Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport

Born into a well-to-do family in Iran, Mehran Karimi Nasseri or Sir Alfred as he became known by airport employees and travelers alike, insisted throughout his life that he was an illegitimate child of an affair between his physician father and a Scottish nurse. Arriving into the UK in September of 1973, the future Sir Alfred studied at the University of Bradford for the next three years, returning home to Iran where he claimed he was expelled from the country in 1977 for participating in protests against the Shah—a claim that would later be refuted by an investigating bureaucracy.

Nomadic Refugee

Awarded refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sir Alfred bounced between England and France until 1988, when his papers were lost after the alleged theft of his briefcase. Caught in a perpetual state of immigration limbo—both of his own making and a steady application of bureaucratic bumbling—Sir Alfred would spend the next eighteen years as a permanent resident of Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle Airport, where he lived on a bench near the Paris Bye Bye Bar, making daily entries into his diary or studying economics as he listened to his radio and smoked from his gold pipe, oftentimes staring in a reflective trance at the constant sea of travelers that passed by his permanent airport home.

An Attraction

Over his many years at Charles de Gaulle, Sir Alfred attracted a legion of sympathetic airport workers and travelers alike, who bought him meals from a nearby McDonalds or sent him money in more than 1,000 letters he claimed to have received. Later helped by French human rights attorney Christian Bourget, in 1995, Belgian authorities granted Sir Alfred permission to travel to Belgium for the issuance of new identity papers, followed by residency offers from France, refusing both overtures when they listed him as Iranian rather than his claim of British citizenship due to his insistence that his biologic mother was from Scotland.

Movie Star

In 2003, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks paid Sir Alfred a rumored $275,000 for the rights to his story, which later morphed into the light comedy The Terminal starring Tom Hanks. Hospitalized in 2006, Sir Alfred would spend the next sixteen years living in various Paris charity centers until his return to Terminal 1 in September of 2022, where he passed away from a heart attack on November 12th of that same year, making the life of Sir Alfred Mehran, one of the strangest immigration misadventures in modern times.