Ferdinard Demara

He was born was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen to join Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, where he stayed for several years. He joined the U.S. Army in 1941.

The following year Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and going AWOL. After two more tries in monasteries he joined the Navy. He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously-oriented psychologist. He taught psychology at Gannon College (now a university) in Erie, Pennsylvania, served as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, and served as an instructor in St. Martin's College (now a university) in the state of Washington. The FBI caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison for desertion.

After his release he assumed a false identity and studied law at night at Northeastern University, then he joined at the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Maine, a Roman Catholic order.

While he was at the Brothers of Christian Instruction, he knew a young doctor named Joseph C. Cyr. That led to his most famous exploit, in which he masqueraded as Cyr, working as a trauma surgeon aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. 

He managed to improvise successful major surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin. His most notable surgical practices were performed when sixteen wounded enemy combatants were brought to the Cayuga, requiring some of them major surgery.  Demara, was the only "surgeon" on board, so he was the only one that could save their lives so he ordered personnel to transport these variously injured patients into the ship's operating room and prepare them for surgery, after that he disappeared to his room with a textbook on general surgery and proceeded to speed-read the various surgeries he was now forced to perform, including major chest surgery. None of the patients died as a result of Demara's surgeries. 

Apparently, the removal of a bullet from a wounded man ended up in Canadian newspapers. One person reading the reports was the mother of the real Joseph Cyr; her son at the same time of "his" service in Korea was actually practicing medicine in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. When news of the impostor reached the Cayuga, Captain James Plomer at first refused to believe Demara was not a doctor (and not Joseph Cyr). The Canadian Navy chose not to press charges, and Demara returned to the United States.

Demara died on June 7, 1982, at the age of 60 due to heart failure and complications from his diabetic condition, which had required both of his legs to be amputated. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he had been living in Orange County, California, for eight years. He died at Nilsson's home in Anaheim, California.