How a fake astronaut fooled the world, broke women’s hearts, and landed in jail
On a chill January evening in 1989, members of the Experimental Aircraft Association of Boston gathered for a special event.
At 7 p.m., the group’s president introduced a guest speaker as a “master of the skies and space.” The mystery man marched onto the stage, wearing a powder-blue NASA flight suit. Amateur pilots leaned forward in their chairs to take a closer look at U.S. Marine Capt. Robert J. Hunt, who was 27 and raffishly handsome, with a push-broom mustache. He arrived at the podium, his space patches shining brightly, and savored the applause.
Hunt launched into stories about his fantastic life as a U.S. Marine fighter pilot. He spoke of zooming off the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea in his F/A-18 jet fighter and showering Gaddafi’s Libya with bombs. He described soaring above Earth aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, on top-secret missions for the Department of Defense. He even presented two blackened tiles that he said were scorched during his reentry. Two hours later, hands shot into the air with questions.
“What’s the climb rate of the F/A-18?” someone asked.
“Classified information,” he said.
“What’s the burn-fuel ratio?”
“Depends on engine power and altitude,” he said.
“Are you familiar with the DIANE system?”
“Digital Integrated Attack and Navigation Equipment?” he replied, before joking that there might be Russians in the audience.
One attendee wasn’t convinced. “He didn’t sound intellectual enough to be an astronaut,” Joy Alexander, 22 at the time, told People Magazine. She found it strange that Hunt spoke in a thick New England accent and cursed like a guy who worked on a construction site, not NASA’s $209 billion space shuttle program. “His attitude, which was rude, seemed all wrong to me,” she added. Older members scolded her for questioning an American hero.
Louis Pascucci, the group’s president, told the Associated Press (via The Boston Herald), “He sure impressed us. Hunt was one hell of an entertainer. We had a full house. He held us spellbound for two and a half hours.”
When the evening was over, Hunt shook hands and scribbled autographs, leaving aviation buffs with the sense they had brushed shoulders with a legend.
But Hunt had never been to space. He didn’t have a pilot’s license, or even a driver’s license. He was an imposter and, in less than a week, he would be in custody as news of his incredible scam made headlines all over America.
For years, Hunt had led cops and the FBI on a cat-and-mouse chase across the country, posing as a U.S. Marine, baseball star, senator and other prominent figures, always escaping prosecution. Only when he became an astronaut did he create a security panic, embarrass politicians and captivate a nation. In March 2025, over the course of six phone calls, he told me his life story with a mix of candor and grandiosity, comparing his career to NFL star Tom Brady’s.
“I was literally the best at what I did,” he told me. As with any story told by a convicted con man, it contains elements of truth, embellishment, and flat-out fabrication—but that’s exactly what makes his story so entertaining.
An early obsession with space
Hunt’s obsession with space began when he was 7 years old, on the night he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on his family’s television set in Everett, Massachusetts. Afterwards, the stars above their modest home seemed to beckon him. He felt a special connection to Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepard, who served in the Navy, just like his grandfather. As a teenager during the Vietnam War, Hunt snuck into the nearby Chelsea Naval Hospital, slipped on discarded uniforms, and saluted himself in the mirror. He imagined exploring distant planets one day. That image of himself, he told me, was “forever lasting.”
His father, Leo Hunt, was also obsessed with the Navy. He drove a jeep with a U.S. Marine Corps license plate and barked “Colonel Hunt” when he answered the telephone. But he had never served. He was a plumber who, according to the Boston Herald, was pecking away at a book about his alleged life in the military, titled “Colonel Chameleon.”
Leo Hunt told the Herald how his son, whom he called “Roy,” started deceiving others at 14, when he sold a neighbor some canaries. “See, when the birds Roy sold him took a bath, all the paint, or yellow chalk, or whatever the hell it was, started to come off. And they were sparrows! Sparrows!” Father and son shared more similarities than they were willing to acknowledge. Leo taught his son how to turn wrenches and fix water heaters. “He was very disciplined about it,” Robert Hunt told me.
Hunt said that, in 1979, while still in high school, he joined the Marine Corps on a delayed-entry program for recruits who were too young to qualify. He claims that an administrative error led to an honorable discharge and that he was sent home from the recruit depot on Parris Island, South Carolina.
“It was disappointing, because that was my dream,” Hunt told me. “I knew everything there was about the Marine Corps and the Navy, so when I graduated, I just carried on the dream.” He said he simply bluffed his way into the barracks. “I knew the curriculum; I knew the commands; I knew the structure,” he told me. But an officer reprimanded him for wearing an unstarched hat, and crestfallen, he returned to civilian life.
