Pauli Poisuo
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Chris Scott
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E. Reid Ross
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Tee Ngin Rui
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The job market is tough, and everyone tries to make their resume stand out. But it's one thing to count that Bavarian folk dance course as "international relationship training." It's another thing entirely to say that your ancestors founded Bavaria, and you've personally ruled it with an iron fist since 1957. These people took the latter approach, and somehow made it work for way, way too long.
Araki Yasusada was a survivor of Hiroshima whose poetry was discovered by his son after his death in 1972. That's already an Oscar movie all by itself, but the poetry was also deeply personal, describing the experience of seeing his wife and one of his daughters engulfed in flames.
And of course, it was all lies.
When people started digging into Yasusada's life, they discovered that his work was the invention of an obscure Japanese translator named Tosa Motokiyu. They then discovered this was also a lie, and both men were a white, middle-aged poet named Kent Johnson. More accurately, a middle-aged white Spanish teacher at an Illinois community college who really wanted to be a poet. Every publisher who intended to distribute Yasusada's work -- and there were several -- stopped the presses, and Johnson had a lot of explaining to do.
To this day, he's done very little. He admits that Yastusada never existed, but maintains that he was a creation of Motokiyu, "the pseudonym of an author whose express wish, stated in his will, was that his identity never be revealed." That's right, he wanted to be so anonymous that he needed a pseudonym for his pseudonym.
Pandit played his last concert in 1996, and no one seemed to have had a clue that the guy wasn't really Indian -- not even the reporter specifically looking into him and his background. Redd kept up the act his entire life, seemingly both onstage and in his personal life, carrying that heavy burden -- and turban -- until his death in 1998.
The truth wasn't uncovered until 2001, when another African-American pianist who'd worked with Redd back in the '40s offhandedly mentioned to a music journalist that he'd known Redd, but he looked a whole lot different back then. Now that's a guy who can keep a secret.
Related: 6 Inspiring Rags To Riches Stories (That Are Bullshit)
Mary Willcocks, aka "Princess Caraboo," claimed to hail from exotic Javasu, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. That's a bold enough lie, especially since Javasu wasn't real, but Mary didn't leave it there. She claimed she'd been kidnapped by pirates, but managed to escape to ... Glouchestershire, England? That seems unlikely, but this was back in 1817, when you pretty much believed whatever people told you.
Confused locals led her to a local magistrate, whose wife was fascinated by the mysterious woman. When a Portuguese sailor turned up in town, claimed to understand Caraboo, and gave her "royal" background to the people, high society was immediately hooked. Dignitaries came from all over to visit Caraboo, and she astonished them with the outlandish customs of her country, which included swimming naked and sleeping on the ground. Soon the "princess" became the talk of the country.
Edward BirdThough for early 1800s English villagers, anything beyond factory work and dying of typhoid was considered an incredible novelty.
In the 1990s, Australian Helen Darville had a great idea for a story about a Ukrainian family that participated in the Holocaust, and she was going to get it published no matter what. Turns out "no matter what" didn't mean "pluck and perseverance" -- it meant "pretend to be Ukrainian and tell everyone that it was heavily based on her own family's experiences." So that's exactly what she did.
She published The Hand That Signed The Paper as "Helen Demidenko," and the publicity material stressed that her Ukrainian ancestry was the source for her story. In interviews, she even made it a point to mention her family's personal connections to the Holocaust. To her credit, she didn't personally claim to have experienced the horrific event. "I depended very heavily on my dad's memories of what the famine was like," Darville/Demidenko said, "and his brother and some of my other relatives as well." She knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the Holocaust.
Allen & Unwin PublishingIt was poised to rocket to the very theoretical edges of what "Based on a true story" could encompass.
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