Folks to Night's classic episode is about one of the biggest musical acts in human history. No, we're not talking about Wham. No, we're not talking about Gregorian Chant. We're talking about the Beatles, but not the bug. Read it. It's a it's a pun. It's like beat less.
I know that escapes me for a long time. Guys. Turns out there would be no Wham or Gregorian Chant, or dancing or magazines that weren't for the Beatles. Those things are entirely true. But they did have a huge influence on music and pop culture and film. I mean, you name it. They really caught the imagination of America in the form of the British invasion. Yeah, the Beatles.
I'm sorry, I really like this band or this topic. Maybe No, it's the band. I think I really liked the band. And it's cool to know that there's there are so many conspiracies surrounding them. It's like they live in a Kospira cloud.
And with that, we're off to the races from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know.
Well, hey everybody, and welcome to the show. You know by hearing my voice first that our compatriot and the loved friend, Matt is not here.
Matt, it's true, is on a top secret adventure which we cannot disclose details about at this point. However, he will return and as far as we know, he is safe and sound, so stay tuned for the return of Matt Frederick.
We had to sign some ironclad NDAs about this whole affair.
I didn't sign it, but they call me Ben. We are joined, of course, with our super producer Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. With an episode that's been a long time in coming in, I'm a little sad Matt's not here.
I am super sad. But I will say something I'm not sad about is that I have the perfect nickname for Paul for this episode. It's Paul the Walrus decand I'll take it. Yeah, Oh come on, dude, that's perfect.
Hey yeah, well let's see. Yeah, I'll go with it. Because Paul was the uh let's see, Paul was the Walrus and the Beatles, and who is the Eggman.
Well in the in the Magical Mystery Tour film, I believe John was the Eggman, but the Walrus was. Paul is a lyric from a song off the White Album called glass Onion. And that's another reference to the ubiquitous, probably most well known Beatles conspiracy theory that there is that Paul McCartney died before his time and living life as a double, some sort of doppele that was hired to replace him. But we will get into that later.
Which I appreciate the foreshadowing there, Noel, because that is one of the reasons that I wish Matt we're here today. Way back in the early days of stuff they don't want you to know, we did a video wherein we portrayed my trusty longtime friend Matt Frederick as a Beatles conspiracy theorist obsessed with the Paul McCartney concept. But let's take a step back and start with the introduction some facts. Clearly, clearly you've heard of the Beatles. We don't make too
many assumptions on this show. But if you are listening now and you are thinking, this is a show about insects that we have given names.
To and misspelled in the title.
Right and misspelled in the title. We promise you there is a method to the madness. The Beatles, you see, b E A t l e s are or one of, if not the most famous bands in human history, not in modern history, not in recent history alone, all of it human history.
And hey, no ding on you, anyone out there if you never notice until this moment that Beatles is spelled funny because we actually had a conversation in the break room with Paul the Walrace and he mentioned that he and only just noticed the fact that it was spelled b E A t l e s as opposed to the traditional spelling of the insect b E E t l e S.
Well, not just noticed, he said in college.
Well that's you know, ay man. We're about a spec right now in the in the grand scheme of funds. College was like last week.
So let's put some numbers behind that claim of being the most famous band in human history. According to UK newspaper note The Guardian, the Beatles have sold over one hundred and seventy eight million units or albums. That's not counting the over one point six billion singles they've sold.
Closer to two billion nons, and that's not counting the innumerable movies, documentaries, covers, tributes, action figures, branded toys, the Hobo teeth, other merchandise, board games and so on associated with the band, board games and so on associated with the band.
Of course, yes, they were definitely merch rich, those Beatles, and I bet you know what else about it doesn't include what's that streams because they only just pretty recently, I mean not college recently, No more recently than college.
Just a few years back.
A few years back got added to Spotify, and that was a really big deal because they, you know, because the Apple Records and Parlophone and whatnot retained all the rights to that stuff with an iron fist. It was not on any streaming services until they obviously struck up some kind of pretty lucrative deal with Spotify.
Yeah, it was a huge deal with Apple Music a few years earlier.
Right, that's right, Ben, And it was certainly part of a big old ad push. You know, Hey, the Beatles are on streaming, so I'd be interested to see because now streaming numbers do factor into units moved in some odd kind of formulation arcanes.
It's a little weird are some arcane incantation for measuring success and also for any hardcore Beatles fans in the audience. Today, we do have to point out that it can be surprisingly difficult to get reliable, up to date statistics for a lot of numbers. You will see other claims that say, no, the Eagles of all bands are the most most lucrative or popular best selling bands.
Did you know what, though, the Eagles suck? You're one of those Huh yeah, I'm a bit of a Lebowski, you know what, Now, I'm just being a curmudge and the Eagles do not suck. I will tell you though, this is apropos of short thing.
Sure.
I went through with a friend of mine. I said something like, what do the Eagles have like five hits? The guy's like, no, dude, it's like twenty. And it is almost exactly twenty giant, giant hits that the Eagles had. So, whether you dig their music or not, they were highly influential, at least in terms of the mainstream.
I think it's the ubiquity of the Eagles that turns a lot of people off, because you know, they're famous in elevators across the planet. You'll hear some sort of version of I'll tell you what. Nothing is quite the same level of depressing as being alone in a grocery store at three am and hearing an instrumental music version of Desperado playing while you're walking by the frozen Food aisle.
I will say, I really do like the Los Lobos version of Hotel California that's on the Big Lebowski soundtrack.
