It’s too late for inclusion in my forthcoming book Can I See Your I.D.? True Stories of False Identities, but this past week’s story of how a 22-year-old basketball player passed himself off to Odessa Permian High School as teen phenom “Jerry Joseph” contains many elements familiar to me from my research.

You’ve got a person with a deep need — psychological, or professional, or simply for survival — to misdirect the people around him. And you’ve got those people around him with their all-too-human abilities to see what they are inclined to see and overlook what doesn’t add up.

My book will include ten such stories. Obviously, there were many more to choose from, and more of them being lived out all the time.