James Hogue

James Arthur Hogue (born October 22, 1959) is an American impostor who most famously entered Princeton University by posing as a self-taught orphan.

Early life Hogue was raised in a working-class family in Kansas City, Kansas, and graduated from Washington High School in 1977.

Hogue attended the University of Texas at Austin in the 1980s, but left without a degree. In the late 1970s, he was a student at the University of Wyoming before dropping out when he did not perform well on the cross country team.

Criminal career In September 1985, Hogue, now 25 years old, stole the identity of a deceased infant and enrolled as a student at Palo Alto High School as Jay Mitchell Huntsman, a 16-year-old orphan from Nevada. On October 7, 1985, Hogue entered the Stanford Invitational Cross Country Meet.

In 1987, Hogue applied to Princeton University, using the alias Alexi Indris-Santana, a self-taught orphan from Utah, where he was then living. Hogue's application materials claimed that he had lived outdoors in the Grand Canyon, raising sheep and reading philosophy books. Princeton invited Hogue to attend in the fall of 1988, but he deferred admission for one year, telling Princeton his mother was dying. In October 1992, Hogue pled guilty to third-degree theft for taking more than $22,000 in scholarship money and was sentenced to nine months in jail.

At some point in 1992, Hogue was briefly employed by the Harvard Mineralogical Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a part-time cataloguer. In June 1993, Hogue was charged with two counts of larceny and one count of receiving stolen property by the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office. He was later incarcerated in the Mercer County Correctional Center on a conviction for defiant trespass.

Hogue was released from prison in 1997 and vanished from the public eye. Between 1997 and 2003, Hogue was arrested at least twice for theft.

In January, 2005, police with a warrant searched Hogue's home in San Miguel County, Colorado, finding 7,000 items, worth over $100,000, stolen from nearby homes where Hogue had worked as a remodeller and repairman. The stolen goods "packed his house and a small secret compartment he'd built." He was apprehended in Tucson, Arizona, on February 4, 2006, by Deputy United States Marshal Richard J. Tracy Jr. and deputies from the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's department while Hogue was sitting in a Barnes & Noble cafe, surfing the internet.

On March 12, 2007, Hogue pled guilty to theft, in return for limiting his sentence and dropping additional charges. He was released on probation in 2012.

On November 3, 2016, Hogue was arrested in Aspen on a misdemeanor theft warrant from Boulder County, Colorado. Aspen police discovered Hogue living in an illegally constructed, camouflaged shack on Aspen Mountain, and possibly in the midst of building a second illegal structure on the mountain. Hogue gave a false name when apprehended and may be charged with criminal impersonation.

In popular media In 1999, filmmaker Jesse Moss tracked Hogue down in Aspen, Colorado, to interview him for a documentary. Moss was a student at Palo Alto High School when Hogue enrolled as a student using a false name. The completed film, entitled Con Man, was released in 2003.