Yeah, I mean, the covers are great, but you could say, I don't know. You could say the same thing about the Beatles. There are so many Beatles covers that have been done through so many iterations that they're eventually just becoming this sort of musical cannon that everybody knows how
to play a variation of I Mean. It's no surprise then that even in twenty eighteen, with spoiler alert half of the Beatles Dead, Fans and Friends theories the like insists that the world has yet to hear the true story of what are also known as the Fab Four. That's fab short for fabulous. So this whole crazy tale of the Beatles begins way back in the mid fifties with the kid who was kind of a popular cool guy, a hot head.
Yeah, and he was really down with this whole skiffle scene.
You know, the skiffle scene is the skiffle CRAZEY.
Give it, give it to me. I always have a hard time remembering how it one would because I think it's sort of a folk thing. We've talked about it before, sure, skiffle.
Yeah, it's sort of like a blues based folk hybrid that sort of takes American traditional music and turned it a little bit into more of a I don't know, a rock and roll kind of jug band.
It's a pastiche of folk music American music that was popular at the times, and John Lenin and co. Were particularly enamored of American prison songs from the South. So when John Lennon took some of his buddies and formed a group called the quarry Men, they would play these prison songs from the American South during what was known
as the skiffle Craze. Lennon was around seventeen at this time, but he already knew another kid who was a couple of years younger than him, who really wanted to be cool, a little bit more of a straight laced kid with stricter parents. He was fifteen years old, his name was Paul McCartney, and cool guy John Lennon came to Paul and said, hey, do you want to play music with me even though you're only fifteen. So soon they began composing songs and playing music together. We'll fast forward. You
can hear entire volumes of this story. It's a tale as old as time.
And I think most Beatles fans have some inkling of the Hamburg days and like the young lads from Liverpool kind of like getting together informing themselves a rock and roll band. So then the next thing that happened was in February of nineteen fifty eight, Paul invited a buddy of his guy from around town, George Harrison used to come and check out the band, and then he actually auditioned. And Lennon, who you know, the hot head bad boy of the crew, who probably you know, was a bit
of the ringleader. It seems like it wasn't so sure about George because he was a little too young, even though he was only the same age as as Paul. But George could shred.
Yeah. So the first audition that Harrison had, Lennon says. Lennon says, well too, he's too young. He's pretty good, but he's too young. So George comes back young. George comes back a second time, and according to the story, he played a lead guitar part from a song they all knew on the top level of a double decker bus and John Lennon essentially went, okay, yeah, fine, forget it. He's fifteen. He's fifteen. He's also our lead guitarist.
Yep, yep.
And then eventually other members of the quarry Man set left, so they were in a weird situation. Was just John, Paul and George and they were playing guitar pretty much when they could find a drummer, and they said, we need we need some more people. And that's when they started picking up some names that are going to be familiar to more hardcore Beatles fans, but maybe not familiar to people who only know the Fab four.
Yeah, they picked up a guy named Stu or Stuart Sutcliffe, who played a little bass. You know, you always think of Paul as playing the bass, So what was what was Paul playing if Stu was sitting on the bass. Were they three guitars strong plus bass?
I believe so? So yeah, And at the time, here's Stuart's big contribution to the band. He is the one who suggested changing the group's name to the Beatles or the beat All and you'll hear a couple of different spellings, and he said this as a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets, a group that both John Lennon and Paul McCartney had idolized for some time, and clearly Stu felt the same. Over the nineteen sixties, their name would change a few more times, first to the.
Silver Beatles, always retaining that beat spelling though, which is important because that's sort of like the little bit of a play on words.
It's Gold Jerry Gold.
And I wonder too if it was a reference to There was a zine I guess for lack of a vetume called Mercy beat that one of John Lennon's high school buddies started, and that's Mercy me Er s Y b E A T. And that was actually the publication that kind of covered a lot of the early Beatles exploits in that skiffle movement or whatever.
Yeah could be. You know a lot of times. Well, at least Stuart Sutcliffe himself will attribute that inspiration for the name to himself. It's probably true in some way, but also you know, people are fond of that kind of attribution. They while they were going through this name change, they said, okay, look we just need a drummer, and so they hired a guy named Pete Best and for a time they were playing as a five piece band.
Their first British performance as the Beatles happens on December seventeenth, nineteen sixty to a place called the Cosbak Coffee Club in Liverpool, CoSbAs and Rock and Thee And while they were recording for the first time in the studio in August of nineteen sixty two, during their first session together, Pete Best was apparently just not cutting the mustard and they got their manager to let go of Pete Best.
Well, that was right after. I think it was even the manager, George Martin who said the drummers gotta go.
They all all agreed.
I've heard one story where that was definitely a thing. But apparently they had a problem with his haircut because he had kind of much more of the traditional kind of greaser pompadoor haircut, whereas by this point the dudes were rocking that British mod mop top that we know and love so well. That became the hallmark of their look. And it just goes to show that even early on in their career, they were very conscious of this image, you know.
Yeah, and their manager had famously told them that if they wanted to be big, it's like, look, you have to do better. Image wise. You can't because they were just showing up and smoking or eating and drinking on stage and wearing whatever they have been wearing that day. It's like, you need to get some proper trousers. There's some great quotes about it, especially because I guess that's back when people said trousers more often.
So.
And it's crazy because this is George Martin's career before he wrote those awesome Game of Thrones books. You know, who knew he actually had a story career as a record producer and manager.
Yeah, and he was really just doing the Beatles, I think to support his love of.
And his love of frappuccinos.
He's he's pretty candid about that.
Yeah.
They so they got rid of Pete Best and that's when Ringo Starr comes into the picture. Also, Stuart Sutcliffe had earlier left of his own accord to pursue a career in art. That had to be a real kick in the pants later for the guy. You know you're familiar with a lot of the discography. In October nineteen sixty two, their first single, As the Beatles comes out. It's called Love Me Do Do It, enters the British charts reaches number seventeen, pretty good for a first time out.
