Benjaman Kyle is missing.
Benjaman Kyle also lives in Savannah, Georgia. If you had his address, you could go visit him, and he’d be there, doing whatever he does each day.
But if you go to the Doe Network, an organization that helps locate missing people, he’ll be there. In fact, his case file is 1007UMGA. But unlike everyone else in the Doe Network’s database, Kyle is not in there because no one knows where he is—rather, it’s because no one knows who he is.
On August 31, 2004, Kyle was found unconscious behind a Burger King, near a dumpster. He was naked, beaten, and bitten by fire ants. His wallet and ID were gone—as was much of his memory. He could not recall any of the events of the past twenty years. He did not know what his name was, where he was from, and did not even recognize his own face. The mystery man adopted the name “Benjaman Kyle” in part because the initials—B.K.—are also Burger King’s. He believes that his true first name is “Benjaman” (with the curious spelling) and therefore uses that name, but there is little to no evidence that he is correct.
His memory is shattered, but over the course of the past few years, he and others have pieced together some likely information about his life before the summer of 2004. He recognizes certain landmarks from Indianapolis, Indiana, which others have used to conclude that he lived in the area sometime in the late 1950s to early 1960s. His spotty but detailed recollection of certain parts of the University of Colorado, Boulder, library and other locations around the campus strongly suggests that he attended the university in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Together, these pieces of information suggest he’s approximately sixty years old.
Kyle also has extensive knowledge of how the restaurant and food preparation business works, and he remembers how to operate the machinery. (While he lost his memory, many of his acquired skills remain intact.) Unfortunately, he cannot remember his Social Security number—until recently, he was unable to get an ID card issued and therefore, unable to gain employment. That changed in 2011, when a local government agency helped him get a government-issued ID, and he later found work as a dishwasher.
Ben Pridmore of England is a memory champion. He can memorize the order of multiple decks of playing cards in a matter of minutes and once memorized the order of twenty-seven decks of cards—1,404 cards total—with only an hour of study. Most incredibly, Pridmore once committed to memory the correct order of a single deck of cards—in twenty-six seconds.