Stuff You Should Know - The Disappearance of Lars Mittank

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

In 2014, a young German man walked into an airport in Bulgaria with a flight booked, then suddenly ran out leaving all his posessions behind, never to be heard from again. This is the story of Lars Mittank. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart 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 at another true life mystery edition.

A true life mystery. Yeah. Okay. I don't want to say crime because I'm not 100% sure crime was involved. I'm sure it still falls under the umbrella of true crime but 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 will 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 and read it ourselves. So we did find a redditor who did something last year who claims that he got information from

Lars's mother who you're going to meet, Sandra. She's not going to be on the show. You're not going to really meet her, 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 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 without double checking it and now 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

fact. 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, 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 dudes. So, you know, yeah, that is what it is. And the dude that

we're talking about is named Lars Metonk and he's known as the most famous missing person on YouTube. I hate that description. He is pretty bad. It should have probably just scared us off of this episode to begin with. I know. Because you remember, what was the name of that con, 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. That almost put me off of YouTube forever. We blocked our memory bank because we did our biggest show ever there in front of about 12 people. Yeah, it was pretty bad. But I'll think of it. And by the way, we should thank Dave Meichner, who was a listener who turned me onto 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 Metonk 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 8, 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. Vidcon. Vidcon. 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, it looks like any lovely seaside hamlet. Yeah, and I couldn't get the impression of whether it was more like Destin or more like Panama City Beach. It seems like a big party spot, if that's what you're wondering. Okay, but it also looked like it was fairly clean and well run and not just whatever kind of thing. I don't know.

I place it between the two from what I can tell. But that's where this event took place, where the disappearance took place. It's 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 1986 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 loved, 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 this is not how they would pronounce it, but the Werder Bremen Football Club. Oh, really? How would they pronounce it? Well, it's always just a little more German. Let's see. Like the guy, the Redditor, he narrates his own documentary and he said it in a way that I'm not even going to attempt. Oh, okay. All right. Fine. So that whole football club thing actually plays a role in this because it may be at the center of his disappearance. We're not 100% sure. But to kind of give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars Metank was, or Metank 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 100 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 to a 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 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, 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 it 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 named Tim Schult and Paul Roman. But they all 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 is 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, it 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 slash Documentary who said that he apparently had kind of gotten, had 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 answer right there. That explains it all. Yeah, basically. So I mean, the week went by pretty uneventfully. I think one of his friends later said on TV or in an interview that it went by really quick. On one, I think the 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 it. Football,

which is goofy, but that's the way it goes. And so they went to this bar, rock bar, or OKBAR, which sounds like a cool place. And they watched a match, I think Costa Rica and the Netherlands. And while they were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans there watching this from 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 Lars and his friends. Yeah. And I 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. 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 spring break party central. So if one of your friends disappears for the night and you're a bunch of dudes, you might just think, like, all right, well, 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 it 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 had 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 were fans of Byron, FC Byron, that they'd 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 had 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's loose, I've seen people saying that like he totally made up the story about the fight. 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 Lars is like, great, but I'm not getting that here. I'm going to go back home 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 named cepheroxyme. 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, a cephaloxin-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 has nothing to do with anything that Lars exhibited, any behavior he 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 Lars 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 I'm 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, the Redditor 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 he went to the specialist. The specialist 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, 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, I felt so too.

All right. Well, let's take a break and we will come back and talk about what happened and after his friends left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this. the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships,

life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some

friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Lars's buddies go back home to Germany. Lars 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 Varna, 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 it a four out of five and booking.com has it at 7.8 out of 10. And it is definitely cheap. I think rooms are like 25 American dollars a night, which is suspiciously cheap. And that 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 p.m. after he's checked into the hotel, he calls his mom. I think it's

the first phone, first of 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 he 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. But he said that there were four men after him that were trying to kill him or that 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 texts his mom, what is serifom 500, which was that antibiotic, which you might think means like he's feeling weird. And what is this I've taken? That to me says that if he was behaving weirdly or experiencing some differing 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 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 500 euros wired, you know, money-grammed or whatever? Western Union. I don't know what the, do they have Western Union over there? Yeah. Supposedly there's a real detail in there in that it was Western Union. Well, what's the, what makes Western Union important?

So his mother had never heard of Western Union and Lars hadn't either, but apparently he talked to another German tourist at the airport who had told him 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, whether or not 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 shady. It could be. So from what I saw that the doctor changed the 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 him to come back. He just never came back. And 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 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, it's 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's 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 all 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, 21 year old athletic gallop out of there. Yeah. As 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 there's 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 I was read it too on a different post,

their 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 was coming after you and would probably look behind you a little more. He doesn't quite do that actually. 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 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. 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, 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. 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 20 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 sandpile 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? No, it's on camera, but it's one of those things where it's like they had to circle and highlight him because he'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, on the other side of that sunflower field, very importantly, is the A2 highway. So who knows what happened? And 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 size 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 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 Mataq.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, just to recap, Lars Matank has fled, is 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 in the sun. Except for his mom speculating that she saw him checking his pockets for that stuff. Yeah, I didn't. I thought that was very confusing. But I saw it in 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 basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were left behind. But I mean, that's a really good point. We're lost in the sunflower field as far as that stuff concerns. We don't know. We got to get our hands on the police report. And even that, I read when Lars's mom hired a Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator,

they got weird conflicting information about what was found with him or not, or 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 some speculation that they intentionally kind of kept the story on the download 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, they didn't necessarily even know

what was going on if they saw this flyer or maybe they didn't even run it on the evening news. Yeah. And so if it was three weeks, four weeks after the disappearance that 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 A2 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 Mittank either. So it's possible there's people out there with information who just don't know 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 500 euros were untouched in his account. And I don't think we mentioned, I think some people speculate the fact that it was 500 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 500 euros wired via this way. 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 and she had decided that that was according to that documentarian. Who knows? We really need to get Sondra Mittank on here, dude. One of the cool things that happened 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 15 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 if she just kept at it, that she might eventually find her son. Yeah. I was really surprised to see that there was a statin here that said that something like only 3% of missing persons cases

aren't resolved within the first year in Germany. Yeah. It's not even in Germany, but among German citizens. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it would be a lot higher than that, but 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 anytime something ends up on the internet, it ends up being passed along to Sandra Matank, 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 Lars? 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 Pilpa, who was reunited with his family after five years. And they think that he 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. Man. 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 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, 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 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 and is 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 and 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 had every right to be anxious and nervous because otherwise he seemed like he was okay. It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what Sandra Matank has been going through for these years. Oh, dude, just can't even. I mean, when you don't have closure like that, your imagination's 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 too, 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. So what about the trucker? Oh, so that's one of the leads that there was a trucker in, where was it? Brandenburg? The trucker, so there was a trucker that in 2019 picked up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove him all the way to Brandenburg, I guess. And he said later on, he didn't know about the Lars Matank 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 or else 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 beyond the lookout among, you know, Lars Matank watchers in Brandenburg from that story. Yeah. There was 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 had picked 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 like 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 too. 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 Bulgarian 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 or 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 dramatically. So it's fairly unlikely that like a blonde German guy named, you know, Lars 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 and was scared he was going to get caught and ran out of the airport. Yeah. I saw a drug thing too. 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, 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 just, it's one of the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to you and Dave Meichner for coming up with this one. Yeah. I knew nothing about it until Dave sent it. So 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 VidCon. Right. You got anything else? Nope. All right. Well, if you want to know more about Lars Meton, go out and solve the mystery, will you? At least for his dear mother's sake. And since we said his dear mother's sake, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this, this is another kid writing in. This is actually from Dad. My son Hans colored a picture of you podcasting today. Unprompted. Nice. Which, did you see this picture? No, I got to bring it up. It was very cute. Which I thought was awesome. I said we should send it to Josh and Chuck and his eyes lit up. He wrote out what he wanted to type and 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 10 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 memory. So we'll often bring

up facts. He's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten. Nice. And the picture is adorable. What's the name of the guy who sent it? I'm looking for it. Sam. Okay. And 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, he has it right. You're on the left. I'm on the right. 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. Nice. And 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 listened to your SYSK about earwax. I told my mom and had some of your tips. Hey, have you guys made a football episode like touchdown? But if not, can you make one? I listened 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'm the second grade, yours sincerely. And that is Hans, last name redacted because he's a kid. Hans, that was 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. Yep. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Hans, maybe try drawing a picture. What are you waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off to us here at stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about

to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.