Yeah, and this is like their earliest, earliest days and sound, which is much more akin to like the Phil Specter kind of traditional rock and roll, I mean really just kind of a lot more straightforward but very catchy melodies that they would continue to incorporate into their future stuff. But it obviously got a little weirder and cooler in my opinion thankfully.
Yeah, because this is a little bit poppy boy bandy stuff, you know, a simple kind of three chord Buddy Holly esque for lack of a better word. In nineteen sixty three, February eleventh, they record their first album, Please Please Meet, and they do it all in one day. In November nineteen sixty three, same year, With the Beatles becomes the first million selling album in Britain, and then they begin their crazy evolution. Their domination of the world, as well
as their internal change as a band. In February of nineteen sixty four, they tour the US for the first time. People lose their minds, they're out of their gourds, the barn doors wide open, whatever idiom you want to use, their nuts. This is where you see a lot of that archival footage of people just screaming and screeching as the guys get off the plane.
Yeah, I mean, in particular young ladies. They were quite fond of these, these lads from these Liverpoodlian lads. Did you know that's the word for it, Liverpool. Yeah, it's a weird inexplicable dal. Yeah. There's one story about how a woman came up behind Ringo and like snipped a lock of his hair. So this was during their first trip to the United States. I believe they did the At Sullivan Show and then broke TV.
Record numbers blew up. And I know a lot of us listening today will say, well, yeah, of course somebody's gonna sneak up behind you and snip a lock your hair. That happens, you know, that happens on a semi regular basis. But this was a different time, So things begin to are you kidding?
What are you kidding about? The lock of your hair? Snippery?
No, that doesn't happen to you.
I don't think I've reached those heights yet.
We hang out, maybe just at different circles.
I guess. So we hang out together a lot, though. But are people doing this to you? Are you okay?
Are you dude? Do you want me to point it out when someone does it to you?
Please?
Okay? You have my word.
Do you think they're just being really stealthy about it? I'm just not noticing.
I feel like I've seen it happen, but you acted like it was normal.
The wiser my friend.
Well that is, you know what, as a team, we can all we can all do better. Also, typically it is Matt who is sneaking up behind you. I just want to put that out there.
Oh I've caught him doing that before. It's in the hall. But listen, I wanted to point one thing out. Sure, move on. In sixty five, the Beatles play say Stadium and it's just like Bonker Nanza's and it's like that was literally the creation of the arena rock genre. Even though it's funny because the Beatles. You don't picture that as being a mega rock show because they're even even like their early stuff, it's a little more traditionally rock and roll.
Again, it was a very different time. Yeah, you know. I think one of the things that really pushed them to that arena status is the year earlier. On July sixth of nineteen sixty four, they had debuted the film A Hard Days Night, and they had released a soundtrack with that on August tenth that reached number one. It also that soundtrack included additional songs, so they were doing
some thing very intelligent. They were releasing albums concurrently or roughly concurrently with films, so if you are a super fan, you can embrace multiple avenues of fandom. This way, they meet the Queen, they play the arena. As you said, Noel, they release another film, Help, and the group internally and content wise begins to change. On December third of nineteen sixty five, they release Rubber Soul. This is often cited
as a turning point for the band. They begin to depart from those very straightforward rock and roll roots we mentioned earlier. They released Revolver. In sixty six, they released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in sixty seven, it becomes the highest selling British album of all time, and I think it still holds up. I really like that album, which one Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's called.
Oh Ye's okay, Yeah it's okay.
You know what they call it? Stone cold class my friend.
Yeah, I agree. They released Magical Mystery Tour in nineteen sixty seven.
That's actually my favorite.
November twenty seventh.
That's just super psyche stuff by that is.
More so than the the just the Beatles album in sixty.
Eight, you know, the Wild album. Yeah, that to me, that's a different Beatles though. Like I really like like the Magical Mystery Tour and Sergeant Pepper are like the most kind of candy dripping psychedelic records that they have in their catalog. Then the White Album has some weird stuff on it, but it's much more of a songwriter, a straightforward kind of And they also say that was when they had their breakup. Was emine because a lot of people refer to that album as a series of solo songs.
We's just referred to it as a he says, not a Beatles record. He said, it's a series of solo songs, and we all this is something where the fans perhaps one out over the creators, because the creators just released this white album cover and they called it the Beatles an eponymous record, but everyone else has called it the Wide Album, and that's what it goes down in history. As they've also been really films. But yes, their internal organization is beginning to stagnate and decay. In January of
nineteen sixty nine, a documentary is filmed. It's called Let It Be, and it's intended as an account of the Beatles' rebirth, but instead it ends up chronicling their demise and they are headed for an inevitable breakup. Speaking of breakups, let's take a break for a word from our sponsors. So as they're retaining this massive fame, the band members are growing increasingly distant. In nineteen sixty nine, John Lennon privately tells the rest of the band that he plans to
leave the part Skid Daddle. They ask him to keep it under wraps, so they keep this statement private. In April of nineteen seventy, Ringo Starr is the only one to show up for a final studio session for a Beatles record. There's no real formal announcement. They had intended to let it peter out, but on April tenth, Paul publicly announces his own departure, and news spreads that The Beatles are no more. Their thirteenth and final album, Let
It Be, is released on May eighth. In the aftermath, without delving into all the legal issues they had and all the personal acrimony that occurred, we should just say that the band's breakup did not end well. It was not amicable, and for a time several members, particularly Paul McCartney, felt really constrained and tied down by the various agreements they have made in as the Beatles. In December of nineteen eighty, John Lennon fatally shot. November of two thousand
and one, George Harrison succumbs to lung cancer. As we record this, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are still alive, still with us, the last living members of the world's best selling band, and oddly enough, many of their fans suspect these two men may hold secrets their bandmates took to the grave. So here's where it gets crazy.
