All right everybody, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast. This is the death of Paul McCartney. We got Sean, we got Jorge, and we got Eric. This is the episode on the Beatles, not quite the Beetles, Paul McCartney. Is Paul McCartney actually dead, and then there’s a body double walking around?

This one’s weird. It’s a little bit before my time, it’s before all of our times. But it continues to be a thing. It’s all in the top 10 lists. All 40 episodes have been in the top 10. It is strange though, it continues to persist, which is weird. That’s what true conspiracies do. They persist as long as there’s a believer, as long as there’s one believer out there.

I don’t feel like we need to really go into the insanity of the Beatles. Everyone knows the Beatles. Even if you’re five you know the Beatles. They were huge, massive, the biggest. You know what you should do as a good exercise on this one is go watch the videos of fan reactions. They lose their mind, literally, they’re out of control. They’re like, I want to bang them, it’s a whole thing, which is so weird because I’ve never felt that about anything.

You were saying it was before our times. I did see that with Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson owned the Beatles, Elvis. But that was also a different time where people were much more conservative, and they’re like, I’ll take my tits out for you right now. They broke all the social norms. Frank Sinatra maybe, no, he was a crooner. Ever since the Marilyn episode, Sean hates Frank Sinatra. I can’t get behind him. Fly me to the moon, every time I hear it I’m like, screw you.

Anyway, so the Beatles were that, and honestly I feel like this conspiracy comes from that. People were so insane about them that that insanity breeds insanity. The really big, really famous people, Bob Marley, Tupac, they all lead to Michael Jackson, because it’s like the big first around that too. Maybe people feel they have to make something up to kind of make sense, because they can’t be gone. This is a little bit different though. Maybe this is a long-term lesson: don’t get so famous.

Because they’re so legendary and so out of the norm, they couldn’t have died regularly. It has to be existential, the crazy circumstances that had to occur. He couldn’t have choked on a Church’s Chicken. So this episode is about the death of Paul McCartney. Now, Paul McCartney is not dead, he’s alive, just so we’re all clear. This is the conspiracy of his death, and he’s still to this day probably one of the biggest musicians on the scene ever, unless you subscribe to this conspiracy.

So we’re going to go into the story. I’m going to tell you this story based on it being the real story, but it’s not the story necessarily. You make the decision, you’ll decide whether it’s real or fake. It’s kind of like Quentin Tarantino at the end of Inglourious Basterds where Hitler dies in a fire. You’re like, well, that’s not the real story. We did a whole episode on that, by the way. I do want to go back to that one and do an update because I feel like we could go even deeper. We should go to Argentina and find out for ourselves.

So late in the evening of November 9th, 1966, Paul McCartney left EMI Studios, and he was tired, sad, dejected, and he just got into a fight with his bandmates during a Sergeant Pepper recording session. Specifically with John Lennon, they got into an argument. Sergeant Pepper, just in case, is an album that they were coming out with, a really big album, and one of their last albums that they did together. So they got into a fight, supposedly.

So they get into this massive argument, and this is very early in the morning, four or five in the morning. When you’re rock stars there’s no concept of time, you do whatever you want. They were probably awake, probably recording. So they’re doing this big recording session and they get into this fight. He storms out of there, he decides to leave, and he gets into his 1966 Aston Martin, of course, because you’re that rich.

So per this story, on his way home he sees a hitchhiker named Rita. He picks her up. What rich person has ever picked up a hitchhiker? You’re so rich and famous and ultra famous, she’s not going to know who you are. Even the bums are like, who the hell? So he picks her up. One of the original stories is she was trying to make out with him while he was driving. So she’s trying to do the thing because it’s Paul McCartney, and he got distracted and drives off the road. In the crash his head is cut off, decapitated.

Where’s this story coming from, who’s telling this? Let me finish the story. So his head’s decapitated, then police arrive on the scene and they go, oh my God, it’s the head of Paul McCartney. They bring the Paddy wagon, John Lennon comes down, Ringo Starr comes down, and they identify the head. So he dies, and then they hold a funeral for him with eulogies by George Harrison, by Ringo, followed by a procession with Lennon, etc.

