Mehran Karimi Nasseri

Just put Rage in there so we know which show that it's for.

Any and all ways are appreciated, and we have a few people to thank today, including Sir Alfred, who came in right before the show with $503.

Whoa.

Thank you, Sir Alfred.

He says, uh, "For Rage in the morning from Sir Alfred belatedly." I mean, I think you're right on time, but, uh-

Yeah.

Really

And sometimes it is needed.

But there was a real guy, the one the movie was based on.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri.

He lived in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 to 2006, eighteen years.

But his case had nothing to do with a lost passport.

What's the longest time you've ever spent in an airport? Probably a few hours, perhaps a day or a night if you've been caught in delays.

But Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who went by the name Sir Alfred, certainly has you beat because today in history in 1988 he set up camp in Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport where he would remain for the next 18 years.

Yeah.

And if you're thinking, "That sounds like a familiar story but wasn't he American and didn't he shag Catherine Zeta-Jones?" You're thinking of the-

And so it took another seven years of legal maneuvering until 1999 when Belgium finally agreed to mail his refugee documents to Paris, basically allowing France to issue him with an official residency permit and an international passport.

But the weird thing is that when Bourguet finally presented Nasseri with his official papers in 1999, he was expecting there to be a big celebration, but Nasseri refused to sign them because I guess more than a decade of living inside this fluorescent-lit transit lounge had inflicted yet more psychological damage on him.

What he said was that he wasn't going to sign the papers because they were obviously fake, uh, and they had his nationality listed as Iranian rather than British, and they identified him as Mehran Karimi Nasseri instead of Sir Alfred.

And so the airport basically had stopped being his prison and had become a kind of sanctuary or something.