Yeah, I mean it's hard to be a band that rises to such meteoric fames so quickly and sustains that fame, not only sustains it as a popular phenomenon, but actually as a critical darling, you know, and just considered to be incredible artists and songwriters and influencers of the zeitgeist and like recording techniques and everything you could possibly imagine
pop culture wise, these guys had their hands in. You know, it's very difficult to be that influential and not have people coming up with some interesting theories about stuff that went on, especially considering that they were a little clandestine about certain aspects of their lives and their careers. Early on, they had this image of like this squeaky clean kind of boy band, almost like almost like a manufacturer thing
with the screaming girls at Shay Stadium and whatnot. But then over time they evolved into much more guru like, you know, kings of psychedelia, and then even beyond them, became much more involved in activism and use their platform, especially Lenin to influence world events, which we'll get into.
So when when you have those kind of conditions colliding, it's it's it's it brews up some pretty interesting conspiracy theories, and we're gonna talk about some of the most popular ones or the most Maybe some of them you may have heard of, and some of them are a little under the radar I have not heard of. But uh, they're the most They're the ones that interested us the most.
Yeah, yeah, we have to. In honor of our compatriot, Matt, we want to start with one of your favorite ones. Matt. We know he's listening. Hey, Matt, it's that Paul McCartney is dead. This is, as you said, Noel, one of the most well known, perhaps strangest Beatles conspiracy theories. The idea is the following, the real Paul McCartney, the one that you see in various interviews or appearances or the
occasional cameo. Isn't Paul McCartney at all. That man is an impostor the genuine Paul McCartney, the little uh what's the word, Noel Liverpudlian, Liverpoodlian, Liverpoodlian, the little Liver Poodlian, Little Liver Poodlian actually died in the early hours of November ninth, nineteen sixty six. After his car skidded off
an icy road and crashed into a pole. According to the story, when John Lennon and George and Ringo found out about this death, they thought that they would not be able to come back from it because we just walked through their earlier timeline. This is sixty six. A lot of great things are happening, they're reaching heights, but
they think they have further to go. So, according to this legend, they covered up his death, replacing him with a look alike, a guy named Billy Shears who already looked, acted and even sounded like the actual Paul McCartney.
You mean Billy Shears from a little help from my friends on you know when they go.
Bely She's and that's the that's the guy, that's Ringo's character in a little help for my friends.
What would you think if I was saying, yeah, that's Billy Shears, So that's is that that's That's that a clue?
Maybe it is, And I'm glad you mentioned clues here because they the question is are you hearing Billy Shears or Billy's here? You know this this is one of the one of the primary pieces of proof for people who believe this theory. They are these ideas that various audio artifacts have been hidden in inside Beatles recordings. They give you clues to the story, right, And that's that's one of them. But there's another one that might be even more more familiar to our fellow conspiracy realist.
Well, there's there's a lot of them, and a lot of them. A lot of this one revolves around hidden images, a lot of a lot of most of these do revolve around things hidden in plain sight or plain audio.
Right, Yeah, because it said audio artifacts earlier. But it's important to notice a lot of the album artwork itself is pointed to as proof of this.
Yeah, album art and even press photos and things like that. But yeah, So one of the lyrics on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of one of the most gorgeous and probably most popular songs on that record, A Day in the Life, has the lyric he blew his mind out in a car he didn't notice that the lights had changed, and also that, you know, people point to
that as being a reference to Paul his death. And then in Strawberry Fields Forever, there is a what's known as a backwards mask, which we've talked about quite a bit on the show. In that most recent episode we did about satanic panics in Italy. I think we talked about a led Zeppelin back mask. But in the song Strawberry Fields, there's a part where when you flip it backwards, it sounds like John Lennon saying I buried Paul. He actually would would correct the record on this and say
I was saying Cranberry sauce. I'll let you be the judge.
Yeah, let's play this. We can't play too many Beatles clips without getting into a crazy lawsuit, but we can get away with this one.
Surely we can. Sure sounds like that to me. I don't hear Cranberry sauce. What do you hear? Ben?
Well, the thing is doesn't It's very much an audio roarshack. Do you know what I mean by? And yeah, like Gershak painting but.
For your ears or what do they call it? Baiter Mainhoff, where like you expect to see something and then you'll see it everywhere, or you think about a thing and then you start to see it everywhere.
They're confirmation biaseds directly. Yeah, but you can see how if someone already believes this they would they would see more of these things as proof. And there are several other details in there, including, for example, on the White album, there's the claim that if you play the track Revolution nine backwards, you'll hear the message turn me on dead Man, turn me on dead Man, tear me on dead Man.
And in nineteen sixty nine, on October twelfth, a student at Michigan University, a kid named Tom Zarski called a Detroit radio host named Russ Gibb, and he wanted to talk to us about the stories regarding Paul being dead.
GiB was dismissive of the rumors, but Zarski talked him into playing Revolution nine backwards on air at w k N R FM, and everyone who tuned in thought they heard turn me on dead Man, turned me on dead Man, and the phones rang off the hooks, and this brought the conspiracy to national levels.
Isn't this the kid that had a bunch of other theories about how?
Like?
What was this guy's story? I feel like there was a part where in the research where he mentioned not having the resources to play every Beatles record backwards to find more hidden messages.
You'll also hear people say that it was just a hoax that Zarski knowingly participated.
It, and Ben I misspoke. There's actually a different kid that did that in the nineties who had some pretty interesting theories about backwards masking in Beatles songs relating to another conspiracy that we'll get into short ah.