And the conspiracy right out the gate is that they decided somebody told them that this would shake the country and the country can’t handle it. His producer is like, we got to bring him back. So now the debate is on whether it’s from the government of England, or if it’s from the record producer, or if it’s from the band itself. They’re worried about riots, burning the whole country down. But I think it’s the producer, he’s like, do it, do it, because they were making so much money.

And then they held a lookalike contest to replace him, and then they found a guy in Scotland to replace him named William Campbell, and he’s also like a singer, something Scotland. Whom then the Beatles trained to impersonate McCartney, including all his mannerisms. He had plastic surgery, and that is essentially one of the biggest conspiracies in the world. But who’s telling the story, where is the story coming from? Because it’s hard for me, you know me, I want to believe, but who the hell is the data from?

So the first record of it being done is in a newspaper article. Which newspaper, TMZ, some tabloid? It was at the University of Michigan. A sophomore by the name of Fred Labour, he was assigned to write a review on the recently released Abbey Road for the University of Michigan newspaper called the Michigan Daily. And apparently that’s where it started, where he called into a radio station and there was a joke that there were clues in the Abbey Road photos, that Paul is dead and that he was replaced with a double. But this guy made up this whole thing. He’s a Michigan sophomore, so he’s 19 years old.

So it’s a super elaborate story, very farfetched, but here are some of the things. So apparently when he died, quote unquote, in 1966, everything changed from the old Beatles look to a new Beatles look. They were clean cut, they had the bowl haircuts, they were on the Sullivan Show, all wearing the same thing, the Yellow Submarine, all smiling. And then apparently afterwards they turned into the long hair doing LSD deep vibe like everybody else. But wasn’t that the 70s? Wasn’t everybody doing that? But that’s the idea, that it completely changed from before to after.

One thing you said is this new guy is supposed to be Scottish. They gave him a name, William Campbell. How did this 19-year-old guy get this specific? But the name changed over time and then it became Billy Shears. So William Campbell, Billy Shears, and his name evolved over time, it’s very confusing. That’s what spies do, they mix it up. Some people say that MI5 planted him.

One theory is that the Beatles were racked with guilt, and so they didn’t want to hurt their fans, so they decided to just replace him and keep it going. Guilt about losing a key member. Just imagine us three for a second. We get so big that we’re bigger than Rogan, we’re huge, a major influence, and then you die, and Sean and I are racked with guilt because Eric is dead and he’s got millions of fans. The easier thing to do is just replace Jorge with another guy named Jorge, a Mexican. Let’s get a Puerto Rican. And it doesn’t feel right, and then the Conspiracy Podcast went on to talk about baseball.

So all of this stems from a lot of symbols, and I want to get into these symbols. There’s supposed to be a bunch of clues. So let’s talk about Abbey Road. They’re all walking it, it’s probably one of the more famous, very iconic photos. So Paul has no shoes on, so that’s one sign. But what does that mean? Barefoot, walking into the afterlife. I do think it’s weird that he’s the only one without shoes, but maybe he was just a hippie.

The other one, who’s all in white linen? John. So the idea there is that he’s the minister of death. This is not me, I’m just telling you. So hypothetically, let’s say he’s supposed to symbolize the angel walking him. What’s the guy in the back in the blue signify, the common man in denim? He’s supposed to be the gravedigger. What about the guy in black? The undertaker. And then Ringo’s in black. And then Paul’s in his suit, barefoot, and he’s the corpse going to his grave. Got a cigarette in his hand, it’s a cigarette for sure. What hand is it? It’s his right hand. He’s left-handed. Well, the picture is taken from their right side. I’m just laying out the facts.

But why would they leave clues so people find out about it? It’s like whoever finds the golden ticket gets in. Isn’t it like the biggest stretch you’ve ever heard? Even I’m having a hard time believing this, and I want to believe it. So the other idea is that this guy Billy Shears was trained to be left-handed. Paul was the only left-handed person in the band. Left-handed people apparently don’t live as long, so they found an identical lookalike that learned how to be ambidextrous, and sang like him too, and moved like him, and they made him into a rockstar because it’s easy.

