One of the most fascinating people I ever met was a compulsive liar. Many years ago, for one of our wedding anniversaries, my husband George and I reserved a fun dinner excursion on a train. The train operated at low speed on an abandoned railway not used for anything else.  It had a vintage dining car where we enjoyed a white linen dinner as we journeyed through a scenic area with beautiful fall color. The slightly different aspect of it was that all the tables seated four people. In other words, if you were there as a couple, you were seated with another couple whom you didn’t know. In American culture, being seated with strangers is odd, but since it was protocol, we got used to the idea pretty quickly.

Our dinner companions turned out to be among the most interesting people we could hope to meet. This other couple—let’s call them Jane Jones and John Smith—were not married but were romantic partners. They had been seeing each other for about a month. After some introductory pleasantries, and as the dinner proceeded, we got to talking about who we were, what we did for a living and the like. Jane turned out to be a fairly typical young woman. But John, about 10 years older than Jane, was … well—we may never know.

John started telling us about his life. The stories started with some remarkable stuff—we were quite impressed. But by the time the dinner ended, my husband and I had discovered a new meaning to the phrase “shovel ready.” 

George and I don’t remember all the details today (I regret not writing them down). He had a list of credentials, honors and life experiences that made Leonardo da Vinci look like Homer Simpson. He had started some very successful businesses and made a lot of money. He’d been in the Special Forces in the military, and had some harrowing tales of danger and his accompanying valor. He had a Purple Heart, of course.

As these tales started to pile up, George and I started exchanging glances. We’re not used to people like this, so it probably took too long to get past the naiveté. But after an hour of hearing one Walter Mitty adventure after another, we caught on. Any one of his stories alone was plausible, but there’s only just so much that can happen to one person. What was even more amazing is that his girlfriend sat gazing at him as if she were dating a John Wayne—Albert Einstein hybrid. She lapped up everything he said.

John made his error when he claimed an achievement that I could fact-check. He said he had gone to a major university on a full hockey scholarship. Ah hah, I thought. Now I’ve got him. I was an academic adviser at the time and knew my way around universities.

Our dinner was on a Saturday night. I could hardly wait until Monday morning when I called the university in question. I asked for the athletic director’s department.

I asked, “Hi. I have a question. If I wanted to know if someone had been awarded a hockey scholarship in the past, whom would I ask?” I was transferred to a charming gentleman of whom I asked the same question.

“I’m the one who would know,” he said.

“Well we’re going back a few years,” I replied.

He said, “I’ve been the sports historian here since 1962.” (This was well within the window of possible years.) I gave the historian the guy’s name.

“Nope—never played hockey here,” he said without missing a beat.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “This guy told me he’d completed his degree on full athletic scholarship.”

The historian laughed, “You’ve been told something that’s not true. I know the name of everyone who even tried out for the team since I started working here. I’ve never heard of the guy.”

I thanked him and hung up. I couldn’t wait to call George with the news who, of course, was not surprised.  George has a better sense of baloney than I do, perhaps because he’s a city kid.  I grew up in a small town where no one could get by with an assumed identity. Everyone knew everyone and their families back two generations.

Since then, we have run into one more Great Pretender (that we know of). The next guy was a friend of friends and had another list of accolades too unlikely to belong to one life. Again, the guy came up with a detail that could be fact-checked. He told our friends that he was still “sort of” in the military (Reserves? It wasn’t clear) and that he had authorization to fly a military plane from the Minneapolis Air Guard base to Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas. George had met him once and was immediately suspicious.  Mr. Pretender had told our friends the model of the plane he supposedly flew. The tip off was that this guy weighed all of 300 lbs. George is an aviation enthusiast and knew the specs for that plane. “There’s no way he’d fit in the cockpit,” he told our friends. He warned them to be careful in their dealings with this guy, and that it was probably not a good idea to confront him—he could be dangerous.

About three weeks later, the guy skipped town. Poof!  Gone. They found out soon thereafter that he was on the lam for a felony—attempted murder of a police officer—in another state.  

There are some amazing people who have actually lived extraordinary lives like these guys claimed to have lived—the late Academy Award-winning actor and military hero Jimmy Stewart comes to mind. But the life lesson we learned is that if something is too incredible to believe, it’s worth discreetly checking out before one extends friendship, a job offer, investments or anything else of value to their trust. For us, it was an unnerving wake-up call.

Since that anniversary dinner, I have often wondered about Jane Jones.  By the time I knew that something wasn’t right, the dinner was over and we parted. At the time, I thought he was just a guy with low self-esteem who was trying to impress a new girlfriend.  Now, with years of life experience, I would be more wary—and worried about Jane.  My point is that nothing really prepares you to deal with people like this.  We have family life education that covers numerous areas of life skills—parenting, money management, communication and more.  Where does one learn how to handle a person who lies like wall-to-wall berber?