“Act like you belong”
True, that. They say that was how Jack Ruby got into the police station to shoot Oswald. He was known to them, and he just walked in like he should have been there, and nobody said boo.
I live near Boston, and some years back, the USS JFK came into port, and they were giving tours. Since I had served aboard her, my wife encouraged me to get in line and take a tour, so she and I went in with one of my buddies, and got in line. The line was nearly a mile long. Not figuratively. Literally. We stood in it for about an hour and it barely moved, and I got the notion to just get up close to the ship and ask a sailor to take me aboard.
When I was a kid, living on Navy bases, I was a real wharf-rat. I used to hang around near the ships (when you could do that) and would ask sailors if they would take me aboard. Sometimes, they did. I got to go on the USS Kitty Hawk, some attack submarine, and a variety of other ships, so I had some experience there.
I began walking past all the people in line, and I went through two Massachusetts State Police checkpoints. I had a crewcut, and looked like I knew where I was going, and they didn’t give me a look at the first two. On the third one, there was a female trooper arguing with someone, and as I walked by, she said “Wait. Where are you going?”
I told her truthfully that I had served on the ship, and said I was going to ask somone to take me aboard, and she said “No. You cannot go past this point.”
Then she began aruging again with the couple, and I just shrugged my shoulders and kept going, never looking back, walking like I was ship’s company.
Next thing I knew, I was inside the barbed wire enclosure that they would assemble and count off people in the groups of tourists going aboard. I was standing right underneath the overhang of the flight deck, nobody paying any attention to me whatsoever.
I found a crewmember who agreed to take me aboard, so I went ALL the way back to get my wife and friend, and when we came back, now there were three of us standing in the shadow of the big ship!
When the next group assembled, we just walked right over as if we were part of the group, and then...up the gangway we went.
So, yeah. I believe if you are dedicated to it, you can just BS your way past many, though not all things if you play the part.
Exactly.
Happens more often than I care to think about.
Reminds me of the time I clipped a Peanut M&M's bag to my shirt pocket to get into a secret facility where everyone else wore yellow badges indicating their security clearance. And that was at the height of the Cold War.