Lars Joachim Mittank (born February 9, 1986) is a German man who disappeared on July 8, 2014, near Varna Airport in Varna, Bulgaria. Mittank was vacationing at the Golden Sands resort, where he was supposedly involved in a fight, and was subsequently unable to fly home with his friends for health reasons. Mittank was documented acting strangely while alone in Bulgaria. He called home to his mother claiming that people were trying to kill him. On the day when he was supposed to fly home, Mittank went to the Varna Airport to consult with a doctor. He was later seen on airport security footage running out of the airport and towards an adjacent forest. He has never been seen since. The case has generated intense interest, and the frequency with which people viewed the footage of him fleeing the airport has led to him being named "the most famous missing person on YouTube."
Lars Mittank was born on February 9, 1986 in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein, and lived there for his entire life. He worked at a power plant, had friends, and a girlfriend. He visited his parents frequently. After his father suffered a stroke, he often helped at his parents' home after work. He was described as a normal person.
On June 30, 2014, 28-year-old Mittank traveled with five of his friends to Varna, Bulgaria. It was his first journey outside of Germany. The group vacationed at the Golden Sands, a seaside resort just outside of the city of Varna. “The week went by really fast," said Paul Rohmann, one of Mittank’s friends, in 2016 on German television. “We relaxed on the beach, swam in the pool, played football, went clubbing. He was relaxed. He was in a good mood." Another friend, Tim Schuldt, said that Mittank did not eat much, and that he would have only a small bowl of soup or a small salad at a time. His friends reported no additional abnormal behavior by Mittank until the final part of the trip.
On July 6, 2014, the day before they were supposed to return home, Mittank and friends were at a bar in town, and Mittank got into a disagreement with some other German nationals over football. Mittank, a fan of the football club Werder Bremen, had differences with fans of Bayern Munich. He then parted from his friends outside a restaurant after leaving the bar, and disappeared for the rest of the night. Mittank turned up at the resort the following morning and told his friends he was beaten up by four men hired by the group in the bar whom he disagreed with the night before. The fight resulted in Mittank suffering an injured jaw and a ruptured ear drum. He went and saw a doctor who advised him not to fly due to his injury, and prescribed the antibiotic Cefprozil (500 mg). Mittank's friends wanted to stay with him, but he insisted he was fine on his own, and told them to follow the original travel plan and fly home on July 7, which they did.
Mittank checked out of the resort the same time as his friends, and checked into the Hotel Color Varna for one night. The hotel was cheap and close to the airport. However, a day after his friends left, he began to act paranoid. While at the hotel, Mittank called his mother, Sandra Mittank. In a whisper, he told her that people were trying to kill or rob him and that she should cancel his credit cards. The closed-circuit television security cameras in the hotel recorded him pacing up and down the halls, looking out windows, and hiding in an elevator. At 1 A.M., he left the hotel before returning about an hour later. It is not known what he did in the intervening period. In the morning, he once again called his mother, telling her that the people pursuing him were getting closer.
