Bielefeld offered a million to prove it doesn't exist

Achim Held was studying computer science in Kiel when, in 1994, he posted an absurd theory on a German forum: Bielefeld, a city of 340,000 people in the north-west of the country, does not exist. His three proofs were questions. Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? Have you ever been there? Do you know anyone who has? To finish, he offered three culprits to choose from: the secret services, the aliens, or simply Them.

The joke never died. It became the longest-running internet joke in Germany, so much so that in 2012 Angela Merkel told a public event that she had been there, "if it exists at all".

In August 2019 the city decided to settle the matter in the only way it could think of: it offered a million euros to anyone who could supply irrefutable proof of its own non-existence. More than two thousand attempts came in, a few of them with serious mathematical machinery.

In September the jury ruled: no proof was conclusive. Bielefeld kept the million, kept the record for the country's longest-running joke, and kept the same old problem, which is that nobody believes in it.