As I expected, someone has come clean as the faker of Barry Egan’s profile. “Egan” added me as a friend, but I never replied to the request. Putting “natch” after one of the profile items was the clincher for me.
It seems it was a very successful experiment in adding people as friends who may know a famous person – and then reverse engineering friend requests. Many of the other profiles I came across also appear to be fake.