“In plumbing, everybody starts off at the bottom,” Hunt told me. He spent his days unclogging toilets, certain he was destined for something greater. In the early 1980s, he met his first wife, who worked at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire and would become his first wife. Not long after their wedding, Hunt dressed as a second lieutenant and snuck onto the base. He was caught poking around Air Force 2, the vice president’s plane. His curiosity triggered an FBI investigation and the end of the marriage. Leo Hunt later told Massachusetts’ The Daily Item newspaper that federal agents called off the investigation to avoid embarrassing George H. W. Bush.
“Roy got onto his plane … and ended up at Bush’s home,” Leo Hunt said. “He even gave Bush one of those tiles, [and] the vice president said, ‘How does it feel to be up in space, Bob?'”
In 1983, Hunt married again, telling his bride he was a college graduate with a baseball contract. Neither was true. He also claimed to own a construction company, Hunt Builders Inc., which had shirts, signs and a logo-painted truck, but no contracts. He built only model airplanes while his wife worked two jobs. By 25, he had moved to Pennsylvania with nursing student Michelle Van Horn, who became his third wife.
They had a son in 1986, which inspired Hunt’s next scheme: a spray-on diaper cream called “Love My Baby.” He falsely claimed his invention was on the brink of a $2.5 million Johnson & Johnson buyout. The secret ingredient, he told me, was “shark oil.” Using his wife’s credit card, he rented limos and posed as a TV producer casting a Super Bowl commercial. He met with modeling agencies and targeted Marie Rubel as a “beautiful, blue-eyed mommy type,” according to the Press Enterprise, a newspaper in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Rubel grew suspicious and contacted the police. The police chief who busted Hunt, Robert Leighow of the Montour Township Police, described him as a smooth talker who could “sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo,” and was a liar. “That’s what this yo-yo did,” Leighow added. “He went out and fantasized everything.”
Leo Hunt and his wife Scarlet Hunt were mortified by their son’s scandals, especially when he ended up back at home. “My wife and I wish we could crawl in a hole and hide,” Leo Hunt once told The Daily Item. “But you know who’s going to be at the bottom.”
Hunt fled back to the military. “Back in them days … if you were in uniform, all you had to do is give them your SRB, which is a Service Record Book. That’s it — ‘welcome aboard,'” he told me. He admits adding false pages to make it appear he was a helicopter pilot with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461, and said he bypassed roughly two years of required training at Naval Air Station Pensacola. He doctored other people’s evaluations or forged his own, he told me. “It’s like a rainbow,” he said. “You just follow it and see where it goes.”
Hunt used his fake credentials to acquire flight uniforms, coveralls and replacement uniforms from the requisition center. “You just had to have the balls to do it,” he told me. “I was walking by headquarters, when a second lieutenant — a ‘butter bar’ — didn’t salute me. I jumped all over [him].” Next, he gave himself a promotion. He purchased $20 Navy astronaut wings, transforming from Capt. Hunt, Marine pilot, to Capt. Hunt, America’s “youngest Marine astronaut.” When he looked in the mirror, he felt a familiar burst of pride.
According to Hunt, he bluffed his way into NASA astronaut training. “I literally put myself in the service,” he told me, describing an alleged transfer from helicopter to fixed-wing aircraft training before being selected for NASA. Hunt told me he underwent specialized physical evaluations at Johnson Space Center, studied in Huntsville, Alabama—known as “Rocket City”—and even spent “nine weeks with Morton Thiokol” learning about rocket boosters. (Morton Thiokol, later ATK Thiokol and now Northrop Grumman Space Systems, build the reusable solid rocket boosters for NASA’s space shuttles.)
There’s no verification for any of these claims beyond Hunt’s own detailed-but-questionable narrative. He told me his aim was to become the first imposter in space. “Believe it or not, that was my plan,” he said. “I was actually scheduled for a shuttle flight.”
In April 1988, Hunt went on a blind date with Ann Sweeney, a 21-year-old optical engineer. Hunt said he was a Marine captain, a night detective for the Cambridge Police Department, and an astronaut in training. “We hit it off,” he told me. Sweeney was a pretty brunette who had an enviable job at Polaroid’s Massachusetts headquarters.
