My father, the fake: was anything he told me actually true?

Michael Briggs was a well-known scientist - and a fantasist. When his daughter Joanne began digging into his past for a memoir, new lies kept emerging ...

Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn’t like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life.

If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool.