Selects: The Disappearance of Lars Mittank

13:17Chuck Bryant: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.

13:38Josh Clark: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.

14:01Chuck Bryant: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.

14:16Josh Clark: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. And then this is sort of one of the keys is he was given an antibiotic named Sephiroxime. and he was given the strongest possible dosage, which was about, I think it was 500 milligrams.

14:47Chuck Bryant:Yes, and that's just a general, I think a 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. So 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.

15:30Right.

15:31Josh Clark: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 because of his ear. He was a little concerned about, obviously, with changes in the atmosphere and 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.

16:05Chuck Bryant:So a little bit about that original doctor. I saw that from the Redditor who said that he spoke to the guys, to his mother, that his mother said 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 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.

16:54Chuck Bryant: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, 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 a thing.

17:15Josh Clark:Interesting. Yeah, I feel 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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21:11Josh Clark:All right, so Lars' 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.

21:56Josh Clark: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.

22:09Chuck Bryant: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. Yeah. Yeah, there is like probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that. But 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.

22:49Chuck Bryant: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 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.

23:19Josh Clark:Yeah. There ends up being another call where he has left the hotel.

23:24Chuck Bryant:He said that he was hiding on a hill, and I think he even said that he was at risk of falling.

23:30Josh Clark: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 his 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 Seraphim 500, which was that antibiotic, which you might think means like he's feeling weird and like, what is this I've taken?

24:13Chuck Bryant: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 um 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 it was either

24:41Josh Clark:that night or the following morning when he asks i think it was the following morning um you know she had booked a flight uh 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?

25:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah, supposedly there's a real detail in there in that it was Western Union.

25:16Josh Clark:Well, what's the—what makes Western Union important?

25:18Chuck Bryant: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.

25:51Josh Clark: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.

26:34Josh Clark: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.

26:43Chuck Bryant:Like this guy is going to be an international mystery in an hour.

26:46Josh Clark:Yeah. So, you know, it could have been innocent that his story changed or it could be shady.

26:51Chuck Bryant:It could be. So from what I saw, the doctor changed the story three times in 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. 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.

27:39Josh Clark: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. Sure. 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 sprinted from the airport because that part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV.

28:24Josh Clark: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 21-year-old athletic gallop out of there as if someone is chasing him.

28:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, 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 it was Reddit 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 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.

29:30Chuck Bryant: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. It's a very strange run, but it's also not like the run of a person who's out of their mind. That was what stood out to me is that he doesn't seem to at all be out of his mind.

29:54Josh Clark: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, 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.

30:44Josh Clark: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.

31:02Chuck Bryant: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 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?

31:21Josh Clark: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.

31:37Chuck Bryant:No. And 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, to me, is extremely important.

32:02Josh Clark:All right. Should we take another break?

32:03Chuck Bryant:Yes.

32:04Josh Clark: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 Lars Mittag.

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33:15Chuck Bryant:That's your business supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com.

33:20Josh Clark:Seamless coverage with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 2H 2025.

34:05Chuck Bryant:We'll see you next time.

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35:49Chuck Bryant:so Chuck just to recap Lars Matonk 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.

36:07Josh Clark:Except for his mom speculating that she saw him checking his pockets for that stuff.

36:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I thought that was very confusing. But I saw it in the sun, which I realize 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. Like, we're totally lost in the sunflower field as far as that stuff concerns. We don't know. We've 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, you know, what was found with him or not, or what was left behind by him or not.

37:03Chuck Bryant:So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what was there.

37:06Josh Clark: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 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.

37:49Chuck Bryant: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 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 Matank 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.

38:30Josh Clark: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.

38:58Chuck Bryant:Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision. He just asked her to wire him some money. Some money. She had decided that that was according to that documentary. And who knows? We really need to get Sondra Metonk on here, dude.

39:13Josh Clark: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 15 German expatriates in Bulgaria. Some were addicts. Some were mentally ill. Some were actually reunited with their family. 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.

39:56Josh Clark:All of these things gave her hope that if she just kept at it, that she might eventually find her son.

40:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I was really surprised to see that there was a stat in here that said that something like only 3 % of missing persons cases aren't resolved within the first year in Germany. Yeah. Not even in Germany, but among German citizens.

40:18Josh Clark:Yeah.

40:18Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I thought it would be a lot higher than that, but that's actually not bad as far as I can tell.

40:26Josh Clark:Yeah.

40:26Chuck Bryant: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 Matonk, 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 him 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.

41:03Chuck Bryant: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.

41:27Josh Clark: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.

42:01Chuck Bryant: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.

42:50Chuck Bryant: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 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.

43:11Josh Clark:Yeah, or I suppose he could have just, you know, wandered into a town and assimilated.

43:15Chuck Bryant: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 and has never contacted her. Another theory is that maybe everything he said is true.

43:33Josh Clark: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 that 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 okay. It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what Sandra Matank has been going through for these years.

44:09Chuck Bryant: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. Yeah. 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.

44:34Josh Clark:So what about the trucker?

44:37Chuck Bryant:oh so that's one of the leads um uh that there was a trucker in uh what 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 to brandenburg i guess um and uh he said later on he didn't know about the large matonk 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.

45:17Chuck Bryant:So there's like a be on the lookout among, you know, Lars Metonk watchers in Brandenburg from that story.

45:25Josh Clark:Yeah. There was another - Stuff like that that kept her going.

45:28Chuck Bryant: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 within two hours, the cops in Dusseldorf had picked the guy up and verified that it was not Lars.

45:49Josh Clark: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.

46:09Chuck Bryant: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 back up again, get back to his life. I saw that 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.

46:52Chuck Bryant: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 and was scared he was going to get caught and ran out of the airport.

47:11Josh Clark:Yeah, I saw a drug thing too.

47:13Chuck Bryant: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 one of the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to you and Dave Meischner for coming up with this one.

47:54Josh Clark:Yeah, I knew nothing about it until Dave sent it.

47:56Chuck Bryant:Way to go, Dave. Yeah, we need to spend more time on YouTube, I guess. We totally missed this one.

48:01Josh Clark:So we can go back to VidCon.

48:03Chuck Bryant:Right. You got anything else?

48:04Josh Clark:Nope.

48:05Chuck Bryant:All right. Well, if you want to know more about Lars Matonk, go out and solve the mystery, will you? At least for his dear mother's sake. and since we said it's dear mother's sake, it's time for Listener Mail.

48:17Josh Clark: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 in an email to you and I thought it was better to just send you his note. Uh, I've been listening to the show for the last 10 years or so and introduced my son a few months ago. Uh, we read books before bed, including yours, and then listen to the podcast as he falls asleep.

48:51Josh Clark:Uh, 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.

49:00Chuck Bryant:Nice.

49:00Josh Clark:Uh, and the picture is adorable.

49:04Chuck Bryant:What's the name of the guy who sent it? I'm looking for it.

49:07Josh Clark: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. Uh-huh. 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. That's awesome. 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. Uh-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.

49:47Josh Clark: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 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 the second grade. Yours sincerely. And that is Hans, last name redacted, because he's a kid.

50:26Chuck Bryant: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.

50:35Josh Clark: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.

50:42Chuck Bryant: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 at iheartradio.com.

50:58Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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