Not only that, Paul was engaged at the time to a woman named Jane Asher, who was quote unquote paid to keep quiet. Then the fake Paul married a different person named Linda Eastman. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein didn’t want to be part of it, so then he was killed from an overdose a couple months later, because he knew. So then this story just took hold even in the US, the conspiracy that Paul was dead. It spread like wildfire, and a lot of people believed it.

And so then they started analyzing, playing songs backwards, scrutinizing the album covers, trying to find anything, because every time they do this they always have to leave clues. These are fan sleuths that would call in. One of them is on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, there’s a freshly cut grave on the cover. There’s also a walrus on the cover of Magical Mystery Tour, which is a symbol in Viking lore of death. And these are fans that would call in from Iowa and be like, oh, this is what I found.

So in the song Strawberry Fields Forever, one says that you can hear Lennon say, I buried Paul, because he’s trying to leave breadcrumbs for all of us. I buried Paul. And then they played the White Album’s Revolution 9 backwards so they could hear the line, turn me on, dead man. Because if you do it back, turn me on, dead man. People will do anything to believe. There was one time Paul sneezed, and in the sneeze you can clearly hear the binary of him saying, I am not Paul McCartney.

What’s crazy is there’s a DJ, Russ Gibb, he spent hours analyzing all these lyrics. Clearly he was not getting gigs. But some people say that I buried Paul sounds like he’s saying cranberry sauce. Let’s play it again. When you’re thinking cranberry sauce, kind of, yeah. So it’s kind of like you could make it sound like whatever you want. So it’s totally possible.

Obviously the Beatles at the time, their recording studio was Apple, Apple Studios, and obviously they denied it. Each band member actually denied it and said this is ridiculous. But it kept growing and it still grows today. I personally believe that there are a lot of people that have been swapped out. Out of all the people, not necessarily think dead, but currently have a double. There’s quite a few that are like, who? Simon Cowell for one. Look at a picture of Simon now, that’s just extreme surgery to make him look worse, a botch job. You know how rich Simon Cowell is, worth hundreds of millions, you think that guy gets a botch job?

But there’s a couple more out there. Biden. No botch jobs there. But back to the doubles, who else? Biden, Putin. There’s talks about Putin being swapped out. They find a doppelganger. And there’s a weird thing with how masks have advanced so far that it’s Mission Impossible. You can look at videos where people will put them on and they go down the shoulder, so you wear clothes over them, and it looks and feels like real skin, the elasticity. You can get real crazy, like Hollywood, you can make anything look like anything.

It’d be super simple when you got to do this day in and day out, because you’re the double. It’s easier to do when you’re not a musician who has to play music and sing, when you just have to talk, it’s not that hard. There’s even people that say Kanye’s got a body double. So the thing is, if you start going against the grain, they say you get body doubled out. Did Jack Ma get body doubled out? Jack Ma disappeared for like a month and a half, he’s the billionaire dude, worth 40 billion.

What happened was he started talking trash about Xi Jinping, and then, whoopsie daisy, where’s Jack Ma, where’s the guy who owns Alibaba? And then a month later he comes back and he’s like, I did not mean what I said about the Chinese government. And then there’s another Chinese actress, imagine like a Sandra Bullock, the most famous woman actor in China, same thing. She started talking trash, she didn’t like what the government was doing, she disappeared for like six months, and came back randomly apologizing, I didn’t mean it, I’m so sorry.

But how do you explain the six months, you’re gone and no pictures, no TMZ? Oh yeah, you’re arrested, you’re in prison, you’re being tortured in a basement in China. So whether or not it’s body swap, devils, maybe, it could be torture. So throughout all this whole conspiracy theory, McCartney wanted to keep a low profile, and so he hunkered down in a country house that he owned in Scotland. Wait, wasn’t Billy Shears from Scotland? Crack the case.

