The Great Impostor: The Man Who Became Everyone — 1951

About this episode

Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. Over the course of his life he impersonated, among other things, a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, a prison warden, a civil engineer, a college dean of philosophy, and a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Korean War. He had no formal qualifications for any of them. He had never been to medical school. He simply read the relevant books, absorbed the vocabulary, and became — convincingly, sometimes brilliantly — whatever he needed to be. He did not do it for money. He did not do it primarily to avoid justice. He did it, as best as anyone could ever determine, because he could. Because performance felt more real to him than identity itself. And then nineteen wounded soldiers were brought aboard his ship off the coast of Korea, one of them needing emergency chest surgery, and the man who was not a doctor had to operate. Every patient survived. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the restless, rootless early life that produced Demara, the string of impersonations that preceded the Navy, the afternoon on the HMCS Cayuga that made him famous, and the specific question his life keep