Okay, I see. And then so this also goes into the idea that you mentioned. Nola All l amend I think, I do think the nickname for super producer Paul is probably the best one we can have for today's episode because in the glass Onion song, John says, well, here's another clue for you all. The Walrus was Paul, and the people who believe this started thinking, Okay, get this, you have to walk with us here. So people who believe this one started spreading rumors that walrus was actually
a Scandinavian word that meant death. That is factually inaccurate. Is the nicest way for me to say it. The word is actually derived from the old Norse rumshalver, which means walrus, not death. So while there are all these clues or purported clues about Paul McCartney secret death, the biggest question would be how could someone get away with this. How could they keep a secret if there is a look alike? How could he live his entire life as someone else without slipping up once?
Yeah, and make all the Sick Wings records too, you know, I mean, come on.
I mean they're records.
What are you talking about? Have you heard Ram? That's not considered Wings? But that record is fantastic. That is a really really great record. I don't really care much about the Wings stuff after that, but Ram is a classic, my friend.
So this guy who was rumored to have replaced Paul McCartney, where'd he come from? Billy Shears? We called him. His full name's William Shears Campbell. He was the winner of the nineteen sixty five Paul McCartney look alike competition.
That's right. He apparently was an orphan who hailed from Edinburgh and it just so happened to my previous point, Ram. He was also a pretty good good mimic in terms of the type of songs that he could actually right himself, and the way he sang and his mannerisms. So, yeah, this is interesting detail here.
Yeah, But the issue with it is that for people who believe there is a body double, they believe there are minuscule discrepancies differences between the actual Paul's face and the impersonator or impostor's face. And you can find plenty of plenty of blogs and forums wherein they describe what they see is the multiple provable differences between the real Paul McCartney and the man they call fall Faul fake Paul.
That's great. And there's another interesting detail here too. It was right around this time November of nineteen sixty six when supposedly this impost stepped in. That's when the Beatles stopped. They were never really much of a touring band. They played these handful of big, giant stadium shows around the world, but not in the sense that we know today in terms of bands that just grind it out on the road for a month at a time. They were not that kind of band, and they just stopped entirely to
focus on their recorded output. And you know, some conspiracy minded types. My point to the idea that it's a lot easier to hide these kinds of things if you're not constantly out in the public eye and you can control your image and the output of photographs and liner notes and what have you.
Right, that's a valid point for sure. And this this theory, of course, is also one of the oldest ones about the Beatles. You can trace it back to nineteen sixty nine when a guy named Tim Harper, who was the editor of a student newspaper Drake University, published an article called is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead? And then you know, later in that year it gets the Nash coverage because
it's on the radio. It takes off like gangbusters, and people still believe it to some degree today, as you might imagine, as you might imagine the Paul McCartney or fake Paul McCartney, whichever you choose. Folks was asked about this before and he said that.
He met He said something jovial and delightful, didn't.
He He was pretty he was. He was surprisingly diplomatic. He said, well, you know, I haven't been in the public eye. I took some time off, so maybe that's why people thought I was dead. And then you know, there's that question of like, when you're at that level of fame and prominence, do people treat it like you're dead when you decide not to be on the front of magazines and these covers. If anything, you know, hopefully he looks at it as a flattering thing. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure how to take it. What would you do if you were accused of being your own body double.
Yeah, that'd be tough man. I haven't accused of this though. Actually, someone on one of the forums mentioned that on this show I sound really serious, and on our other show, Ridiculous History, I sound much more upbeat. And is it possible that I have some sort of clones or double action going on?
Saw that I imagined you'd be pretty delighted by it. I thought your answer was diplomatic.
It was, you know, I try. I can't claim to be as a diplomatic as Sir Paul McCartney. But speaking of, let's talk about a couple of more image related clues to this particular one on the cover of Sergeant Peper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is just chock full of references and things and different characters from history, like I
believe Karl Marx is on there. Also, all four Beatles are shown wearing band uniforms and gathered around this giant bass drum, and Paul has his right hand over his head, and this has been interpreted to represent an Eastern symbol that means death. And he also has a black clarinet while the other guys in the band have golden brass type instruments.
And there's something with his dominant hand as it's pictured in the art right in.
Terms of which one he's using to hold the clarinet. Right, Yeah, interesting, Okay, So there's there's actually a website called turn me on deadman dot com and has a whole page devoted to some of these Paula's Dead theories, and one of them involves taking a mirror and holding it up to the center of that Sergeant Pepper bass drum, at which point it says I ONYX he die, which would be I one nine he die, which also has an embedded reference
to eleven nine November ninth, nineteen sixty six, which is when supposedly he had this fatal car crash.
So is this a is this surreptitious communication? And if so, why and how if they want to keep it a secret, that's the question. This going back to what Paul McCartney said himself or his double said, he seems to have been kind of a sport about it. In nineteen ninety three, he gave a nod to this conspiracy theory in his album do you Know the Name of It?
It was Paul is Live.
Yes, it is Paul is Live. And despite that, the fury continues today as recently as just two thousand and nine, even in Wired magazine, in the Italian version of the publication, there was a study done by two forensic scientists who used computer technology to compare the measurements of McCartney's skull before and after the car accident. They took on the project because they wanted to prove that the Paul is
Dead thing at no basis. But what they claim to discover is that the point where the nose detaches from the face is different in both skulls, and the position of the years is different in a way that cannot be explained by surgery, and the shape of the palette is also different. So their story is that they went in to disprove it and they came out going, oh but an Italian.
And I think at this point we can even move on to a slightly related one, that a very strange one that implies that every single beetle was in fact a double.
A double or fixtional.
