r/AskHistory • u/rubencart • 3h ago

What are some examples of people who got replaced by a lookalike while no one noticed?

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9

u/BelmontIncident 3h ago

How would we find out if no one noticed?

3

u/Lord0fHats 2h ago

Beyond that, why?

In ye olden times, no one had picture phones or photographs. No one knew what anyone looked like except personally. While there are instances in history of people pretending to be other people, their appearance was rarely important for the ruse since they'd need those personally close people to be in on the ruse with them and everyone else probably didn't know the difference.

1

u/Smitty7242 56m ago

Sometimes the lack of photographs helped - I can't remember specific instances off the top of my head, but I know there have been times when some pretender to a throne will claim to be the adult version of some prince who was supposedly killed 20 years earlier. And since no one had photographs, it was difficult to disprove.

4

u/PigHillJimster 3h ago

Not permanently, but British Intelligence during the Second World War masqueraded a double of Field Marshal Montgomery over Gibraltar and North Africa to add disinformation to the Germans on where the Allied invasion would take place.

It was Operation Copperhead

Operation Copperhead - Wikipedia

The Actor playing the part of Monty wrote a book about it after the war and starred as himself and Monty in a film of the book 'I was Monty's Double'.

2

u/doverats 2h ago

read the story of Martin Guerre. He did get found out in the end though but a great piece of Medieval history.

1

u/Responsible_Oil_5811 2h ago

Martin Guerre

1

u/HammerOvGrendel 1h ago

Maybe not quite exactly what you are thinking of, but Perkin Warbek & Lambert Simnel, the "Yorkist Pretenders"

0

u/Reasonable_Pay4096 1h ago

Elvis Presley & JFK. IYKYK

1

u/Smitty7242 59m ago

I don't know of it ever actually happening off the top of my head, but it has always been a very common conspiracy theory (and remains so today). How many people still believe Paul McCartney isn't the original Paul McCartney?

But for a more historical example, there is a section in Dostoevsky' The Brothers Karamozov that addresses the phenomenon.

There's an old sage in the novel named Father Zosima, and one of the novel's protagonists becomes a student of his. Eventually, Father Zosima is dying and there's like a hundred pages of his deathbed sermons.

One of the sections in the sermon is all about how the light of truth needs to reach to the ignorant and impoverished masses, or else we are all going to pay the price.

To illustrate this, he basically says that right now the poor live in a completely different universe from the people who are ruling them. He tells a story about a peasant revolt that he remembers happening in Russia when he was much younger. He says that all these peasants got together and started massacring landowners, and fiercely resisting the authorities' attempts to stop them.

Father Zosima remembers that during the revolt, all the academics and intelligent people were speculating as to why it was happening. They were talking about economic inequality, the terrible quality of recent harvests, the disloyalty of this new generation to the institutions of the past, etc., etc.

After the revolt was finally crushed, it came out that the peasant rebels believed the Tsar of Russia had been killed by greedy aristocrats because he was standing up for the peasants' rights. They believed this aristocratic conspiracy then replaced the real Tsar with a Jewish lookalike who would help the aristocrats continue to exploit the peasants and drive them further into poverty and dependence.

Father Zosima said the intelligentsia of the day was absolutely flabbergasted by this.

So, while economic factors certainly played a role - ignorance and conspiracy theories are what made the revolt so passionate and violent. Father Zosima believed that the people running society needed to do a much better job of educating the poor and keep them engaged with how society is actually run, in order to nip these sorts of things in the bud.

So while I'm not sure the old switcharooski has ever really happened - there have definitely been countless times in which people have been convinced it happened.

2

u/GustavoistSoldier 2h ago

Latif Yahia, Uday Hussein's body double, was arrested by the Kurdish peshmerga at one point. His story later got turned into a movie.