posing

“With you, Captain Robert J. Hunt, the youngest astronaut in the United States.” Applause. A man with NASA’s blue monkey took the stage and, for more than two hours, captivated the audience with his stories of secret missions aboard ATLANTIS SPACE FREE NASA. At one point he took two blackened collapse and said they had stayed like this during the atmospheric reentry of one of his trips to space. Years of lies. It was January 1989. His two -hour talk at the Boston experimental aircraft association would be the last after years of being entertained by politicians and all kinds of institutions. It had been passed by NASA’s Combat Pilot and Astronaut without anyone being discovered its complex network of lies. Until, days after that last talk, he broke hearts and ended up imprisoned. The origin of a fake. Robert Hunt’s obsession for space began at age seven, seeing Apollo’s moon landing 11. His father shared a similar fascination, but for military life. He was a plumber who called himself “Colonel Hunt”, although he would never have been in the army. With 14, Robert began in another of his specialties: the art of deception. At that age he sold yellow -painted sparrows to a neighbor telling him that they were canaries. After the institute, he enlisted the Navy, but was expelled after a psychological evaluation after only two months. Disappointed, decided to “continue the dream” on his own, according to The journalist Jeff Maysh recounts. He began to sneak into military bases and live his fantasies. On one occasion, he was caught by groking near the Air Force Two, the plane of the then vice president George Hw Bush, which triggered an FBI investigation. Creating Captain Hunt. In the 80s, Hunt married several times, presenting himself as a university graduate, professional baseball player and inventor of a spray diaper cream called “Love My Baby”, supposedly about to be bought by Johnson & Johnson for 2.5 million dollars. The secret ingredient, according to him, was “shark oil.” The jump to fame came when he decided to become a national hero. He falsified documents and a career as a Navy helicopter pilot was invented. Then, he bought Astronaut wings for $ 20 and proclaimed himself “the youngest astronaut in the United States.” His plan was to go to space. Robert Hunt had no pilot license or driving license, but the “Captain Hunt” had flown a F/A-18 Hornet in Libya and had formed as an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. His goal, he confessed later, was to become the first imposter in space: make the lie so great that it ended up being reality. In December 1988, the farce reached its peak during a trip to Ireland. After impressing Aer Lingus crew with his credentials, he was invited to the cabin. When landing in Dublin, it was received by officials of the Irish government. “I didn’t even have to go through customs,” he says. “They had a small band there, playing the national anthem.” He later took the tea with the mayor and received the Irish Honorary citizenship. The fall of the imposter. People realized that Captain Hunt was not in his bockals, but the castle of cards did not collapse until a policeman named Andrew Palombo related two strange complaints. On the one hand, American Express had blocked a 4,000 -dollar charge for a private jet on the Ann Sweeney credit card, an engineer who worked in Polaroid. On the other hand, a family had denounced that a man disguised as an astronaut had convinced his 18 -year -old son to enlist the Navy and then demanded $ 4,000 to cancel the enlistment using his “connections in the Pentagon.” Palombo, a decorated agent, investigated those complaints and uncovered a surprising history of deceptions. “It was like seeing him die.” On January 28, 1989, agent Andrew Palombo knocked on Robert Hunt’s door and found military paraphernalia, flight monkeys, a NASA helmet and Korean war medals, a conflict that occurred before Hunt was born. The celebrities Space Transfording Tastestesses They turned out to be burned soil tiles. Hunt declared himself guilty of theft for using his wife’s card and scams the family of the child recruit. His wife, the optical engineer Ann Sweeney, had believed all his lies. He said that discovering it was “how to see someone die.” “This guy has passed NASA Astronaut, Marina’s Combat Pilot, Cambridge Police and God knows what else,” the Palombo agent told the press. A repeat scammer. Far from reforming, Hunt did not waste time. As soon as he left prison, he announced his candidacy for mayor of Revere, Massachusetts. “I know power and how to move in it,” he told the press. After not paying the restitution to his victims, he became a fugitive of the law. His next appearance was in San Francisco. He appeared at a military base as head of the Seal Team Six, the Navy’s anti -terrorism elite. He slept in the officers of the officers and worked for three weeks at the emergency operations center. His fall was almost comic: the FBI stopped him after he parked in the reserved square of a general. Today, Robert Hunt is 63 years old and lives in New Hampshire, working on construction. 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