Is Paul McCartney Dead?
April 07, 2019
It’s safe to say I’ve been a Beatlemaniac since I was a little kid. The first song I remember hearing was Norwegian Wood, from the album Rubber Soul (1965), playing on my dad’s record player (though my story with the Beatles likely goes back even earlier). As I grew older, I found myself spending countless hours consuming everything and anything I could about the boys from Liverpool — magazines, books, music (including rare versions), documentaries, and so on.
One of my favorite pastimes was browsing blogs that shared various curiosities about the Fab Four. It was during one of those deep dives, around 2010, when a bombshell hit: the last post on one of the Blogspot blogs I followed boldly declared — on my bulky CRT monitor — PAUL MCCARTNEY IS DEAD!
Now, anyone reading this will probably laugh, and so did I at the time. I knew Paul was alive, touring and frequently in the media, but I entertained the post’s idea and got hooked. Before I knew it, I had to know more about the story.
After reading a few posts and having a brief exposure to the so-called “evidence” of the left-handed bassist’s death, I started to entertain the idea that we had lost a Beatle and were being fooled for decades. So let’s try to understand why.
The Hoax
At the end of 1966, Paul McCartney (who, according to some versions, was driving a Mini Cooper apparently belonging to his friend and Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger) was said to have been in a fatal accident, while the other driver involved was only hospitalized. Another version tells of a young woman whom Paul picked up for a ride. When she realized who he was, she had a hysterical fit, causing the car to flip over (this was the first version I ever read).
The Beatles allegedly spared no effort to cover up the supposed tragedy — even under pressure from the UK’s MI5 intelligence agency, which supposedly hid the accident and informed the rest of the band. A man — either an orphan, a winner of a “Beatle look-alike” contest, or both — named William Shears Campbell, also known as Billy Shears, was allegedly chosen to replace the late Paul. The most macabre versions of the hoax involve extensive plastic surgery and even describe Paul’s body trapped in the wreckage.
Not long after, the weight of guilt from replacing their bandmate drove the Beatles to fill their albums with subliminal messages, hinting that one of our beloved Liverpool lads had passed away.
In 1967, the rumor started spreading through The Beatles Book Monthly, though it quickly lost momentum. It resurfaced in 1969 with lasting impact — its resurgence began with a student newspaper at Drake University publishing the headline “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” The news serves as a textbook example of motivated reasoning: solid evidence that Paul was alive was dismissed, while “coincidences” and nonsensical “clues” were emphasized — a kind of à la carte reasoning, where people only accept what suits their beliefs.
In October 1969, a Michigan radio DJ received a call from a young man named “Tom,” who told the station to play Revolution #9 backwards to hear the phrase: “Turn me on, dead man.” This would become one of the first “clues” suggesting the band’s remorse. The hoax started gaining traction then, fitting perfectly into the narrative many fans were looking for — especially those trying to make sense of why the Beatles had stopped touring.
Subliminal Messages
Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album
Sgt. Pepper’s may be the album most packed with “evidence” for conspiracists — though this only works if Abbey Road didn’t exist. Even so, the mound of “freshly turned” earth, “Beatles” spelled out in red flowers, a yellow floral bass guitar supposedly played by Paul, and younger versions of the Beatles — all in black — are seen as symbolic of a funeral for the Beatle.
But a true conspiracist goes further. In A Day in the Life, from the same album, we hear:
“He blew his mind out in a car.”
Whoa! That would — no, MUST — be a direct reference to the gruesome accident details!
What else is there? A year later, Strawberry Fields Forever would feature in the Magical Mystery Tour, and also reveal the desire from our Beatles to tell the world about Paul: when slowed down, you can supposedly hear John saying “I buried Paul.” (And yes, I heard it too, back in the day.) Even songs that seem unrelated to the story — especially the weird ones — are combed for clues by reversing them. Revolution #9, from The White Album, includes the phrase:
“He hit a pole! Better get him to see a surgeon.”
And I’m So Tired reportedly contains:
“Paul is dead, miss him, miss him.”
Back to Magical Mystery Tour (1967): one of the Beatles is seen in a black walrus costume, an animal symbolizing death in some Scandinavian cultures. “If the black walrus is a sign of death, it must’ve been Paul inside the costume,” argue conspiracists. This joke is revived in Glass Onion (on The White Album), reflecting the fans’ obsessive questioning: Who was the walrus? John answers in the song:
“The walrus was Paul.”
A slam-dunk clue for sleuths everywhere.
Abbey Road
Despite the “evidence” in earlier albums, Abbey Road (released in 1969) delivered the final verdict for many conspiracists. Paul appears barefoot on the album cover (some cultures bury the dead this way), holding a cigarette in his right hand (suspicious — Paul is left-handed), and in front of a beige Volkswagen Beetle (or just “Beetle”), whose license plate reads LMW 281F — interpreted as:
“Linda McCartney Weeps” (a reference to his widow) and
“28 If” (Paul would have been 28 if he were alive).
It is all truly compelling.
Finding What You’re Looking For (Even Where There’s Nothing)
Up until now, I’ve discussed a set of “evidences” presented over the decades about the alleged death of McCartney, in a truly fascinating exercise of how people manage to find various needles in haystacks. As we might expect from a good conspiracy theory, there are no loose ends; all the evidence is interconnected and in direct communication with the main conclusion (or premise).
