Missing farmer returns after 30 years wearing same clothes, carrying the same train ticket, and claiming he has been ‘home’ all this time

A 93-year-old Romanian returned home with the same clothes he was last seen in and the same train ticket he left with… the only problem is he left 30 years ago and his family hadn’t heard from him since. Now his unprecedented return somehow adds more questions than answers.

In 1991, on Aug. 29, Vasile Gorgos left his home in eastern Romania with a train ticket in hand for a short business trip. He was expected back by nightfall. He didn’t come back. Weeks passed, months, then years and decades. Thirty years later, Vasile finally returned home, 30 years older, arriving in a car that quickly drove off. Luckily, his family had not moved. Furthermore, according to Indy100, which broke the story, not much had changed in Vasile’s homestead. Everything was the same, just older — ironically nothing had changed with Vasile either — he too had simply gotten older.

Was it aliens? Was it a man who ran away with someone he was having an affair with? We all know the cynical story about the mythological father who left to get some milk. But there were a couple of details that didn’t fit into any of those narratives.

Chief among them is who was in the car that dropped him off. Why was he wearing the same clothes he left with all those years ago? And that’s not to even mention that Vasile reportedly has no memory of what he was doing during all those years he was gone. He underwent a thorough medical examination, and aside from a few neurological issues, he had a clean bill of health. Nothing explained why he doesn’t remember where he had been all those years.

When asked, Vasile simply insists that he’s been at “home.” There have been stories of people who go missing and completely change their identity. Such as the case in New Jersey, where a man named Steve Carter only discovered through a chance encounter on a missing persons website that he himself had been missing from his birth family since he was 4. He was 34 at the time. Similar to Vasile, Carter also had a belated reunion with his family 30 years later. Stories like this, while rare, do happen in some instances.

Vasile’s story certainly feels like a character arc from the TV series Lost, one that may never get a satisfying resolution. Social media is rife with conspiracies. The one gaining traction is that Vasile supposedly lived with another family born of his alleged affair, and as he approached the twilight of his life, they decided he should spend it with his original family. But again, that doesn’t explain the missing memory. The only logical conclusion is that Vasile must be hiding something.

That does raise the question of whether it matters. Would they rather have their beloved patriarch back, or would they rather know where he went? In this situation it seems like that choice was a binary one; and Vasile trusted they’d choose him over answers.