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Listen to the office deep dive on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You should know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there and there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know is another true life mystery edition. A true life mystery? Yeah, OK.

I don't I don't want to say crime because I'm not 100 percent sure crime was involved. I'm sure it still falls under the umbrella of true crime. But it's it's a mystery. A disappearance. How about that? Yeah.

And this one is this can be frustrating to research. And this is our caveat in that this situation, as you'll learn, happened in Bulgaria to a German man. And that's part of the reason it's hard to get great information. There are plenty of people on the Internet telling this story with different details. And it's just sort of one of those cases where, like, we can't get our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops. Right. And read it ourselves.

So we did find a predator who did something last year who claims that he got information from Lars, this mother, who you're going to meet, Sandra, not she's not gonna be on the show.

You're not going to really need her to meet through our words. But, you know, who knows? This is someone on Reddit and. All his sources were in German, so I couldn't double check those either, right? Yeah, no, I mean, that's that's a caveat that works for just about any true crime or disappearance case these days, just because there's so many people who, you know, take a story and run it through their own grinder.

And, you know, like you said, little details, little facts get changed here. And then somebody else picks up the same fact of that double checking it. And all of a sudden it's all over the place. And you can't tell if that's because it's real or because a bunch of people just repeated the same incorrect facts. So we're going to definitely do our best. But one of the things about this story is there are enough, you know, totally verified facts to it that that, you know, you don't really need to get completely lost in the details.

People have gotten completely lost in the details, but they've still not solved the case. That hasn't helped anybody yet. So just the facts that are known are kind of strange enough.

Yeah. And I think it's always more comfortable for us when it's like when there's a book that's been written about it published by, like a real publisher like Beverly Cleary. It's not just Internet dudes. Right. But, you know, a lot of times these more recent sort of missing person cases, it is just Internet, dude, so, you know, yeah, that's what it is.

And the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Martok, and he's known as the most famous missing person on YouTube, because I hate that he is a pretty bad Elvis.

It should have probably just scared us off of this episode to begin with. The the because you remember what was the name of that?

Kahn the YouTube convention. We went to that one time.

Oh, it was like Internet con, but it wasn't that. It was close to that. I can't remember who put me on YouTube forever. We blocked our memory bank because we did our our biggest show ever there in front of about twelve people.

Yeah, it was pretty bad, but I'll think of it.

But by the way, we should thank Dave Meisner, who was his a listener who turned me on to this quite a while ago. So sorry it took so long to get to Dave.

So we're talking again, we're talking about Lars Matonga and he vanished from the face of the earth, as his mom put it. It was like the earth just swallowed him up. Back on July 8th, 2014, in a town, a resort town in Bulgaria on the Black Sea called Golden Sands, which looking at pictures of it, it looks like a pretty charming little place gone.

Vinken that's it. It might as well have been called Internet con.

Yeah, but did you look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel for the place? Yeah. You know, looks like any lovely seaside hamlet.

Yeah. And I couldn't get the impression of whether it is more like Destin or more like Panama City Beach.

I just it seems like a big party spot, if that's what you're wondering.

OK, but like it also looked like it was fairly like clean and well run and not just like, you know, just whatever kind of thing. I don't know, I place it between the two, from what I can tell. But that's where that's where this event took place. Where the disappearance took place is actually Varna, Bulgaria, which is the main town that Golden Sands Resort Beach town is right outside of.

Yeah. So as far as Lars, the young man who would go missing, he was born in February, nineteen eighty six in northern Germany. He was an only child. He was a handsome kid, very popular. He was athletic. He was smart. He did well in school.

After he ended up after he graduated, he ended up getting a job at the GDF Suez Power Plant about 100 miles from where he grew up, fixing small electrical machines. He was an engineer and it seemed like he had a really good life and he enjoyed his job. He loves and this will figure in. So put a pin in this. His one big love was his football club, his soccer team that he followed, which is and, you know, this is not how they would pronounce it, but the Vater Bremen Football Club.

Oh, really? How would they pronounce it? Well, it's always just a little more German.

Let's, you know, like the guy, the editor, he narrates his own documentary. And he said it in a way that I'm not even going to attempt. Oh, OK.