“He told me he was sick of groupies, women who went out with him because he was a pilot,” Sweeney later told the Boston Herald.” Hunt whisked her to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he said he’d graduated first in his class. Dressed in a tuxedo, he whirled her around the dance floor at a Marine Corps ball. “Within three weeks, I thought I’d known him a lifetime,” Sweeney told People. (Sweeney did not respond to interview requests.)
The couple married four months later and then traveled first-class on various exotic vacations. Hunt claimed his flights and $41,000 leased Jaguar came free with his NASA job. He also bought a Kawasaki Ninja motorbike to match his “Top Gun” persona and, in Miami, agreed to buy a $1 million sport-fishing boat before ghosting the broker, who told the Herald, “He’s a liar.”
In September, the newlyweds boarded a private jet at Logan Airport bound for a romantic weekend in Montreal. Hunt told the pilot he was an Atlantis space shuttle astronaut and autographed a picture. He paid for the flight using his wife’s corporate credit card and, for a while, nobody at Polaroid noticed. The company was fighting off a hostile takeover by Roy E. Disney, backed by the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert.
“My wife … had access to the kind of stock information the powerful guys at Drexel wanted but couldn’t get,” Hunt later told The Daily Item. He claimed to have met with DBL staff at the Harvard Club while wearing a Harvard ring he bought at the campus store. “They asked for corporate information I did not have access to,” Hunt told me.
The takeover failed, and Hunt’s fragile double life remained intact, preserved by the unquestioning trust of those closest to him. Drew A. Curtis, a psychology professor at Angelo State University in Texas and expert on pathological liars, told me this is called “the ostrich effect.” His wife, like most people, operated under a “truth bias,” assuming that people are honest. She simply buried her head in the sand.
“Then it just got out of control”
In December 1988, Sweeney’s brother, who lived in Ireland, boasted that his astronaut brother-in-law was coming to visit the Emerald Isle. While boarding an Aer Lingus flight from Boston, Hunt dazzled a ticket agent with his credentials and was upgraded to first class. When the pilot learned there was an astronaut aboard, they invited him into the cockpit. “And he turned to me, he said, ‘You will be received at Dublin airport.’ And I’m like, oh boy. Received? What the hell does this mean?” Hunt imagined the runway full of police cars.
Instead, two smiling Irish government officials greeted him. “I didn’t even have to go through customs,” Hunt told me. “They had a little band there … playing the national anthem.” The reception exceeded his wildest expectations. “Before I knew it, I was giving speeches and accepting awards. I decided to play along with it,” he added.
Over the next two days, Dublin embraced its visitor from the final frontier. “We stayed at the Shelbourne hotel,” Hunt told me. He sipped tea with the city’s Lord Mayor, Ben Briscoe, and smiled for photos. Hunt told Briscoe that the British prime minister had arranged for him to be married at Westminster Abbey — a rare privilege reserved for members of the British royal family and a select few others. Briscoe realized that Hunt was “not the full shilling,” a spokesperson later told the Associated Press, but politely let him carry on.
“Everything was paid for by the city,” Hunt told me: from pub visits, a trip to remote Irish castles, and even a journey to Donegal to ride “some of the most beautiful riding horses in the world.”
Hunt left Ireland with souvenirs of his deception: “Irish sweaters, Guinness beer mugs, hats,” and honorary Irish citizenship. “All I wanted to do was visit my brother-in-law,” he told me. “Then it just got out of control.”
Back in the U.S., Hunt continued his astronaut hoax with several lectures. He wore his Navy uniform and told audiences how “Atlantis reaches seven Gs during takeoff,” and “glides in from 220,000 feet with zero power.” Hunt told me he also gave his father a military uniform for a photo, not realizing the badges were misplaced and the hat was wrong. Hunt insisted that his father didn’t teach him to be an imposter. “My father was a strange guy,” Robert’s brother, Joseph Hunt, told the Herald, “But he is not responsible for Roy.” Leo Hunt was his son’s longest-serving victim, having suffered the consequences of his painted sparrows, space fantasies and schemes.
Soon, trouble was brewing for Robert Hunt. American Express rejected his $5,000 charge for the private jet trip, and alerted Polaroid. Sweeney’s family warned her something wasn’t right about her husband, and New Englanders started talking about Capt. Robert Hunt.
A long history of hoaxes
As long as there has been space travel, astronaut imposters have fooled innocent folks, mostly to sell fake lunar souvenirs. History’s first space hoaxer was Jerry G. Tees, a 28-year-old electrician who posed as an astronaut at a Houston nightclub in June 1963. After Milton Berle introduced him on stage, a panicked Tees noticed four genuine astronauts in the audience.
