October 12, 1969 Paul McCartney Is Dead!
Remember the Beatles! They created a cultural revolution. However, not everyone knows the rumor about Paul McCartney at the height of the Beatles popularity. While studying for a college class I came across this piece of information since at the time of this occurrence I was 4 months old.
On October 12, 1969 A young man called a Detroit disk jockey to say that he discovered evidence that Paul McCartney was dead! Here is how he came to that conclusion:
- At the end of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the Magical Mystery Tour album, filtering out background noise allows the listener to hear a voice saying “I buried Paul!”
- The phrase “Number 9, Number 9, Number 9″ from the song “Revolution 9″ on the White Album, when played backward, seems to intone “Turn me on, dead man!”
Two days later, the University of Michigan student newspaper ran a story titled “McCartney Is Dead: Further Clues Found.”
- A picture inside the Magical Mystery Tour album shows John, George, and Ringo wearing red carnations, but Paul is wearing a black flower.
- The cover of the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album shows a grave with yellow flowers arranged in the shape of Paul’s bass guitar.
- On the inside of the album, McCartney wears an armpatch with the letters”OPD.” Is this the insignia of some plice department or confirmation Paul had been “Officially Pronounced Dead”?
- On the album cover of Abbey Road, John Lennon is clothed as a clergyman, Ringo Starr wears an undertaker’s black tie, and George Harrison is clad in workman’s attire as if ready to dig a grave. For his part, McCartney is barefoot, which is how Tibetan ritual prepares a corpse for burial. Behind Paul, a Volkswagen nearby displahys the license plate “28 IF,” apparently stating that McCartney would be 28 if he was alive.
The rumors said that his dead had occurred from head injuries suffered from an automobile accident and that the record companies secretly replaced him with a double. In 1969 Paul denied the rumor himself in Life magazine. People got suspicious because when you held the page up to the light, the picture on the page behind it was for an ad for an automobile and covered Paul’s head. Is this another clue? (Sources: based on Rosnow & Fine (1976) and Kapferer (1992))
Now look at him , does he look real?
3 comments
I enjoy studying the “Paul is dead” hoax more than anyone, but just to be a big stinker, I’ll debunk most of them; I’ll address the points as you listed them:
1. He says “cranberry sauce”; this is more evident on bootlegged mixes of the song.
2. There’s no way I could explain something as unlikely as that, but I have heard it, and it was probably just John being avant-garde.
3. Not really explainable, possibly just a coincidence. The man did have style, you know!
4. The son of one of the crew members arranged the flowers like that to impress the band. Apparently it worked, as it stayed on the album!
5. It stands for Ontario Police Department
6. Now you’re just being silly.
My point is that it’s quite fun to go through all of these and be amused, but ultimately not get too involved, because it can be really convincing if you are persuaded easily by almost nothing.
When I was in a college english class, I wrote a paper on how the Beatles changed music (and therefore the world). I included something similar to the above in my paper, as well as documented facts of how this band of boys from Liverpool impacted the world around us.
I got a “D”. Why? Because my “professor” said that I was wrong.
I then quit college and enrolled in the Connecticut School of Broadcasting.
I think if Paul was dead all these years he would have found a way through to us to let us know about the imposter!
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