All right, fine. So that whole football club thing actually plays a role in this because it may be at the center of of his disappearance. We're not a hundred percent sure. But to kind of give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars Pétanque was, TONC was his dad had a stroke a couple of years before he disappeared and his mom had to take care of his dad full time. Lars was an only child and he would come home, I guess, about.

Hundred miles from where he lived and worked almost every weekend to help take care of his dad, which is not every guy in their late 20s would do that, you know, and apparently he was dedicated enough that his mom had to kind of encourage him to go along with five other friends of his two week long vacation at Golden Sands in Bulgaria. In July, the end of June, beginning of July, he wasn't going to go and his mom said, no, you should totally go.

You deserve a week off like this.

So he went, yeah. So the it's a big party scene. Like I said, it is well known for young people from all over Europe going to take advantage of the resort deals that all inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs to be had. Lars was the life of the party. According to his friends.

I saw anywhere from three to five friends. I know for sure, two guys. And I think these were his high school mates who were most prominent names, Tim Schultz and Paul Roman. But they were hanging out, going to the beach, playing soccer. The one weird thing that I think people may have made too much about online as far as Internet sleuthing goes, as his friends remarked that he didn't have much of an appetite on the trip, was eating like soup and salad and fruit, whereas they were, you know, was an all inclusive resort.

So they were just like feasting on everything. And I think they thought it was odd that he wasn't. But I don't make a whole lot about that.

Yeah, neither did that one redditor documentarian who said that he apparently had kind of gotten he'd been on a health kick.

So he was kind of watching what he ate a little more. Yeah, some people have been like, there's your there's your answer right there that explains it.

Yeah, basically.

So, I mean, the week went by pretty uneventful. I think one of his friends later said on TV or in an interview that it went by really quick on one. I think a second to last day they went to watch a World Cup match. The World Cup in Brazil was going on at the time. And you may not know this about Europe, but they're really crazy about soccer, so much so that they have their own word for football, which is goofy, but that's the way it goes.

And so they went to this bar rock bar or Ackbar, which sounds like a cool place, and they watched the match, I think Costa Rica and the Netherlands. And while they were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans there watching this, all different clubs and countries. And there were some kids, I guess, who were recent high school graduates and were fans of FC Bayern, which is the rival to Werder Bremen. And I guess they kind of got into it verbally only with with Lars and his friends.

Yeah. And also saw places that there was actual physical confrontation. Oh yeah. We don't know for sure, but we do know that it wasn't the biggest deal and it wasn't the big fight that happened later on, right after this night out, the guys apparently go to this McDonald's, which is kind of an open air order at the open air window kind of thing. And Lars didn't want to eat because I guess he was on that health kick and he sort of just stood nearby while his two buddies were ordering.

They got their food, they turned around. He wasn't there. They don't see him for the rest of the night. But like I said, it's sort of like, you know, spring break party central. So if one of your friend disappears for the night and you're a bunch of dudes, you might just think like, all right, well, you know, maybe he ended up meeting somebody or maybe he just went out and partied some more.

But it didn't send up these huge alarms that he didn't come back that night. Yeah.

So when he did show up again, I don't know if was later that night or the next morning, he said that he had been beaten up, actually jumped by three or four Bulgarian guys and that he had gone to duck when one of them threw a punch and it actually taken a punch in his ear, which is a terrible place to get punched. And he said that he was quite convinced that it was those kids, those high school kids who are fans of Bayern FC Bayern that they gotten into it with at the bar earlier that night, because apparently they had said this is just I only saw this in one place that they had said that they'd shouted that it's easy to get to pay somebody, to beat other people up in Bulgaria.

And so this happened close enough and close enough proximity to that other altercation that he just assumed. That's why those guys jumped him. I mean, there's apparently there was no other explanation for it. So that was his story. He showed up with a injured ear in the story that. He had been jumped by some local Bulgarians. Yeah, and his friends apparently didn't necessarily believe that story because he wasn't you know, he didn't have black eyes or a bloody nose or anything.

He looked fine and he was acting fine. So they weren't too sure about that story. Again, with the Internet, sleuths have seen people saying that, like he totally made up the story about the fight. Right. But that is all just people speculating online.

I know if you ever want to see people, just take a piece of information and then spin it to the nth degree, the most extreme possible interpretation of it, that you could do worse than hang out on the Internet.

