He successfully impersonated a surgeon, a prison warden, a monk, a college dean, and a sheriff's deputy — often for years at a time. When caught, he was rarely charged. He just moved on and became someone else.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara was born in Massachusetts in 1921 and ran away at 16 to join a monastery. He never finished any formal education, but by the time he was done, he had successfully posed as a civil engineer, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, a prison warden, a sheriff's deputy, a child-care expert, a cancer researcher, and a teacher.
His most audacious impersonation came during the Korean War, when he assumed the identity of Canadian surgeon Joseph C. Cyr and secured a posting aboard the HMCS Cayuga. He performed actual surgical operations — including removing a bullet from near a soldier's heart — by reading medical textbooks the night before procedures. Patients survived. His skills were described as 'admirable.'
He was exposed when the real Dr. Cyr read about his own supposed heroics in a Canadian newspaper. Demara was quietly discharged from the Royal Canadian Navy without charges — the military decided a court-martial would generate more embarrassing publicity than releasing him. He then sold his story to Life magazine.
His strategy for survival was what he called 'expanding into the power vacuum' — finding organizations where a gap existed, creating a position for himself, and filling it so convincingly that removing him became the problem. He claimed a photographic memory and exceptional intelligence. When asked why he did it, he said simply: 'Rascality, pure rascality.'
By the late 1950s, his considerable weight had made anonymity nearly impossible — too many people had seen the Life magazine photos. He spent his final years working legitimately as a hospital chaplain in California, where sympathetic colleagues protected his job despite knowing his history. He died in 1982 from heart failure.
He inspired a 1959 bestselling biography, a 1961 film starring Tony Curtis, and the TV series The Pretender. The real Demara reportedly disliked the film. His impersonations were so effective that some historians have suggested the key ingredient wasn't intelligence or photographic memory — it was simply confidence so total that no one thought to check.