Well, there's two there's one that says they were a series of humans that were actors that were hired to play them so they could like maximize their you know, grind time with all the different you know, responsibilities they would have being a giant band like that. So that's one, and I don't know, we don't have to even go into that one too dp, but that is one that's floating out there, the idea of a boy band sort
of manufactured, like the Monkeys and things like that. The Beatles would have been the ones that kind of set that trend off. But this is the idea that they were, in fact all played by different actors.
Is this the one that says the Beatles were created by the Illuminati.
Well, it's a different one, but it's related. This is it. That's all I've got for that one. It's just I mean, it's really there's really not much to it. Yeah, here
we go. So there's a guy named Chris Fischell, this is coming from a great Huffington Post article, who was looking into the idea McCartney had died, and in his research decided that in fact, every other Beatle had died except possibly Paul, and that there were tons of clues hidden in all of these record covers dating far back as nineteen sixty three, where Ringo's face on their sixty three record is not in line with the rest of them.
And then in sixty four you've got a Hard Day's Night where George has his back to the camera and is holding a cigarette. This is all super stretchy to me. And then on Revolver we've got supposedly the second John Lennon singing the line I'm only sleeping sleep being a metaphor for death. And then we've got the Buried Paul thing in sixty seven. And you know, this guy goes into about two dozen or so pieces of evidence and decides that this is the one I was talking about earlier.
He says he just didn't have the resources necessary to listen to every single song backwards. I guess he didn't have a computer yet, right, But that's it, Yeah, that's it. And then it goes on because there's another one saying that the Beatles had been played by different actors, every single one of them. And there's a list just like you said with Paul, for every Beatle, showing that there are different facial dissimilarities through various periods in their career.
It's it's interesting because that is not as implausible principle a theory as we might initially think. It's not. I don't think it's particularly a secret, but it's probably an open secret. We can go ahead and say this something similar has occurred in the past and entertainment culture, and I have one example of something that's going on. Now. Have you heard this story about Morgan Freeman and voiceover?
I think we talked about this off air. Morgan Freeman has an iconic voice and it'll lend it to anything you hear him. Often, even when he's in any film, he's just the narrator because he's that well known for this.
So you got an AMEX card commercial, Morgan'll do it right.
You got to break up with your girlfriend, Get Morgan Freeman on the phone, soften the blow, schwalk away, giving that voicemail message ten stars. Also, don't break up with your significant other over the phone. You know what I mean? Not nice be an adult. But uh. But the strange thing about Morrian Freeman, and that a lot of people don't know, is that he has been getting so much voice acting work and he is so well known and so popular in the industry that his prices go up.
And if he doesn't have the time or the inclination, or if you don't have the money to afford him, he will recommend his secret voice. Double what there's a guy who just does Morgan Freeman esque voices. So if a mex can of Ford, he doesn't want to do it, but he still wants a piece of the action. He'll say, you know, well, you can't get me, but you can get this guy who sounds like me.
And do you think that guy has to pay him like a finder's fee or some sort give him a cut? I bet he does. Surely he does.
I'm sure he gets a cut. I don't know the nature of the relationships.
Had to license that voice. And that's a very weird arrangement, bet, And what.
An interesting interesting thing. So and then dictators often use body doubles. Saddam right, Saddam, Stalin, Goaddaffi. The list goes on.
But Saddam in particular. I believe there was some forensic expert that went through dozens and dozens of photographs of Saddam Hussein and determined that they were at least I want to say six in play.
Well there were several. Yeah, I think a couple of them died too. But we say all that to say it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that someone could have a body double in the entertainment industry. What differentiates this theory is the idea that it would be so prolific and so successful. I mean, I wonder, frankly, I wonder if it happens with K pop, which is another huge industry. But not every Beatle as we know, ended up being one of the Fab four. Pete Best
got kicked out. There's also this conspiracy theory that says the Beatles tried themselves to kill Pete Best. And these are just these are just some of the beginnings. We have some more to explore, but maybe let's give that some room to breathe. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Here's one of the darker ones, the John Lenning cover up. We mentioned earlier that he was shot on December eighth, nineteen eighty in Manhattan by a fellow named Mark David Chapman.
And it's weird because he was simultaneously a crazed fan. He's been described that way many times. But he also had some real problems with Lenin, specifically with his atheism, because Chapman himself was a Christian and he did not appreciate John Lennin kind of spreading this notion that you know that Christianity, you know, it would never go so far as to say that it's stupid, but he just did not think it was important.
That you the notion that you do not need a God or the threat of divine punishment to be a decent person. Atheism essentially absolutely somewhere between spiritualism and atheism. Yeah, So he he shot Lenin four times in the back. I think he fired the gun five times, and then he just sat down on a curb and started reading The Catcher in the Rye, which he had brought with him. When he was arrested, he asked for a statement. He told police that the book The Catcher in the Rye
was his statement. This has got to be a real terrible occurrence for JD. Salinger.
Well, this is a recurring thing, this idea that Catcher in the Rye is somehow some sort of assassination trigger. Because the gentleman who made an attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, I believe was carrying a copy of it as well, And it's been talked about as an interesting you know,
if anybody hasn't read it. It's told from the perspective of a young dude who was very kind of antisocial and telling the story from the confines of a psychiatric institution, and it of normalizes that kind of outsider mentality, you know, the kind of lone wolf no one. He doesn't kill anybody in the book spoiler alert, but he talks about things along those lines.
And there's a there's a huge, a huge thematic thread going through this story in which Holden Callfield, the protagonist, or at least the main character, wrestles with the concept of what is real and what is fake, who is phony, who is sincere? And yes, it has been alleged in various conspiracy theories that Kettrin the Rye was used as a psychological trigger by intelligence agencies. So in this theory, John Lennon was not killed so much by Chapman himself.