So he goes to a doctor, he gets the diagnosis of a ruptured eardrum, apparently went and saw a specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should get surgery and large, just like great. But I'm not getting that here. I'm going to go back to Germany if I'm going to get surgery. Yeah. And then this is sort of one of the keys is he was given an antibiotic name several Seim, and he was given the strongest possible dosage, which was about I think it was 500 milligrams.

Yes. And that's just a general I think is cephalexin based antibiotic that doesn't really usually have many side effects. And if it does have side effects, it's typically something like an upset stomach. I saw that there's a condition where it turns huge patches of your skin, very dark all over the place, almost like your highlights have been shaded. It's really interesting to look at, but that's that's has nothing to do with any other anything that that large exhibited, any behavior exhibited.

It's just antibiotics. I mean, if you've ever taken antibiotics, you know that there's not really usually many side effects to it. Right, so Lars catches well, again, different information. I saw that his friends were going to stay with him. He insisted they leave so his friends eventually do catch that original flight out. And Laura stays behind, you know, because of his ear. He was a little concerned about, obviously, with changes in the atmosphere and on pressurization on a plane.

He didn't think it was a good idea and not sure if that original doctor told him that might have been a problem, but he knew it was going to be a problem.

So a little bit about that original doctor. I saw that from the the editor who said that he spoke to the guys, to his mother, that his mother said that that Lars said that the doctor didn't really treat him. The first one did and said you should go to a specialist. But then when he went to the specialist, the specialists said, like, wouldn't speak to him in English. And Lars felt he had mocked him and that apparently Sandra thought that that was really significant because that was not a word that Lars typically used, but he still managed to get the antibiotic from the doctor.

The thing about the perforated or ruptured eardrum is I was looking on the Internet. It turns out and the National Health Service says that if you have a perforated eardrum, it would probably actually make flying more comfortable, not more dangerous. So I can understand Lars being worried about that, not being a trained medical professional. But if he's encountering at least three other medical professionals in Bulgaria, you would think one of them would be like, actually, no, that's you're actually better off flying like this or would at the very least be like you don't have to worry about that at all.

It's not that's not a thing. Interesting. Yeah, so too. All right.

Well, let's take a break and we will come back and talk about what happened after his friends left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this.

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All right, so his buddies go back home to Germany last is left there by himself, which is pretty key as far as understanding that they weren't worried about him. He wasn't behaving weird. He seemed fine. He seemed like Lars. Otherwise, one of them probably would have raised some sort of alarm bells and been like, hey, maybe we should stay here. But they said he seemed relaxed. He was in a good mood. And so they took off.

Being summer, Lars had a hard time getting a hotel room because everything was booked up and he was staying on extra. So he ends up having to check into the hotel color. Varno, which was a really seedy place that this cab driver takes him to. Apparently a lot of drug dealers, a lot of sex workers. But that was kind of the only place available. And we don't know a lot about what happened that night other than these phone calls and texts that he exchanges with his mom.

So one thing, though, about the hotel color, I looked at it, TripAdvisor gives a four out of five and booking dotcom has it at seven point eight out of 10. And it is definitely cheap. I think rooms are like 25 American dollars a night, which is suspiciously cheap. Yeah, yeah. There is like probably some criminal activity there. But that it's not like it's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that. But it was the fact that it was his only option I think kind of tells you quite a bit too about it.

Sure. So he goes to this hotel, he checks in. Apparently the person behind the counter made a copy, a photocopy of his credit card. And according to his mother, that did not sit very well with Lars. And at 11:00 p.m. after he's checked into the hotel, he calls his mom. I think it's the first phone for so many phone calls that evening. And he tells her that he wants her to block his credit card because he's kind of sketched out by this hotelier who has made a photocopy of his card.

He's worried that they're going to use it for fraud and he can just unfreeze it when he gets back. That's the first phone call he makes.

Yeah, there ends up being another call where he has left the hotel. He said that he was hiding on a hill and I think even said that he was at risk of falling. So it must have been sort of some sort of a really steep type of situation, I guess. Yeah, but he said that there were four men after him that were trying to kill him or intended to kill him at least. And he said, don't call me back because my phone I don't want my phone to ring.

I'm not sure I knew he didn't have a smartphone with him. He left that at home and brought sort of a cheaper phone. So I don't know if it didn't have a way to turn the ringer off or not or if he was just not thinking clearly. But he said not to call him back. He eventually texted his mom, what is Serafim? Five hundred, which was that antibiotic, which you might think means like he's feeling weird and.

Right. What is this?

I've taken that to me says that that if he was behaving weirdly or experiencing some different behavior, that he guessed that that's what it was. That's the only explanation for that, because they found that he had taken three of them. So he knew that he had that in his system, which I guess if he was acting weird, maybe that's what he thought it was. That's what sticks out to me.

Yeah. And I think was that it was either that night or the following morning when he asks I think it was the following morning, you know, she had booked a flight home for him. He doesn't get back in touch with her, which really worries her. But the next morning, he does get back in touch. This is two days after this bar fight. She's relieved. He says he's going to go to the airport and can he get five hundred euros wired, you know, MoneyGram or whatever Western.

I know. What do they have Western Union over there? Yeah.

Supposedly there's a real detail in there that it was Western Union.

But what's the what what makes Western Union important?

So his mother had never heard of Western Union in. Lars hadn't either. But apparently he talked to another German tourist at the airport who had told them to use it. And he was able to describe to his mom how to use Western Union in a way that she understood how to use Western Union after he explained it, which said to his mom that he had his wits about him. He wasn't out of his mind. He wasn't wasted on drugs or anything like that.

He was very much with it mentally.

All right. So he and I saw two different things here. Either his mom urged him to go to the airport doctor just to make sure he's good to fly or there was some requirement that he do so. But either way, he goes to the airport medical center. And this is where things get a little confusing because it's really all over the place where.

He goes in right away or whether he goes in later, but he apparently calls his mom, tells her, hey, they said I shouldn't fly or drive, but he hadn't even gone to see the doctor at that point. And then once he does see the doctor, the doctor ends up giving a few different versions of what happened while he was in there, which is either, you know, some people think that looks really shady. I think it could have just been like at the time, this doctor, you know, you're not making some really big mental notes about this random patient that comes in like this guy is going to be an international mystery in an hour.

Yeah. So, you know, it could have been innocent that his story changed or it could be jadi it could be.

So from from what I saw that the doctor changed his story three times and that an airline employee came in and then later it was an airport employee came in, which I think kind of across the Internet became a construction worker because the airport had recently undergone or was undergoing renovations. And then I guess the third story was that the doctor said that no one had come in and that Lars had excused himself to go to the toilet and did not come back. The doctor was expecting to come back.

He just never came back. What the doctor didn't know if that was in fact, what happened was that Lars wasn't coming back because he was sprinting through the airport and running out of the airport and into the surrounding countryside.

Yeah, and in the version where someone does come in, what that means is, is that literally a human being, another person walks into the examination room and apparently really freaked out, if that version is correct. Really freaked out. Lars, who was already obviously feeling a little bit paranoid and was like, what is this person doing in here? In the one version of the story, the doctor tries to explain, hey, is just a construction guy or no, this is an airline employee that's going to actually walk you to the plane.

It's a little frustrating to not know the exact truth, but no matter what happens, we do know that he sprinted from the airport because that part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV. And that's why he's the most famous disappeared person on YouTube, because it's very compelling to watch this young kid drop and you don't see him drop his stuff. But clearly, he walks in with a backpack and a duffel bag and he sprints with nothing in his hands at, like, full, you know.

Twenty one year old athletic gallop out of there. Yes. If someone is chasing him. Yeah.

So but there's a couple of weird things about it. If you watch the video and again you can go anywhere on the Internet and see this I think is a good 30 seconds of it cut together that he is running in the airport. And then when he gets outside, he kind of like walks and then jogs a little bit and runs some more. But then I saw somebody on I think it was read it, too, on a different post there.

There Unresolved Mysteries Group is just really good. But somebody pointed out that if you watch him, he's not really like looking behind him. He's not he's not looking to see somebody coming after him. And it kind of puts a different spin on things because you do think, well, surely he's running for his life. But if you're running for your life, it does seem like you would be a lot more concerned about who is coming after you and would probably look behind you a little more.

He doesn't quite do that. Actually, he's it's a very strange run, but it's also not like the run of a person who's out of their mind. That's that was what stood out to me, is that he doesn't seem to at all be out of his mind. Yeah.