“I was petrified,” he later told the Associated Press from jail, after admitting his month-long scam. “I don’t know why I do it. I just live in a dream world, I guess.”
In 1998, a 49-year-old Texan named Jerry Whittredge allegedly claimed to be an astronaut to gain access to a Navy flight simulator. Boldly, Whittredge sat in NASA Mission Control as staff prepared to rescue a satellite.
“He was talking to the astronauts in space,” said Joseph Gutheinz, a former senior special agent with NASA’s Office of Inspector General who captured him. “He said, ‘My secret is, I’m a CIA assassin known as ‘Black Death.’” Gutheinz told me the judge suspected Whittredge was a spy until he claimed his lawyer was Bill Clinton. “Jerry was sent to a Federal psych ward for evaluation, after which the federal government opted for an alternative to punishment,” Gutheinz added.
Military imposters typically pose as the heroes of their time — Navy SEALs after the Osama bin Laden raid and, during the space-race era of the 1980s, astronauts, who enjoyed the cultural cachet of rock stars. Almost everyone, apart from the 22-year-old skeptic at one of Hunt’s lectures, was blinded by his astronaut fame. Anthony Anderson, who founded Guardian of Valor to expose people who falsely claim military service, told me astronaut imposters are rare because “there are very, very few astronauts.” He added that genuine servicemen can easily spot misplaced patches or improper salutes, but imposters are inevitably caught by whistleblowers.
Investigations begin
In January 1989, Massachusetts state trooper Andrew Palombo heard a strange complaint at Logan airport. A worker said a NASA astronaut in a U.S. Marine uniform — complete with sword, medals and a Purple Heart — had visited her home and convinced her 18-year-old son to enlist in the Navy. When he changed his mind, the man demanded $4,000 to use his “Pentagon connections” for a discharge. She said he claimed to command the space shuttle Atlantis and signed a photograph “Captain Robert Hunt.”
Palombo called the Naval Investigative Service Command, who said Hunt had been a member of the U.S. Marines Reserve for two months in 1979. He was “mustered out after a psychological evaluation,” Palombo told The Daily Item. This enraged the state trooper, who’d earned his elite position through a grueling paramilitary selection process; he couldn’t tolerate an imposter claiming unearned rewards.
Palombo loved his job so much, he often said he’d work for free — where else could he wear a ponytail and earring, carry a gun, and drive Mustangs? His 6-foot-4-inch frame was enough to intimidate the drug dealers, gangsters and serial killers he caught.
“He could rock ‘n’ roll with the best of them, and if they wanted to go a couple of rounds, fine. He could knock them out with one shot,” retired State Police Capt. Richard Downey told The Daily Item. Yet, like Hunt, Palombo had two sides. In 1987, when a mentally unstable man threatened to blow up a passenger plane, Palombo gently talked him down. “It was a very low-key conversation,” he later told the Herald.
Palombo methodically unpicked Hunt’s cons. “This guy has been masquerading as a NASA astronaut, a Marine fighter pilot, a Cambridge cop, and God only knows what else,” he told the Herald. “He’s a flim-flam man, and from what we can figure, he’s squeezed at least $60,000 out of people since September.” Palombo also figured out the truth about Hunt’s military wardrobe. “He got the stuff on credit by posing on the phone as an officer and a gentleman. … It was worth about $1,000, and of course, he didn’t pay for it.”
Sensing that his scheme was unraveling, Hunt planned an escape. A friend of the Hunts told the Herald that Sweeney left her job at Polaroid because her husband “claimed he was being transferred to fly fighter jets from a Marine base in Hawaii.” But they didn’t make it to the airport.
Cracks emerge
There was a knock on Hunt’s door on Jan. 28, 1989. When it swung open, he found himself staring up at a giant state trooper. During a search, Palombo found military paraphernalia, flight jumpsuits, a NASA helmet, police badges, and images of Hunt wearing Korean War medals.
“He wasn’t even born then,” Palombo told the Herald. A shocked Sweeney also surrendered two scorched space shuttle tiles. “But they’re just ordinary floor tiles,” Palombo said. He arrested Hunt for larceny and dragged him to the station. “Palombo had this real hard-on for me for some reason,” Hunt told me. “He was just a big bully type.”
