Paper-Thin Disguise/Real Life

Paper-Thin Disguises are actually surprisingly easy to pull off in real life, and it's overall more understandable in such contexts. The clinical term for this is "change blindness", and some people also have a "face blindness" that makes less able to recognize faces compared to others. It's especially prevalent with celebrities and other notable figures, due both to Small Reference Pools and to this trope's overlap with Hidden in Plain Sight - sometimes it's easy to miss a disguise that's "paper-thin" when you weren't looking for one to begin with.

With that in mind, here are real-life examples of this trope:


 * Here's a video showing a 'magic trick' where the back of the cards change color.
 * In the book Secret Service Chief, a former head of the US Secret Service tells about his investigating a gang that passed fake checks. They entered a store, cashed some checks, went outside switched hats and jackets and went back in and cashed more checks with different names. Several times. To the same clerk.
 * An author who interviewed Marilyn Monroe later wrote of an incident that occurred when they were walking down the street talking. The author was confused that, although they were in plain sight, no one seemed to recognize her. Monroe then said, "Do you want to see her?" She changed her posture, walk and way she was speaking to what she used in the movies and suddenly people saw Marilyn Monroe, movie star and sex symbol, and reacted accordingly.
 * A reporter witnessed Mel Gibson do something similar when accompanying him to the DMV. Mel visibly "turned off the charm", changed his expression and posture and put on a baseball cap. He made himself so inconspicuous that even the clerk who saw all his documents and renewed his license took no notice of the resemblance to a famous man named "Mel Gibson".
 * Man robs bank disguised as tree.
 * This article has a very funny real life example of this. A bald, bearded reporter wearing glasses showed up at NBC asking executives about Jay Leno's future... the funny thing is that they didn't know it was actually Jay Leno in disguise.
 * There was a man who tried to sneak over the border disguised as a pilot seat. Understandably, this did not sit well with the border patrol.
 * Justified in the case of a man who changed clothes to get Dr Karl to autograph different copies of the same book; Dr Karl suffers from a natural inability to recognise faces.
 * British TV prankster Jeremy Beadle was short, fat and bearded with one hand noticeably larger than the other, yet he frequently tricked people by wearing a false beard and dark glasses.
 * For an "undercover" story, a reporter dressed as a typical college student hung around a college's dining hall. However, he Did Not Do the Research and was immediately discovered—the student body population was so small that everyone knew each other and immediately recognized that the reporter was not one of their classmates.
 * Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was able to successfully sneak into competitors' stores unnoticed by simply leaving his trademark hat in the car. Even Walton himself never figured out why this was so effective.
 * Probably because most people have only a passing familiarity with who Sam Walton is and absolutely no idea what he looks like.
 * The liberation of FARC's hostages, among them Ingrid Bettancourt, was carried by government officials who passed as FARC members by wearing Che Guevara and Hammer and Sickle's T-shirts.
 * During the Napoleonic Wars, the British employed "Exploring Officers," who would ride behind enemy lines, wearing full uniform in order to escape execution as spies. One such officer, Colquhoun Grant, was captured and sent to Paris. He escaped, but then reasoned that he could do his job as an Exploring Officer just as well in Paris as he could in Spain. So he wandered around Paris in full British uniform, gathering intel. He told anyone who challenged him that he was an American. When one old French soldier who had served in the American Revolutionary Wars called him out on this, he quickly amended his tale to being an American actor who was wearing his stage costume. Luckily, the French were Too Dumb to Live, and he escaped back to England.
 * That may not be an example of that in general. The definition of spy in international law is not that he is seeking information but that he is in disguise. A uniformed person seeking information is a scout. A spy is seeking information(or looking for trouble in which case he is better described by the more generic "covert operative")in disguise. The distinction is whether they are subject to normal treatment of prisoners of war. However calling oneself an American does make it a paper thin disguise.
 * Special Forces Expert Lazlo Almasy was asked by Rommel to infiltrate Cairo. When he objected that he didn't want to be treated as a spy if captured, Rommel suggested he wear his Hungarian(his real allegiance) uniform on the grounds that Cairo was crowded with people from tons of different countries none of which had the slightest idea what a Hungarian soldier was supposed to look like. Perhaps paper thin is not the word as it turned out to be a pretty good disguise.