And another couple of details here that was tough to verify supposedly in the doctor's office. He said, I don't want to die here. I have to get out of here.

I don't know if that's true or not, but supposedly that's what he said. And then the mom, Sandra, evidently saw she went over there to do her own investigating, obviously, right after it happened and supposedly saw footage directly from the airport that had a lot of different stuff that was not included in the footage that went to the police. And she said in the footage that she saw was that when he leaves the airport, he stands there like checks his pocket as if he's checking to make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff and kind of looks around and orients himself for a minute.

Yeah. Like, should I go this way? Should I go that way? If you look at other places on the Internet and you just look at that footage, it looks like he just bolts from the airport and then continues to either kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks his pockets, never orients himself at all.

Yeah. So he actually walks within twenty feet of a couple of cops who are standing, talking to one another in the parking lot. He walks past them. He goes behind a sand pile and then eventually goes over, I think, is it actually on camera, him going over the fence or is it just presumed that he went over the fence?

Now it's on camera, but it's one of those things where it's like they had to circle and highlight him because it's so far in the distance. But he goes over a barbed wire fence into a full bloom sunflower field, which are very, very tall and literally disappears, never to be seen again.

Now, then, on the other side of that sunflower field, very importantly, is the 82 highway. So who knows what happened in then. Beyond that, there's a lot of woods. I wouldn't call it like the most densely forested place on Earth, but there's a pretty decent sized woods around there. There's also a lot of farm fields, too, that's exposed and out in the open. But there's a highway on the other side of it. And that's to me is is extremely important.

All right. Should we take another break? Yes. All right.

We're going to take another break and bring it home with what happened from there and then some of the theories about what happened to large matak.

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So, Chuck, just to recap, Lars Matonga has fled, there's a really good way to put it, the airport leaving behind in the doctor's office, all of his stuff, including his wallet, phone and passport. Now, is that verified?

I saw that basically everywhere, including except for his I'm speculating that she saw him checking his. Yeah, I did it. I thought that was very confusing.

But I saw the sun, which I realized is not the most credible source. But sadly, it is one of the most credible sources when it comes to researching this case. I saw it on a Yale article. It's it's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport and phone were left behind. I mean, that's a really good point. Like, we're totally we're lost in the sunflower field as far as that stuff concerns. We we don't know. We got to get our hands on the police report.

And even that I read when when Larisa's mom hired a Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator, they got weird conflicting information about, you know, what was found with him or not or what was what was left behind by him or not. So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what was there.

Yeah, I get the picture that it was a frustrating experience working with the Bulgarian police. It seems like Germany got involved with Interpol, but they had some frustrations as well. There's there's some speculation that they intentionally kind of kept this story on the down low because they didn't want it to affect tourism. Yeah, I could see that other people say that. Well, maybe not that, but it just wasn't widely known. It was some German kid. It wasn't all over the newspapers.

And so people, you know, they didn't necessarily even know what was going on. If they saw this flyer or they maybe not have, maybe they didn't even run it on the evening news.

Yeah. And so, like, if it was three weeks, four weeks after the disappearance that, like, news started to really spread or maybe news never really spread. If you were a driver and you gave a kid a ride on the way to highway outside of the airport, you might not have ever put two and two together. Or if you saw some kid running through a field into the woods, you might not have ever heard of Lars Martok either.

So there's it's possible there's people out there with information who just aren't or don't know to to cough it up, although that's probably exceedingly unlikely these days because of the exposure that this story's gotten.

Yeah, one interesting tidbit is that they did find that those five hundred euros were untouched in his account. And I don't think we mentioned I think some people speculate the fact that it was five hundred euros on the nose and that it was Western Union and he had never used it meant that he was being told by somebody to get five hundred euros wired via this way. Yeah, but again, that's just Internet speculation.

Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision. He just asked her to wire him some money, some money. He had decided that that that was according to that documentarian. Who knows? We really need to get Sandra Matonga in here.

Dude, one of the cool things that happened through this, through his mother investigating this is various leads came in over the years, like, hey, there's this guy that speaks German. He could be Lars. She would go check it out. There's this other guy. Over the years, she has ended up finding fifteen German expatriates in Bulgaria. Some were addicts, some were mentally ill. Some were actually reunited with their families. Some didn't want to be reunited.

