years ago. In February 2002, he returned home from work to the town of Peneberg. He called his family and said that he would be in an hour. But they found him only three weeks later in the city of Kamyshin, Volgograd region, without money and documents.
The strange citizen was looking around the Kamyshinsky station with surprise, looked into the faces of passers-by and could not understand in any way: where is he and, most importantly, who is he?
Employees of the Petrovvali Linear Department of Internal Affairs (PLOVD) sent the citizen to the central city hospital for examination, but this did not clarify the situation. As reported by "Volgogradskaya Pravda", doctors did not find traces of bruises, mutilations, brain injuries, injection marks and signs of violence on the body of the man who "fell from the moon". In the blood there was not even a hint of the presence of known drugs that could paralyze memory like this.
Physically healthy - the doctors decided and returned their ward to the operatives, recommending that he be sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Instead, investigator A. Nazarkin, who was in charge of the case, sent a photo of the person who had lost his memory on television, in the program “Wait for me”. The photo was shown on TV. And the very next day the police station on duty got a call … from Germany!
When meeting with his family, Peter did not recognize them and for a long time, confused and painful, looked into the eyes of the attending physician.
Dr. Balezin, whom Peter has seen, has been in psychiatry for over 30 years. But the case of such a strong directional impact on certain centers of consciousness, such a destruction of purely specific brain cells in order to destroy the "I", to kill a person in a person, he, according to his admission, has never met.
“The patient knows and remembers everything. Also, as regards himself, which is related to his "I". And this "I" fell out absolutely. It's erased,”Balezin clarifies.
In other countries
Many people still remember the story of the silent virtuoso pianist, whom in April 2005 the police found on the beach in the town of Sheerness in the English county of Kent. He was undocumented, dressed in soaking wet clothes - a strict black suit, white shirt and tie.
In the nearest hospital, the man was changed into dry clothes, but they did not get a single word from him. Then they gave me paper and a pencil. But the young man drew a piano instead of a name and address. In the Dartford mental hospital, where the patient was placed, there was a piano. Having broken to the instrument, the man played for four hours without a break.
After a few months in a specialized clinic, he suddenly found the gift of speech and remembered that his name was Andreas Grassl and he was from the town of Prosdorf in Bavaria.
However, how he ended up 1200 km from his homeland, Andreas could not remember.
“He had no passport, no license, nothing. There was not even a ticket. He still doesn't know how he got to England. He believes he took a train from France and woke up on a British beach,”says Joseph, father of 20-year-old Andreas …
A similar incident happened in 1999 in Canada. A twenty-year-old boy with amnesia was found on a street in Toronto and taken to a hospital, where he was named Philip Staufen. Linguists, listening to his accent, determined that he was an Englishman from Yorkshire. However, Philip himself did not remember this, as well as how he ended up in North America.
The boy's relatives were never found, and two years later, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Elinor Kaplan issued a permit to Philip Staufen, allowing him to work in Canada and receive health insurance.
Versions
There are many similar stories, and, unfortunately, many of those who have lost their memory remain in the dark about their past.
What is happening to them? Psychiatrists cannot answer this question. In the blood of patients, as already mentioned, no signs of foreign drugs are found. All these people did not suffer any serious diseases, they did not have any head injuries. In general, doctors only shrug their shoulders.
However, there are a number of versions with the help of which they are trying to explain this strange epidemic.
The head physician of the Sevastopol City Psychiatric Hospital, Georgy Kadomtsev, admits the possibility of the existence of drugs that block memory: scientific developments in this direction have been carried out for a long time and in different countries. If a person is deprived of his own "I", then he loses a fulcrum, he is more likely to execute any command, order. This is robotization, the zombification of a person.
The work of aliens?
Another version, which researchers of the phenomenon of people who have lost their memory use, is the intrigues of alien aliens. They kidnap people, conduct experiments on them, then use space technologies to remove traces of surgical and other operations, and finally erase the memory of what happened and land where the flying saucer will land at the moment.
In 1989, the American Linda Carlisle was found a few days after her disappearance in the vicinity of San Francisco on the side of the road. Linda felt great, but could not remember how she found herself hundreds of kilometers from home on a suburban highway and where she was absent for five days.
A couple of weeks later, Linda accidentally witnessed a traffic accident when a five-year-old boy died under the wheels of a truck. At the same moment, apparently under the influence of the strongest stress, Linda suddenly remembered what seemed to have been erased from her memory forever.
It turns out that she was taken aboard their ship by some large-headed creatures with huge yellow eyes without pupils and small children's bodies. One of the aliens wore a kind of transparent helmet on his head. Linda also remembered that some kind of sensors were attached to her body. The strange creatures did not tell the woman who they were and where they were from.