He was more killed by remote control. The ideas that Chapman was programmed by US government agents to kill Lenin, and they use the novel as a signal to go ahead with the operations. So either it was a subtle signal to Chapman that other people wouldn't understand, or it was a trigger that he was programmed, brainwashed essentially into following, you know, like he sees this or here's a passage read aloud and it triggers a certain set of actions. This sounds just this sounds like if it were a
breakfast dish, it would be nuts and bananas. But it is true that John Lennon, like other celebrities and musicians and political activists, John Lennon was being monitored by US intelligence agencies to some degree. All this theory does is go further. We should also mention that Mark David Chapman, at the time of this recording is alive and well.
He just had a parole hearing earlier this year. He was denied parole because the prole board wrote back to him and said, you admittedly carefully planned and executed the murder of a world famous person for no reason other than to gain notoriety. While no person's life is any more valuable than another's life, the fact that you chose someone who is not only a world renowned person and beloved by millions, regardless of pain and suffering you would
cause to his family, friends, and many others. You demonstrated a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life and the pain and suffering of others. Not the most well written sentence, but you get what they're saying. You know what I mean.
It has a bit of a run on, wasn't it was?
It was they were trying to squeeze in a lot of stuff there.
But does it mayby sound like too that they're really pushing the onus of this act really hard on him, saying for no reason, considering that this mk ultra esque type conditioning was perhaps in play. And then you know, and knowing what we know, maybe Ben talk a little bit more about why Lenin was being monitored. Lenin himself was being monitored by the government the same way that they would keep tabs on someone like Martin Luther King.
Sure, yeah, so the concern here we have to look back. It's nineteen eighty, the Cold Wars in full swing. Domino theory of ideology is also it's not something that got left behind in Vietnam. You know. The idea here is that leftist activists who have a public platform could sway the US voter or the world stage that it was a big concern of the powers that be at the time.
But the question then becomes one of technology involved. Has the US ever successfully managed to make an individual do something they would not normally do unconsciously, you know what I mean? Like sir Han Sirhan claims that he was a mentoring candidate as well. But then the second question goes to.
Motivation.
Had had John Lennon done something specific that would have been the straw on the proverbial camel's back. Had he done something that made someone in a shadowy room in DC or in Langley go, he's gone too far? Send the book, you know what I mean?
Yeah, And I don't know, like when you asked this question about like have we really seen evidence that that this is even possible? And this might sound utterly ridiculous, but I'm going to put it out there. I have seen, you know, and you may have two successful hypnosis you know, And I know a lot of times it's like people
certain people are more susceptible to it. But you know, I went to like a Renaissance fair here in Atlanta, and I don't know, I'm pretty skeptical about this stuff, but I saw some people who I saw walking around earlier at the festival and who were called up or volunteered to go up on stage and were hypnotized super quickly and made to do things that they wouldn't normally do, like cluck like a chicken, or you know, walk around.
Who's to say you couldn't take that to the next level and trigger somebody with a word to make them, you know, really do something they wouldn't do, like kill a Man's interesting.
Well, it goes into not just severity of action or extremity of action, but also a severity of time or distance from suggestion to action. It's something I would I've often called this the chloroform question. So you know how chloroform We all know this. Chloroform in fiction is depicted as something that you it's put dows on a rag and then you put it over someone's face, right their mouth and their nose, and they pass out for some amount of time. Real chloroform application, or the real usage
of it, is much different. You have to hold it there longer, and it keeps people under only as long really as it's on them. They'll wake up shortly thereafter and real hypnosis. We know it can have these short term effects. People cluck like a chicken. They will do acts that they might not normally do, but we don't know if it can force them to do things that we would considered depraved, like murder or you know, cannibalism. Maybe you could get somebody to light a fire if
they were if they disassociated it from human harm. But the big question is can we make some sort of suggestion that will stay for months or years. That's the big question, right, Can the Renaissance fair hypnotist make someone cluck like a chicken in twenty twenty.
And then recall it with yes, now I understand, I understand, but it's still it's interesting to see that happen in real time. The potentials there, The potential seems to be there, but you know, like we say, the human mind is even less understood than you know, what we understand about space. So he did.
Chapman did apologize for being such an idiot and choosing the wrong way for glory to Yoko Ono after he shot her husband, and then choosing the what choosing the wrong way for glory, So.
He almost admitted that he did it for like a notoriety in some way.
Right, he is eligible for parole in twenty twenty. Unlike Sirhan Sirhan he has not made ardent, consistent claims that he was brainwashed by any intelligence agency. But that that's where we leave it. And it's the thing that makes this one so tantalizing is that we know, we know, years and decades later, that the intelligence agencies of the US, at the very least did actively monitor people they considered to be dangerous political activists, and they also actively harassed them.
Like you said earlier with doctor King, they really did that, right Cohen, telpro was a real thing. The question is just how far it went. And if you want to read more about this, check out John Potash's book Drugs Is Weapons against Us, which says that these agencies did not just target John Lennon, but they also targeted Tupac Shakur and Kirk Cobain and many other celebrities. But here's here's a question of what if there's something bigger than
intelligence agencies at work. What if it's bigger than the CIA, What if it's bigger than the FBI, What if it's the Illuminati?
The illuminati the very same. Oh wow, okay, and within that we have some subsets, don't we sure this idea of the illuminati. We have two in particular that we're talking about. One that's a research wing of the UK that supposedly receives government funding from the United States, and that was very particularly tied to MK Ultra we talked about a little while ago, which is something called the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.
Yes, the Tavistike is.
In addition to the Committee of three hundred. First off, let's talk a little bit about the Tavistock Institute. They are essentially a nonprofit, at least on the surface that a British based nonprofit that has done kind of a think tank, I guess you could call it, that has done research on how to solve societal problems.