But she found all these people. So like every time that happened, it gave her hope that even though the chances, you know, with a case like this is if you don't find this person within the first few days or the first week, it's like very slim to no chance. All of these things gave her hope that she could if she just kept at it, that she might eventually find her son.

Yeah, I was really surprised to see that there was a stat in here that said that something like only three percent of missing persons cases aren't resolved within the first year in Germany.

Yeah, but not even in Germany. True. But among German citizens. Yeah, yeah.

I thought it would be a lot higher than that. But that's that's actually not bad as far as I can tell. Yeah. So, yeah, one of those people, by the way, who was found that was thought to be there's like a whole thing where people are following this case and any time something ends up on the Internet, it ends up being passed along to Sandra Matonga, who will basically post on her Instagram like, hey, this was sent from this town.

Can somebody go see if they can find this homeless guy and get me more pictures of them so we can figure out if it's large, like she does this kind of frequently, there was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who looks a lot like Lars, but disheveled with the beard and his hair. Kind of crazy. Yeah. And that turned out to be a different man who was missing from British Columbia named Anton Tilpa, who was reunited with his family after five years.

And they think that he hitchhiked, hitchhiked and walked from British Columbia down to Brazil and then kind of lived around Rio, I think Rio on his own for a while during a mental break. And so some of the theories over the years that have been formed, the one that seems most obvious to me, is that along with the ear injury, there was some sort of a head injury, maybe a concussion left untreated that led to erratic behavior and paranoia maybe.

And that, you know, once he had left and had no money and no phone and no passport, he sort of was just sort of perhaps lost his memory and lost in Bulgaria and still lost in Bulgaria.

Yeah, that's entirely possible, especially if it was a head injury that was getting worse and worse by the hour.

That could definitely explain the erratic behavior of leaving his stuff and running through the airport and jumping the fence into a sunflower field. Because if you think about it, everything up to that point, you can explain by him being intimidated in a hotel he didn't feel comfortable in by some guys who aimed to rob him. And even if those guys didn't aim to rob him, it just him thinking that they were going to rob him explains everything else up to that point.

The thing that makes it inexplicable, as far as I'm concerned, is him leaving the airport the way they did and potentially leaving everything behind that throws everything out the window and actually makes the idea of a traumatic brain injury a lot more possible in my mind. The problem is that if that's what happened to him, it's really possible that he's up there, you know, out in the woods somewhere still and just hasn't been found and is dead probably by now.

Yeah, I suppose he could have just wandered into a town and assimilated well, his mom apparently does believe that he's still out there, which is why she tries to shake down every lead she can, but thinks that he does have memory loss and that that's why he's still out there just in his never contacted her.

Another theory is that, you know, maybe everything he said is true. Maybe there were men following him. Maybe it had something to do with that fight in these guys that may or may not have been hired to beat him up. Apparently, the human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem. And maybe, you know, a young, handsome, fit man like Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and that he really, like, had every right to be anxious and nervous because otherwise he seemed like he was OK.

It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what Sandra Mattock has been going through for these years.

Oh, dude. Just can't even. I mean, when you when you when you don't have closure like that, your imagination is left to just fill in whatever blanks. And, you know, in a situation like that, people's imaginations tend to go to the darkest places. I can't imagine the stuff that she's come up with or that people have suggested to her to, you know, being caught up in it and forgetting like this is the mom. Like, this is real to her.

This is her life. This isn't just something on the Internet.

But what about the trucker? Oh, so that's one of the leads that there was a trucker in. What where was a Brandenberg? The Checker. So there was a trucker in 2019, picked up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove them all the way to to Brandenberg, I guess. And he said later on he didn't know about the large but TONC case at the time. But he said later on he found out about it and said, oh, man, that's got to be the kid that I picked up.

And so his mom shook down the story. And I don't think that she ever got in touch with the truck driver. Also, the truck driver was just like, here's what I think. But I can't I can't say either way and I don't know where he went. So there's like a be on the lookout among, you know, Lars Metung Watchers and Brandenberg from that story.

