Most people have fantasized about being someone else, but few of us have actually done it. Here’s an amazing story of a man who pretended to be someone he wasn’t…and pulled it off.
BACKGROUND: Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. was one of the most prolific imposters in history. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921, the high school dropout had successfully passed himself off as a doctor of philosophy, a zoologist, a Trappist monk, a prison counselor, a biologist doing cancer research, a sheriff, a soldier, and a sailor by the time he was in his 30s.
MOMENT OF “TRUTH”: His greatest ruse came during the Korean War when he used the identity of Dr. Joseph Cyr, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1951. He served aboard a destroyer off the Korean coast. Under intense battle conditions, Demara was the ship’s surgeon: he pulled teeth, removed tonsils, administered anaesthesia, and even amputated limbs. But most incredibly, after studying the procedure in a book, he successfully removed a bullet from a wounded soldier that was less than an inch from his heart. Onlookers let out a cheer as he completed the impeccable operation and saved the man’s life. In all his time as a doctor in Korea, he never lost a single patient.
UNMASKED: His success turned out to be his undoing—photographs of the heroic doctor made it into Canadian newspapers. The real Dr. Cyr’s mother saw them and alerted authorites. Amazingly, no charges were filed; Demara had saved too many lives. A naval board of inquiry released him—with back pay. Demara was later arrested for posing as a teacher in the United States and served a six-month sentence. When asked why he did it, noting that he didn’t get rich from his escapades, he answered, “Rascality, pure rascality.”
IMMORTALITY ACHIEVED: In 1961 Hollywood made a movie based on the Demara story, The Great Imposter, starring Tony Curtis and Karl Malden. Director Robert Mulligan was a finalist for the Director’s Guild Award for the film. And Demara himself got a minor part in another movie: In 1960 he appeared in the melodrama The Hypnotic Eye. He played…the doctor.
Number of documented deaths-by-piranha in human history: Not even one.