Rudolph Fentz (supposedly born 1847, died June 1950 in New York City, also known as Rudolf Fenz) is the fictional central character of an Urban Legend.
The story of Rudolph Fentz is one of the more significant urban legends of the 1970s and has been repeated occasionally since; with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s it has been reported more often as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of (involuntary) time travel.
In essence, the legend is that, in New York in 1950, a man wearing 19th century clothes was hit by a car and killed. The subsequent investigation revealed that the man had disappeared without trace in 1876. The items in his possession appeared to reveal that the man had travelled through time from 1876 to 1950 directly.
The Fentz legend is composed of the following details:
One evening in mid-June 1950, at about 23:15 clock passers-by at New York City's Times Square noticed a man of about 30 years old, dressed in the fashion of the late 19th Century. No one saw how he arrived there, and he was disoriented and confused standing in the middle of an intersection and hit by a taxi and fatally injured, before people were able to intervene.
The officials at the morgue searched his body and found the following items in his pockets:
None of these objects showed any signs of aging.
Captain Hubert V. Rihm of the Missing Persons Department of NYPD tried using this information to identify the man. He found that the address on Fifth Avenue was part of a business; its current owner did not know Rudolph Fentz. Fentz's name was not listed in the address book, his fingerprints were not recorded anywhere, and no one had reported him missing.
Rihm continued the investigation and finally found a Rudolph Fentz Jr. in a telephone book of 1939. Rihm spoke to the residents of the apartment building at the listed address who remembered Fentz and described him as a man about 60 years who had worked nearby. After his retirement, he moved to an unknown location in 1940.
Contacting the bank, Rihm was told that Fentz died five years before, but his widow was still alive but lived in Florida. Rihm contacted her and learned that her husband's father had disappeared in 1876 aged 29. He had left the house for an evening walk and never returned. All efforts to locate him were in vain and no trace remained.
Captain Rihm checked the missing persons files on Rudolph Fentz in 1876. The description of his appearance, age, and clothing corresponded precisely to the appearance of the unidentified dead man from Times Square. The case was still marked unsolved. Fearing he would be held mentally incompetent, Rihm never noted the results of his investigation in the official files.
Since 1972, the unexplained disappearance and reappearance Rudolph Fentz has appeared in books (such as those by Viktor Farkas) and articles, and later on the Internet, portrayed as a real event, and as has been cited as evidence for various theories and assumptions about the topic of time travel.
In 2000, after the Spanish magazine 'Más Allá' published a representation of the events as a factual report, folklore researcher Chris Aubeck investigated the description to check the veracity. His research led to the conclusion that the people and events of the story invented all were fictional. Aubeck found that the Fentz-story for the first time in the 1972 May / June issue of the Journal of Borderland Research and was published as a factual report. This magazine was published by the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, a society that addressed UFO sightings with esoteric explanations. The magazine sourced the story to the book published in 1953, A Voice from the Gallery by Ralph M. Holland. Aubeck believed the origin of the fictional story had been found.
However in August 2002, after Aubeck had published his research in the Akron Beacon Journal, Pastor George Murphy wrote to him and told him that the original source was older still. Ralph M. Holland had either taken the story about Rudolph Fentz completely from either a 1952 Robert Heinlein science fiction anthology, entitled 'Tomorrow, The Stars' or the Collier's magazine from 15 September 1951. The true author was the renowned science fiction writer Jack Finney (1911–1995), and the Fentz episode was part of the short story I'm Scared, which was published in Collier's first. This meant that the fictional character and the source of the story were finally identified.