So at first he found the whole thing funny, and it actually had a good effect on Beatles sales, more attention. But then it grew and grew, and he turned to anger, and it reached a boiling point when Life Magazine trespassed on his property to get photos to prove that he was still alive. He threw a barrel of water at one of the cameramen in an angry rage for trespassing. Who has a barrel of water just sitting around? But if you’re a celebrity and TMZ comes on your property, that’s why you hire people who kill those people, my security detail. When you’re that rich, I ain’t pulling that trigger.

But then he calmed down and was like, oh, this is bad PR, this is not good. So he invited them in and took photos with his family, and he said, just as in the agreement, that you’re not going to publish the photos of me raging. So then he took good photos of him and his family at his Scotland farm, and he played some music for them. That was the November 7th Life Magazine cover, him and his family in Scotland. They wanted to put him on the cover of Life Magazine and he turned it around into a positive thing.

But here’s the argument, that he was the fake, that was the fake Paul at that point trying to prove that he’s the real Paul. He said, look, I’m a family man, I love people, I’m the real Paul. So later on there was an hour-long special hosted by an attorney named F. Lee Bailey. F. Lee Bailey, OJ Simpson’s lawyer, the lawyer who’s everywhere. He is part of every conspiracy that we’ve ever done. We should do one on F. Lee Bailey, he’s probably been alive, born in Transylvania in like 1802, a vampire. He was a major player in OJ Simpson and all these different high-profile scandals.

So he did an hour-long special where he did a mock courtroom where he brought in witnesses, and it was entitled Paul Is Dead, and it was to grill those witnesses. And what happened after that? Nothing. Nothing was proved, they had nothing to go on, nothing’s changed. So in the interview for that Life Magazine, McCartney said that the rumor was bloody stupid.

And so in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with John Lennon, he was asked about the death story. He responded, I don’t know where that started, that was barmy. The whole thing was made up, we never went for anything like that. We put things in like a beat missing or something, see if anyone noticed. We used to have a few things, but nothing could be interpreted like that. So he’s saying they did put a couple of funny things in the album and the songs, but he never really did anything crazy. Also, why would we try to get caught? Just don’t put anything in the album.

So that’s pretty much it. There’s a lot of things on the album cover that are weird. There’s a hand resting and you go, oh, that hand symbolizes the grave reaching out. There’s also a part of the cover that looks like it has a date and says he died, in Roman numerals. But Jorge showed me this picture and I can’t find every other album cover with the same thing.

My biggest thing is, okay, you find a body double, you give him some plastic surgery, looks like Paul, got it. But being able to train him to be left-handed and play the guitar left-handed and sing songs and sound like Paul McCartney, he talks like him. Also, most people who grew up in that time period know this, but he started a band called Wings, and they had like six number one hits. So this body double happened to be a phenom in the 70s and 80s. You’re not going to have that talent as a double. Just plastic surgery me, bring the hairline back, plug it, then plug it.

Think about it, the cops that showed up to the incident, they got to be paid off and kept quiet for years, decades. The girl who’s getting handsy in the car, she got to get paid off. That was the other part, they did a song about Rita, but did they say Rita? John talks about Rita as a maid, it’s debatable, maybe he’s talking about a margarita. Everything you can look into and be like, it’s just fans reaching, trying to find anything to make a point. There’s so many people that had to be kept quiet for so long, it’s just too improbable.

They actually had eulogies and all this, everybody at the funeral. The motive is not that good. The motive of doubling is to sell millions of records. But do you think they wouldn’t have kept selling records? They probably would have sold more. Like Van Gogh, when you die you become super popular. But they wouldn’t have been able to make any more full Beatles albums. Once someone like Kurt Cobain died, Nirvana became immortalized forever. But the other way too, I’m seeing Stone Temple Pilots on Sunday and the lead singer is not the original, and they haven’t been doing as well since.

The Beatles are the Beatles. These are mega stars, phenomenal, top five of all time, top three. Think back, in the 60s they were top whatever. It’s like, imagine Beethoven goes on a bender with some hooker and dies, and they’re like, we just sold out the amphitheater, we got to get Beethoven back in there, let’s find a body double and train him to play the piano, easy. He’s a phenom, you can’t just do what he does.