Palombo was troubled by a fake doctor’s identification card in Hunt’s name. “If you hold it up to the light, you can see another name beneath his,” he told The Daily Item. Hunt told me that when his wife Michele worked at a Pennsylvania hospital, he stole a white coat and posed as a Harvard-trained physician. “She didn’t know I was delivering three babies a day down there,” he said.
Palombo discovered that Hunt’s Marine uniforms and dress swords were fronted to him from the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, but the origin of his blue astronaut jumpsuit remained a mystery. A NASA security specialist from Washington found that the equipment didn’t match items recently stolen from a space display van.
NASA and FBI officials determined that impersonating an astronaut wasn’t illegal unless other crimes were involved. Palombo logged Hunt’s helmets and spacesuits as evidence in his case.
“These things have nothing to do with the crimes he was charged with,” he told the Globe. “They were taken because he used them to perpetuate a fraud.” When news of the arrest broke, the president of the Experimental Aircraft Association of Boston, which Hunt had captivated with his lecture, told the Herald, “It was disappointing to hear he wasn’t an astronaut. But the gang doesn’t have any bad feelings. Some of the guys said let’s bail him out and see how he did it.”
Back at the police barracks, Palombo gently presented Sweeney with the evidence. “She had no idea he was doing all this stuff. She actually thought she was married to an astronaut,” he told The Daily Item. “The people he ripped off were nice people, and they truly liked him.”
“I was really in a state of shock,” Sweeney told the Herald. “It was almost like watching someone die. Here was this person I thought I knew, and bit by bit, in the course of an hour, he just dissolved, just disappeared. I loved the person I thought he was but that person never really existed.”
After leaving her job at Polaroid, Sweeney moved back to her parents’ home, where she ruminated on the red flags she’d missed and how she’d ruined a promising career. “I don’t know whether to hate him or pity him,” she told the Herald. “Where I grew up, people don’t lie to each other. After learning of Hunt’s other wives and children, she wondered, “Did he ever love any one of us, or did he hate us?”
Hunt compared himself to a first responder who grows numb to tragedy over time. “They become disciplined and hard over it, and that’s me,” he told me. While the pain of each divorce diminished, he could never escape the suffering he inflicted on his parents.
They came to visit him during a miserable 90-day stay in Boston’s Charles Street Jail during the winter of 1989. “The guards were actually saluting him,” Leo Hunt told The Daily Item. “He was a celebrity, but he has that incredible gift. And I should know, he’s taken my wife and I for thousands of dollars, and we fall for it every time.”
“My dad was heartbroken,” Robert Hunt told me. His parents hated the publicity, like the interview he gave to The Daily Item from jail about his Dublin hoax, in which he said, “The Irish aren’t very smart.”
On the morning of Hunt’s trial, lawmakers joked about spaceships parked outside the courthouse. He arrived wearing red Marine Corps sweatpants, was handcuffed to another defendant and was grinning so confidently that many confused him for the prisoner’s arresting officer. His smile faded when he learned Sweeney was divorcing him. He pleaded guilty to larceny by false pretenses for using his wife’s corporate credit card and for swindling $4,000 from the young recruit’s family. He was given a two-year suspended sentence.
As soon as Hunt walked free in May 1989, he announced his candidacy for mayor of Revere, Massachusetts. “I know power and how to get around it,” he told the Herald. “When I look back, I laugh. I did things some of the biggest people in the country do.” Yet everywhere he turned, there was Palombo.
“He was under the gun to make restitution to the courts, and I was worried he might be accepting campaign contributions,” the state trooper told The Daily Item. “You have to realize that everything he told you is a lie. I know. I have tracked him pretty much from the time he was 18 years old,” he told a Massachusetts newspaper. Hunt blamed his arrest by Palombo for both ruining his political career and destroying his space dream. “If that had never happened, I would have orbited,” Hunt told me.
When a Herald reporter asked Palombo about Hunt’s motives, he said, “Greed.” After thinking for a moment, he added, “He never even got that much. I sat down and figured out that if he had gone to work for Burger King at $5 an hour, he would have been ahead of the game.”
Hunt failed to pay a single dollar in restitution to his victims and skipped town without paying his lawyer’s $20,000 fee. Courts in Massachusetts and New Hampshire issued arrest warrants, and by July 28, 1989, Hunt was a fugitive. “He walked away laughing at everybody,” Palombo told The Daily Item,” holding up Hunt’s powder-blue NASA jumpsuit, as a grin spread across his face. “This is the one he claims he wore into outer space. He’s a spaceman all right.”