Yeah, there was a lot of stuff like that that kept her going totally. I saw there was another one about a man in Dusseldorf that the whole thing lasted for about two hours. That's how fast things get done. She posted pictures that somebody had sent her of a man, a homeless man in Dusseldorf and asked for more pictures. And they within two hours, the cops in Dusseldorf did pick the guy up and verified that it was not Lars.

Yeah, I mean, I think the head injury and loss of memory, like he would want to get back to Germany.

By all accounts, he had a good life, enjoyed his job, was a pretty happy guy and loved Germany. So the idea of him choosing to stay there of his own, like sound mind just doesn't seem likely at all.

No. And unfortunately, that really strongly suggests foul play is a possibility to the fact that he has not turned up. He has every reason to, like you say, turn turn back up again, get back to his life. Yeah, I saw that this on the State Department's website for Bulgaria. And human trafficking, like Bulgaria does have a human trafficking problem. But it seems to be typically targeting Bulgarians, especially Romani. People who end up getting forced to beg on the streets are forced into hard labor.

If you're a man that it doesn't necessarily target tourists. And I think the Bulgarian officials would probably not put up with that because it would harm tourism so juridically. So it's fairly unlikely that, like a blonde German guy named, you know, Lars would be would end up begging on the streets of France at the behest of the Bulgarian mafia. And I also saw another theory that he was a drug mule and he flipped out, was scared he was going to get caught and ran out of the area.

Was our drug thing to what really kind of undermines that theory is that no drugs were found in his stuff. So it's possible he took drugs. A lot of people are like, well, clearly he was on drugs. Like, why else would you do that? That's a possibility as well. But again, if you really look at some of his behavior, it yes. The fact that he ran out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's erratic behavior.

But if you look at the way he was behaving during that erratic behavior, he's not acting erratic, if that makes any sense. It's yeah, it's just it's one of the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to you and Dave Meisner for coming up with this one.

Yeah, I knew nothing about it until Dave said it's a way to go, Dave. Yeah, we need to spend more time on YouTube. I guess we totally missed this one so we can go back to Bitcoin. Right. You got anything else? Nope. All right. Well, if you want to know more about Lars Metung, go out and solve the mystery, Will. At least for his dear mother's sake, and since we said as to your mother's sake, it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this this is another kid right now.

And this is actually from dad. My son Hans colored a picture of you podcasting today, unprompted, which did you see this picture?

No, I got to bring it up. It's very cute, which I thought was awesome. Said we should send it to Josh and Chuck and his eyes lit up. He wrote out what he wanted to type in an email to you, and I thought it was better to just send you his note. I've been listening to the show for the last ten years or so and introduced my son a few months ago. We read books before bed, including yours, and then listen to the podcast as he falls asleep.

I'm thankful that I'm able to share this with Hans. He's a smart kid with incredible memories, so will often bring up facts he's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten. And the picture is adorable.

What's the name of the guy who sent it?

I'm looking for Sam, OK? And it's it's a picture with magic marker and you are sitting upright at a table. And he actually nailed it because you're on the left. You know, back in the before times when we were actually in our studio. Yeah, he has it right. You're on the left. I'm on the right. I am. It looks like I'm passing out, though. I'm kind of slumped over. But he's got two little microphones and then two little pieces of paper with a handwritten thing that says notes pointing at the paper.

Huh?

It says, I listen to your show almost every night. And then there's a handwritten letter, which is great, which I'll read as best I can. I love your show. Chuck and Josh, today I listen to your essay, ask about earwax. I told my mom and and had some of your tips. Hey, have you guys made a football episode like Touchdown? But if not, can you make one? I listen to almost all the episodes except ones that my parents don't let me watch.

I also have your book. I have read some of the chapters in it and they are great. I like that you guys have different types of episodes, like short stuff and just regular episodes. I'm your biggest fan. I am in the second grade. Yours sincerely. And that is Hines last name. REDACTED because he's a kid.

Hanzo is amazing. I'm going to find the picture. I haven't been able to find it yet, but that was a beautiful letter. And you have a super cool name, by the way.

Yes, I love it. And thank you, Dad. Sam and whoever else is in the family helping to support the show.

We really appreciate it. Yeah, well, if you want to get in touch with us like cons, maybe try drawing a picture. What are you waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off to us here at Stuff podcast that I heart. Radio dotcom.

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