Let me ask you a question, because we also did Mount Rushmore recently. Who’s the Mount Rushmore of music in general? Does it have to be one person or a band? It’s a head, you can’t have a band, you got to pick one. The Beatles count as one. Get out of here, that’s not Mount Rushmore. MJ, King of Pop. Elvis. MJ definitely, not the Beatles, no, nobody in any other language. The last 30 years, Andrea Bocelli is up there, he’s amazing. The last 30 years we haven’t had one that was in the top four. Eminem. It’s really hard, you’re thinking through everything. People like Bach, what he did, how is this possible, he wrote this music, it’s impossible. I would need time to formulate this list. And it’s subjective too, based on what your music is.

So where are you at, Paul McCartney? I think he’s 100% alive. You think this is all BS? I think it’s all BS. But how is this still around? We did two episodes of these are the top conspiracies on the planet. I think it’s one of those things kind of like Tupac. But that one is a little more suspect, you got shot on the Vegas strip, there’s a lot more that can sustain that one. But Tupac, Bob Marley, whatever famous people, I think people just make up stuff. If they hear somebody dies, then they start making up all these clues, and then it just took off and had a life on its own.

I don’t buy it at all. There’s too many variables, it’s so improbable. With these other ones we’ve done there’s room for speculation, so I can totally get behind it. This just seems like there’s no evidence at all, zero. Not even things that make you go hmm. There’s not even a credible source. The guy who wrote the paper was a 19-year-old kid in Michigan. If he was at the Cambridge newsletter I could get behind that. There’s no credible resources. It’s really easy when it’s something like the Beatles. It probably was an internet troll who started it, back in the 60s, a newspaper troll, and there’s a mad following.

By the way, think about this, the way he sounds before and after, you would be able to pick up something. Maybe if he couldn’t play an instrument or couldn’t sing, but let’s say the guy could play an instrument, the Scottish guy. Just like his voice, even, let’s say you could train his mannerisms, let’s say he could be ambidextrous, stay quiet, such a hard sell. It’s not like Tupac in Cuba and he’s dead, nobody knows who killed him. It’s just too loose. I want to believe, trust me, I am the believer, I want to believe, because I believe that a lot of weird stuff does happen, and I believe the whole body double thing is a real thing, just not here.

Last question, so why? You go search top 10 conspiracies on Earth of all time, and this is like number eight. You know why? Because it’s the Beatles. The Beatles are one of the top three bands to ever have lived, and therefore any conspiracy involving them is instantly going to get views, so much attention. They just want more content. No one’s going to make a thing about Joe Schmo at the hardware store, oh, he got replaced, he’s been acting different, I asked him the other day and he couldn’t tell me where the nails were. No one cares.

I agree, I think this is absurd. I don’t really grasp how it keeps going. It’s in the top, just because there’s so much popularity. All the top 10 have some basis, but this is probably the least of all the top 10, it’s clickbait. Say Beatles, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, everyone’s going to read it. I am very curious what the poll looks like on this one. I’m also curious if anyone knows anything that we don’t. I just want one little nugget that I could sink my teeth into, then I’ll happily switch sides.

Usually it’s all the album stuff and the symbolism of the white outfit, but listening to the words backwards, it’s a stretch. What gravedigger have you ever seen wear a denim suit? The gravedigger was the denim suit, the black suit was the Grim Reaper, and then Paul was just in his regular suit, barefoot, the white suit was the angel. The thing is, have you ever seen a man buried barefoot in a suit? They don’t do that, they put shoes on. Why would he wear a suit and no shoes? It’s a weird one. We’re going to do a poll, I want to know what is believed, is this a true thing or is this just media-driven.

So there you go, Paul McCartney everybody. Hey buddy, if you’re out there, Sir Paul, I think you’re the real deal. Here’s the real thing, Paul, if you really are you, you have to email us, give us a little tweet. If you ex us, it’s called X now, we’ll know that you’re real, but you have to tag us, otherwise you’re fake and this is a real conspiracy. Please, God, retweet this for our own final sake. I will get a tattoo of you on my chest if you tweet this out, I swear to God. It may not be big, but it’ll be on my chest.