Rudolph Fentz

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Rudolph Fentz (* 1847 ; † June 1950 in New York City ; also Rudolf Fenz ) is the fictional central character of a modern legend .

background

The story about Rudolph Fentz is one of the more important modern legends, as it has occasionally been cited since the 1970s, and with the spread of the Internet since the 1990s, more frequently as a reproduction of facts and thus as evidence of the occurrence of (involuntary) time travel .

In essence, the popular narrative is that in 1950 New York City, a man dressed in 19th century fashion was hit by a car and died. The subsequent investigation showed that this man was Rudolph Fentz, who disappeared without a trace in 1876, who must have come from the past to the relative present in an unexplained way.

The fictional representation

In detail, the Fentz legend contains the following elements:

One evening in mid-June 1950 at about 11:15 p.m., passers-by in New York's Times Square noticed a man about 30 years old dressed in late 19th century fashion. Nobody had seen where he had come from; he was suddenly disoriented and confused in the middle of an intersection and was hit by a taxi and fatally injured before anyone present could intervene.

The morgue officers searched the dead man and found the following items in his pockets:

None of the objects showed signs of age.

Captain Hubert V. Rihm from the New York Police Department's Missing Department attempted to identify the dead person using these clues. He found that the Fifth Avenue address belonged to a store whose current owners did not know about Rudolph Fentz. Fentz's name was not in the address book, his fingerprints were nowhere, and no one reported him missing.

Rihm continued his investigation and finally found a Rudolph Fentz Jr. in a telephone directory from 1939. The apartment building at the address listed remembered this Fentz and described him as a man in his 60s who worked for a nearby bank and had moved unknown after his retirement in 1940.

Rihm received information from the bank that Fentz had died five years earlier, but that his widow was living in Florida . Rihm contacted her and learned that the then 29-year-old father of her husband had disappeared in 1876. He had left the house for an evening stroll and had never returned. All efforts to find him had been in vain.

Captain Rihm found Rudolph Fentz in the missing persons files of the year 1876. The description of his appearance, age and clothing exactly matched the appearance of the unidentified dead person from Times Square. The case was still marked as unsolved.

For fear of being considered mentally insane , Rihm never recorded the results of his investigations in the official files.

The real issue

From 1972 to the present day, Rudolph Fentz's unexplained disappearance and reappearance has been portrayed in books (such as Viktor Farkas ') and articles, and later also on the Internet, as an actual event and as evidence of various theories and assumptions, for example on the subject of time travel , listed.

In 2000, after the Spanish magazine Más Allá had published an account of what happened as facts report in began Madrid living Briton Chris Aubeck the veracity of the narrative to check. His research led to the conclusion that the characters and events in the story were all fictitious.

He found that the Fentz story first appeared as a factual report in the May / June 1972 issue of the Journal of Borderland Research ; this journal was the organ of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation , a society that dealt with the esoteric explanation of UFO sightings. There, in turn, the 1953 book A Voice from the Gallery by the Borderland member, journalist and science fiction enthusiast Ralph M. Holland was given as the source . Aubeck believed to have found the origin of the fictional story here.

However, in August 2002, after Aubeck published his research in the Akron Beacon Journal , Pastor George Murphy contacted him and informed him that the original source was even older. Ralph M. Holland had taken the story about Rudolph Fentz completely from a 1952 science fiction anthology published by Robert Heinlein entitled Tomorrow, The Stars or from Collier’s magazine from September 15, 1951. The author was the well-known science fiction writer Jack Finney (1911-1995), and the Fentz episode was part of the short story I'm Scared , which was first published in Collier’s . Thus the fictional character and the origin of the narrative were finally determined.

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