Quote, helping organizations, groups and individuals to learn, change, innovate and develop. How much more vague could you be. They were started back in forty seven, right.
That's right, and they have since their inception been intimately tied to the field of psychiatry. And again they were connected to the mk ulture experiment as we talked about earlier, which if we didn't go too deep into it. Surely you guys know what this is. We've done episodes on in the past. But it is that Manchurian candidate kind of research that was ruled to be not cool, you know, by the US government, the idea of turning people into secret sleeper soldiers, among other things.
Yeah, so they are commonly associated with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You can find a couple of books focusing on this, one by Daniel Eastland called Tavistock Institute, Social Engineering and the Masses. That's the more recent one.
It came out in twenty fifteen. But the concept here is that there's a totalitarian agenda which ultimately will result in the Illuminati taking over America with the intent of utterly destroying it through rock music and drugs to rebel against the status quo, undermine the family unit, dogs and cats sleeping together, people barefoot in the streets and wearing shoes in their houses.
Well, it reminds me of that episode we did a while back about did the CIA manufacture of the counterculture? A very similar end, you know, in theory would be to cause the breakdown of civilized society in some way or to demonize a particular group, which is I think more of what the CIA theory was about, but this one is much more watched the world burn type stuff, hasn't it been?
Yeah it is. No, there's the idea is that the Beatles were created purposefully with intent by the Illuminati or these various subsidiaries to introduce counterculture, to introduce drugs. And this part is something larger, called the Aquarium conspiracy by its opponent. So it was started by a guy named John Coleman as recently as the nineteen nineties. He used to work for MI six and that gave him some
street crad with people. He said that the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations was instrumental in creating this band, and they do. Some of his claims rest on the similar idea of subtle visual or audible clues, like he says there's a promo picture from the Yellow Submarine that shows John Lennon flash the Devil's Horn sign associated with this mysterious group, and that Paul is making the six six six or I of Horace hand signed or as I like to refer.
To it, the a ok emoji hand.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, kind of I mean, it's just like putting your finger and your thumb together in a circle and holding out your other three fingers. But you know, if you if you draw a line through that that oh that you're making, and then the remaining three fingers, you get three sixes. But it's also it's literally you know, that's.
What the six six.
But it's also literally you know, an emoji for and it just means cool. Everything is a ok.
You know, well in some places it means butthole.
That's fair.
That's that's I think that's unfair to tourists who don't know that way the traveling.
There was another conspiracy theory or you know, kind of an alarmist thing that was making the round power. Well wasn't why power. I think it was like the teenagers were using that symbol in pictures and it showed that they were what the kids called DTF down to.
Yeah. Oh, there's also one of the one of the pieces of evidence for the Illuminati idea is that the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band also includes a host of quote Illuminati stooges such as Alvis Huxley, Karl Marx, HG. Wells and playwright George Bernard Shaw.
That's right, Shaw was in it too.
Yeah, Yeah, a known Illuminati stooge. I just love it when people are called stooges or tycoons. We do have something else, and one more tad on the pile here, and that's the idea that the Beatles did not release all their songs. Did you ever hear this?
Yeah? This one's pretty pretty debunkable, but it's one of those ones that I think rabid fans were so jazzed about the idea of they just wanted to let it ride. But what's the backstory?
Yeah, it goes back to nineteen seventy one. There's a British teenager named Martin Lewis and he sends bootleg Beatles recording to a magazine and he includes extra track names on the bootleg songs like Colliding Circles, left is Right and Right is Wrong, deck Chair and pink Litmus paper Shirt and claim they have been hidden away in the Apple Records vault. The thing is, of course people thought this is amazing. They wanted to hear these new songs.
But the thing is that later Lewis confesses and says the whole thing is a hoax, and like you said, Noel, people don't believe him. He even explained it in an interview with USA Today when he said, to my shock and horror, many Beatles fans refused to believe me. People told me your confession is a hoax. I know someone who's got those songs. And so he says, I'm letting
the cat out of the bag again. There are no hidden songs, which is where we begin to wrap up the show today, folks, because for some of these theories that we've described, some more plausible than others. There are always going to be people who say, if you are attempting to disprove what I believe, then that means you are part of the vast Beatles conspiracy. But what do you think? No, what do you think? Do you think any of these could have some sand or a grain
of truth? Do you think Paul McCartney died in the sixties.
I don't know, man, I hope not. He seems like the same old Paul, you know.
And also it's on balance we have to think of the ratio to be fair, if there's a body double, he spent more time now being Paul McCartney than Paul McCartney did when he was alive. Well, so you know, in terms of just time spent as Paul, who is more genuine. I know that makes me sound like a horrible person.
Not at all, not at all.
But we also want to hear from you, folks, fellow conspiracy realists, skeptics alike. Do you think that any of these claims have an amount of an amount of sand. One thing we did not talk about, which is a provable improven conspiracy, be corruption in the music industry and the ways in which artists back then and today were chosen sometimes to be successful through practices like payola, through practices like you know, suppressing one record label's output to
play the records of another label. Hopefully that's something that we can we can explore in a future episode, but in the meantime, let us know what you think. You can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook. On our various community pages, the one for this one is Here's where it gets crazy.
Longtime listeners, you probably you hopefully heard Nol and Matt do an episode recently that was entirely composed of fascinating stuff from our community page right, nol.
Yeah, that was a fun one. Those are always fun to do. And Ben, there was a very disc concerting Ben shaped abyss in the room with us at that time, but you yourself were not corporeally present, but we did commune with the abyss a couple of times.
Very kind. I am often described as a bend shaped abyss.
Uh.
So you can and that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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