In the article, Brian MacKinnon hinted that he would get plastic surgery and try to enter medical school under a new identity.

In 1997 Granta published its “Ambition” issue. It contains a really great piece called “I Was Brandon Lee,” written by journalist Ian Parker, who is now a staff writer for the New Yorker. The story profiles a brazen impostor named Brian MacKinnon, a Scottish man who in 1995 went back and attended his old high school again when he was 32, pretending to be “Brandon Lee,” a Canadian teen who excelled academically, enjoyed extracurriculars and dreamed of being a doctor when he “grew up.”

One of the most interesting things about the case is that administrators, teachers and fellow students convinced themselves that the oldish-looking MacKinnon was 17, even though the truth stared them in the face. An excerpt:

“Gwyneth Lightbody was surprised, but hoped she did not show her surprise. ‘I said, ‘Well–in you come.” She told me that ‘He did not look like your typical teenager. I assumed he was an adult, but when you’re presented with facts…I mean, in teaching, you see all sorts of strange sights. It could be he had some illness that made him age rapidly–or something.’

On the first day she met some fellow teachers mid-morning. ‘We were all saying, ‘Have you got a pupil that looks old?’ We all thought he was an adult. But we assumed everything had been done, and he was just a bit of an oddity.’ Pupils were doing the same, trying to make Brandon fit his own story–by reminding themselves, for example, of the wide range in teenage body types. ‘I had a boyfriend who was over six feet then,’ one student said to me; another said: ‘I could think of boys with beards and hairy chests. If someone says they’re seventeen, you’re not going to turn round and say no, no you’re not.’ By lunch it seems MacKinnon had been accepted as an old-looking, odd-looking teenager–an alien from Canada–rather than an adult who looked his age.”