And this outlandish story still hasn’t come to an end (as conspiracy theories rarely do). In 2009, for instance, forensic scientists made headlines in an Italian newspaper claiming that, through comparative photos of Paul before and after 1966, it was possible to see that they were two different people (the rumor was later debunked due to photo manipulation).
This hoax has been the focus of many studies in fields such as psychology, sociology, and communication. And that makes sense: it says a lot about how people are, how they invest time and resources into something — even if it’s a lie — and how our brain is, in a way, a villain in these cases.
The kinds of evidence I mention here are popularly known as stretches — that is, reasonings that are forced to fit into contexts where they don’t quite belong. One example (and honestly, almost any part of the “Paul is dead” story would serve) is taking part of a car license plate that reads “281F” and developing a subliminal message that supports the original premise. It’s unlikely, highly implausible, that the story is true — but it doesn’t reside beyond possible doubt. That is, there’s still a tiny chance that Paul really is dead. And for a motivated mind (even if for the wrong reasons), that’s enough.
Moreover, there’s a large amount of information that is deliberately ignored by people who enjoy the story and its conclusion. It’s known that the name “William Shears Campbell” was invented by a Michigan radio listener (the same station that was instructed to play Revolution #9 backwards) named Fred LaBour, back in 1969, during a moment of inspiration right after the program.
LaBour, who worked for a student newspaper in Michigan, used the story to publish a comedic version of it, titled “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light.” He didn’t expect, however, that it would go viral in the way it did, and eventually retracted it.
Paul appears in several interviews mentioning that the lyric from Glass Onion was a big joke. John, too, had to explain in multiple interviews that, in fact, what he says in Strawberry Fields Forever is “cranberry sauce” — and not “I buried Paul.” Various explanations from official Beatles outlets developed in parallel to the story’s growing fame.
Exposure to conclusions we like increases our willingness to defend them. Exposing someone to stories — such as alien abductions or UFO sightings, for instance — makes them more likely to seek explanations aligned with those stories when trying to explain other events, even when the new story has little or nothing to do with the previous accounts. From the moment we have a conclusion in mind and we like it, we tend to seek out evidence or reasons to support it. In other words, we go after the pieces that fit our narrative, and interpret even the most ambiguous ones as proof that our conclusion is true.
To illustrate: suppose a person comes across several reports of UFOs in the night sky over the Serra Gaúcha region and is, in a way, “seduced” by these accounts. A short time later, this person spots a “suspicious” light in the same night sky. It’s likely that, lacking a more reasonable explanation, they’ll try to explain it through the earlier stories. This becomes clear when we analyze the supposed evidence surrounding Paul McCartney’s alleged death — particularly the one claiming that Paul is inside the walrus costume. We “know,” supposedly, what a black walrus symbolizes (death), and we “know” there’s a Beatle who is supposedly dead. Add to this a gentle tendency to agree that Paul is dead, and we get the artist behind the walrus costume in Magical Mystery Tour.
Another relevant aspect is a cognitive tendency called motivated reasoning, also briefly discussed in the article “On Having Conviction,” by Guilherme. Basically, motivated reasoning is a set of cognitive biases — tendencies in how we think about things — that guide us toward a conclusion that’s often already determined. It works to defend and sustain what we believe to be true (even if it isn’t). In the case of the hoax, it’s the active search for explanations that point to a conclusion that’s no longer up for debate: Paul is dead.
In other words, motivated reasoning is the opposite of rigorous thinking, which involves understanding our biases (including motivated reasoning itself) and pursuing virtuous goals — like truth.
That’s why I say the brain can be a villain in this story. Cognitive biases exist and are expressed with relative ease, even when they’re undesirable (and they’re clearly expressed more easily than efforts tied to critical thinking). I used to glance over this story — which is undeniably fascinating — and I know that much of my effort was directed (and motivated) by the premise that Paul was dead. The evidence filled every possible gap in the story, and, as Maslow described in 1966, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” I was satisfied with the evidence, with the conclusion, and with the fact that I hadn’t been challenged about its truth.
It’s dangerous to start from a conclusion — it suggests that all we need to do is find our way to it. In reality, the conclusion is, as the word itself implies, the end of the road. Ideally, we should make a solid evaluation of the reasons or evidence of a story before accepting a conclusion about it. That doesn’t always happen, because sometimes we’ve already formed a conclusion before even thinking about the story. In such cases, we would do well to consider opposing evidence, reflect on the reliability of what we take to be good reasons, and be willing to examine our arguments critically.
Although I had a lot of fun playing detective back in the day and sharing the view that Paul was dead, today I have even more fun realizing how everything I’ve learned and practiced keeps me from repeating the mistakes I made in 2010.
Link to original (In Portuguese)
References
- The Beatles Bible. “Paul is Dead.”
- The Beatles Bible. “Magical Mystery Tour.”
- Super Interessante. “Teoria da conspiração: Paul McCartney morreu e foi substituído.”
- The Beatles (2000). The Beatles Anthology. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. ISBN 0-8118-2684-8.
- BBC Culture. “Paul is Dead: A Beatles secret message in an album cover.”
- Rolling Stone. “Paul McCartney is Dead: Music’s Most WTF Conspiracy Theories Explained.”
- Snopes. “Fact Check: Paul is Dead.”
- Open Culture. “Paul McCartney is Dead Hoax Started at an American College Newspaper.”