A television crew from “A Current Affair” interviewed Hunt’s second, third and fourth wives, who compared notes on set. “They had a lot of similar experiences,” Michele Hunt, the nurse and Hunt’s third wife, told the Press Enterprise. “I can talk about it a lot easier now.” Reporters staked out Leo Hunt’s home, hoping to catch a glimpse of his missing son, but he told The Daily Item his son was in New York. “We’re worried about him, but God only knows, he’s probably the governor of New York by now,” he said.
Eventually, Hunt reentered his family’s atmosphere. His mother begged him to change and gave him cash for a fresh start. He considered becoming an “honest” plumber but instead spent the money on another Navy uniform. “That’s when I became a commando,” he told me. He presented himself at the Presidio of San Francisco, a U.S. military base, as the head of SEAL Team Six, the elite Navy counter-terrorist group. He slept in officers’ quarters and worked three weeks at the emergency operations center, tooling around with computers. Hunt told me he berated an elderly man who questioned his authority, later realizing it was Eugene Cernan.
“Here I am, yelling at an Apollo astronaut,” he recalled. “Like, oh boy, this can’t get any f—— worse.” But it did. After he parked in a general’s spot, the FBI charged him with false impersonation. He was finally captured, pleaded guilty in July 1994, and served a year in prison.
After his release, Hunt’s cons continued, and Palombo doggedly pursued him far beyond his jurisdiction. When Hunt struck up a relationship with a wealthy female French-Canadian golfer and was accused of posing as a federal drugs agent, Palombo called the Canadian authorities and revealed his criminal past.
“He was fanatical,” Hunt told me. Then, in July 1998, Palombo’s Harley-Davidson hit an oil patch and spun out of control, killing him.
After the security concerns following 9/11, Hunt told me his schemes became “impossible.” Finally, in 2005, the Stolen Valor Act made it illegal to falsely claim military decorations. Hunt hung up his fake uniforms and decided to rebuild his relationship with his parents.
“When I got out of that mess, I was welcomed into their home,” Hunt told me. He recalled a heart-to-heart with his father, who told him, “You’re my son. You’ll always be my son. But you need to pull your life together.”
A con to touch the stars
During hours of interviews, Hunt insisted he tricked his way to flying real fighter jets and spun incredible tales of “right engine blowouts” and incredible g-forces. “I was doing crazy stuff like nose-overs and back tail pressure ups,” he told me. I asked Gutheinz, the NASA investigator, if it was ridiculous to believe him. Gutheinz described how his imposter, Jerry Whittredge, waltzed past “vault safe” military security and persuaded a military base commander to write to the Pensacola Naval Air Station, saying he needed “a little flight time” — all on the strength of a convincing story.
Over the years, some of Hunt’s stories have corrupted the public record. He convinced Rodney Stich, author of “Defrauding America,” a book about CIA conspiracies, that he flew secret missions to deliver missiles to Iran. A Navy admiral once publicly praised Hunt for a daring combat mission over Beirut. Leo Hunt told The Daily Item, “No Marine pilots flew in Beirut, and my son certainly was never there. But believe me, this will all come out. I know he’s a liar, but there’s 98% truth in this story.” Despite everything, Hunt’s father still wanted to believe his son.
“There is often some true element in the web of fiction that a con artist weaves,” said Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and co-author of “Nobody’s Fool” (Basic Books, 2023), a book about scammers. Yet stolen-valor expert Anderson scoffed at the idea that a plumber would have gotten near the controls of a fighter jet or survived astronaut training. “He would have stood out like a sore thumb,” he told me. The National Personnel Records Center had the final word: The military has no record of Robert Hunt.
Today, Hunt lives alone in New Hampshire, where he has held various construction jobs. He is 63, has few friends, and passes his time watching the History Channel. He has repaired his relationship with his father, he told me, but Leo is 88 and “at the end now.” (Leo Hunt could not be reached for comment.)
“What I regret is the people who got hurt,” Hunt said. “My ex-wives…didn’t deserve that, because they went into it with a genuine heart. …I went into it with the complete opposite.” He said he eventually stopped dreaming of space and “grew up.”
Yet Hunt’s eyes still light up when he reflects on his favorite moments as an “astronaut.” “When I’m wearing a blue flight suit and everybody else is wearing a gray or green one, you stand out,” he said. “Like this guy is the super guru of pilots, so they all want to be your friend.” Just like the common sparrows he once painted yellow, Hunt’s deceptions turned him into something extraordinary and, for a brief moment, allowed him to touch the stars.
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