He Ran Out of an Airport Doctor's Office, Over a Fence, and Into the Woods. Lars Mittank.

On July 8, 2014, a security camera at Varna Airport in Bulgaria recorded a young man running.

He came out of the airport building, jogged across the grounds, climbed over a fence, ran through a meadow, and kept going, toward the trees.

He had left behind his passport. His phone. His wallet. His luggage.

He had just shouted, in a doctor's office, that he did not want to die there.

His name was Lars Mittank. He was twenty-eight years old, from a small town in northern Germany.

The video has been watched millions of times. People call him the most famous missing person on YouTube. And nobody knows where he was running to.

Who was Lars Mittank?

Lars Joachim Mittank was born on February 9, 1986, in Berlin, and grew up in Itzehoe, a town in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany. He lived there his whole life.

He worked at a power plant. He had friends and a girlfriend. After his father had a stroke, he often helped his parents out.

His family and friends described him as a normal guy. His mother said he had no history of mental illness.

Golden Sands

On June 30, 2014, Lars went on vacation with five friends to Golden Sands, a beach resort near the city of Varna, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast.

It was his first trip outside Germany.

His friends said he was relaxed and in a good mood. One of them noticed he did not eat very much. But nobody saw anything unusual. Not until the end of the trip.

The fight

On the night of July 6, Lars got into an argument with some other German tourists. It was about football. Lars supported Werder Bremen. They were Bayern Munich fans.

He left his friends outside a restaurant. He was gone all night.

The next morning, he told his friends he had been beaten up by four men. He had an injury to his jaw and a ruptured eardrum.

A doctor told him not to fly with that ear injury. He gave him a prescription for an antibiotic called cefprozil.

His friends were scheduled to fly home on July 7. Lars told them he would be fine on his own, and that they should go. So they did.

The hotel

Lars moved into a cheap hotel near the airport for the night.

He called his mother, Sandra. He was whispering. He told her that people were trying to kill him, or rob him. He asked her to cancel his credit cards.

The hotel's security cameras recorded him walking up and down the hallways. Looking out the windows. Hiding in the elevator.

At about one in the morning, he left the hotel. He came back about an hour later. Nobody knows what he did during that hour.

Remember, this was a young man who had never been abroad before. His friends had gone home. He was injured, with a painful ear, in a strange city, alone.

The next morning, he called his mother again. He told her that the people after him were getting closer.

The doctor's office

On the morning of July 8, Lars texted his mother that he was at Varna Airport. He was going to see the airport doctor, to get cleared to fly.

The doctor's name was Kosta Kostov. He later described Lars as "nervous and erratic."

Kostov said he told Lars he was fine to fly home. But Lars stayed in the office. He had doubts about the medication he had been given.

Then a construction worker walked into the office.

Lars began to shake. He shouted that he did not want to die there.

And he ran.

The footage

He left everything behind. His wallet. His phone. His passport. His bags.

The airport's cameras followed him as he jogged away from the building, climbed a fence, crossed a meadow, and ran toward the forest next to the airport.

That is the last confirmed sighting of Lars Mittank.

The medication question

So what happened to him?

His mother and some doctors have wondered whether the antibiotic was to blame. Cefprozil belongs to a group of antibiotics that have been linked, in some reports, to psychosis and paranoia.

But the airport doctor said Lars had never taken the antibiotics. He said Lars had not even filled the prescription.

Other people have wondered whether Lars had some kind of sudden mental breakdown that nobody saw coming.

And some have asked whether his fear was real. Whether someone actually was after him, connected to the fight. There is no evidence for that. But there is no evidence that rules it out either.

There is no expert agreement, and no agreement in his family, about what caused his behavior, or how much of his fear was based on something real.

The search

Bulgarian police never found out what happened to him.

His mother hired a private investigator, Andreas Gütig. He checked hospitals for unidentified patients. Nothing.

Experts doubted that Lars could have survived long outdoors in the summer heat with no food or money, although he did have hunting, fishing and trapping experience.

About a year later, a truck driver thought he saw Lars hitchhiking in Varna. In 2019, a German truck driver said he had given a ride to a bearded, long-haired man who looked like an older Lars.

None of these sightings has ever been confirmed.

His mother believes he may still be alive, possibly with no memory of who he is.

Think about what he left at the airport. His passport. His phone. His wallet. Without them, he could not easily cross a border, call home, or get money. If he survived that day, he would have had to survive with nothing.

What we still don't know

By 2018, the airport video had more than sixteen million views.

We still do not know what Lars was afraid of. We do not know if the threat was real, or if something in his mind had changed. We do not know what he did during that missing hour at the hotel. And we do not know what happened to him after he disappeared into the trees.

What we know is this. A twenty-eight-year-old man on his first trip abroad got hurt in a fight, stayed behind alone, and became more and more terrified over a day and a half. And when he finally had a chance to go home, he ran the other way.

What do you think Lars Mittank was running from?