Ferdinand Demara, the Great Impostor

Ferdinand Waldo Demara (1921-1982), known as "the Great Impostor", masqueraded as many people from monks to surgeons to prison wardens.

He joined the U.S. Army in 1941 and began his new lives by borrowing the name of his army buddy Anthony Ignolia and went AWOL. He then faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously-oriented psychologist. Both Navy and Army caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison.

A string of pseudo-academic careers followed. He was, among other things, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher. One teaching job led to a six months in prison. He never seemed to get much monetary gain in what he was doing - just temporary respectability.

His most famous exploit was to masquerade as surgeon Joseph Cyr about HMCS Cayuga, a Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. He managed to improvise successful surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin. This worked until the mother of the real Dr. Joseph Cyr found out and reported it.

Demara returned to the U.S., inspired the 1960 film "The Great Imposter", and died on 1982 as a Baptist minister.