Old US TV show clip spread as ‘Torenza Woman’ claim
A video has gone viral on social media claiming that a woman presented a passport from a nonexistent country called “Torenza” at the John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport in the United States and then mysteriously disappeared. However, Dismislab’s fact-check found no evidence of such an event. The footage actually comes from an old American television show titled ‘Airline’, featuring an Arabic-speaking woman who faced communication issues on a flight from Baltimore to Los Angeles because she did not know English. The fictional story of the “country of Torenza” appears to be inspired by a 1950s Japanese urban legend.
On October 11, 2025, a post from a Facebook page shared some photos of a woman and a passport with the caption, “An unbelievable incident occurred at JFK Airport in America. An elderly woman got off a flight from Japan. The Airport staff was shocked to see her passport. Her country’s name was TORENAZA; there is no country with this name on the world map. However, her passport had stamps from over a dozen countries that do not exist. Surprisingly, the passport’s biometric details and seals looked authentic. When asked, she said, ‘Maybe I have come from another planet.’ She seemed like a normal traveler. So the airport staff took her to the observation room. She sat there for 30 minutes, when suddenly the CCTV cameras stopped working. She was never seen again.”
Later, similar posts appeared on Facebook (1, 2, 3) and Instagram with the same claim.
Verification by Dismislab found a YouTube video from the TV series named Airline. The video, inaccessible from Bangladesh, was analyzed using a VPN. It came from the episode titled “Lost in Translation.” At 22:26 minutes of the episode, the same woman in a hijab from the Facebook post appears. The first photo in the viral post exactly matches her face and outfit. The second photo appears at 25:48, and the last at 26:04 of the same episode.
The episode shows a woman traveling from Baltimore to Los Angeles who struggles to communicate with airline staff because she does not understand English. Later, an Arabic-speaking employee helps her. Nowhere in the episode is “Torenza” or any such country mentioned.
Two more images shared with the claim were found to be clearly from U.S. passports. One image shows “United States of America” printed on the cover, and another shows passport pages with various visa stamps from real countries.
Search on social media reveals that the same video spread across Facebook pages and profiles (1, 2, 3, 4), TikTok (1, 2, 3), X (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and YouTube (1, 2, 3), all repeating the same false story. Before appearing in Bangladesh, the claim circulated internationally in video format.
One such video has been shared over 49,000 times. The U.S.-based fact-checking outlet LEAD STORIES published a report on October 13 confirming that the viral clips reused old footage from the mid-2000s American show Airline and contained AI-generated voiceovers.
Japanese legend that inspired the “Torenza” story
While verifying the video, Dismislab found a report by the U.S. media outlet PRIMETIMER.
In the report titled “Is the story of the Torenza passport woman true or false? Debunking the viral claim,” it states that the Torenza story aligns with a Japanese urban legend. The story connects to Japan’s well-known fictional tale “The Man from Taured,” set around Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. A USA-based fact-checking organization also published a report on this fictional story.
According to the claim, in the summer of 1954, a man with a European appearance arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. When he presented his passport, it showed the name of his country as Taured. Japanese officials were astonished, as no such country ever existed on any map. The traveler, fluent in French and Japanese, firmly stated that Taured lay between France and Spain and that his nation was thousands of years old.
His passport contained stamps from many countries, including Japan. Investigation revealed his travel purpose, hotel booking, and even his bank account were all nonexistent. Authorities placed him under surveillance at a hotel, but the next morning, both the man and all his documents vanished mysteriously. No official records or news reports of the event ever surfaced, yet it turned into a popular urban legend.
Some reports suggest that the legend known as “The Man from Taured” possibly drew inspiration from a real incident in 1959. A white man named John Alan Kuchar Zegrus arrived in Japan with his Korean wife and was later arrested on charges of using a fake passport and identity fraud.
According to Japanese media, Zegrus worked as a former spy who recruited Japanese military volunteers through the United Arab Emirates. In 1960, he received a one-year prison sentence and failed in a suicide attempt. After serving his term, Zegrus was deported to Hong Kong, and his wife to South Korea.
No further information about their later lives surfaced. After this mysterious incident, the Taured legend spread widely in Japan.
Disclaimer: The original version of this fact-check report was published in Bengali on Dismislab’s Bengali website on October 16, 2025. The English translation was completed later; however, to maintain time accuracy and avoid any potential misinterpretation, the English version has been published with the original publication date.
