In the fall of 1969, a persistent rumor that Paul McCartney had been killed two years earlier and replaced with a look-alike captured the imaginations of Beatles fans and the general public. Clues began to appear on album covers and in music, a lookalike contest was held after the alleged death date but no winner was ever announced, but more conclusively, a team forensic scientist in Italy concluded that he was replaced in 1966 consisting of Francesco Gavazzeni and Gabriella Carlesi, who conducted a biometrical analysis of Paul pre and post 1966. After setting out to prove the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory a hoax, the scientists saw discrepancies in the facial features that could not be accounted for by error or plastic surgery. The two forensic scientists claimed there is high probability that it is not the same person, based on analysis of the shape of the skull and jaw, the curve of the jaw, the ear, palate and teeth. The original article was entitled Chiedi chi era quel «Beatle» and was included in the August 2009 Italian WIRED magazine. Ringo Starr also revealed in a 2015 interview that the rumors that Paul had died in 1966 and was replace with William Campbell were true and didn’t want to take the secret to his grave.
In an exclusive interview with the Hollywood Inquirer, Mr. Starr explained that the “real” Paul McCartney had died in a car crash on November 9 1966, after an argument during a Beatles’ recording session. To spare the public from grief, the Beatles replaced him with a man named William Shears Campbell, who was the winner of a McCartney look-alike contest and who happened to have the same kind of jovial personality as Paul.
“When Paul died, we all panicked!” claims Ringo, obviously very emotional. “We didn’t know what to do, and Brian Epstein, our manager, suggested that we hire Billy Shears as a temporary solution. It was supposed to last only a week or two, but time went by and nobody seemed to notice, so we kept playing along. Billy turned out to be a pretty good musician and he was able to perform almost better than Paul. The only problem was that he couldn’t get along with John, at all.”
William Shears Campbell, better known as Billy Shears, does indeed “disappear ” from records in 1966 and no traces of him can be found after Paul’s alleged death.
Mr. Starr alleges that the group did send out a lot of hidden messages through the years to prepare the population for the truth.
He notably says that the entire Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was awash with Paul-is-dead clues: the Beatles had indeed officially formed a “new” band featuring a “fictional” member named Billy Shears, which happened to be the actual name of Paul’s replacement.
“We felt guilty about the deception” added Ringo Starr. “We wanted to tell the world the truth, but we were afraid of the reactions it would provoke. We thought the whole planet was going to hate us for all the lies we had told, so we kept lying but sending subtle clues to relieve our cousciousness. When the first rumors finally began about the whole thing, we felt very nervous and started fighting a lot with each other. At some point, it was too much for John and he decided to leave the band.”
Ringo Starr claims that he finally decided to tell the truth, because he was afraid that it was going to die with him. At age 74, he is the only other surviving member of the famous band besides Paul McCartney, and he was afraid the deception would never be revealed.
The British MI5, the hidden hand behind the replacement, announced an investigation to determine if an impostor could have indeed posed for 48 years as the Member of the Order of the British Empire, Sir James Paul McCartney, during official ceremonies involving Queen Elizabeth II.
Hidden Messages
In September 1969, American college students published a series of articles in which they claimed that clues to McCartney’s death could be found among the lyrics and artwork of the Beatles’ recordings. Clue-hunting rapidly proved infectious, and within a few weeks, it had become an international phenomenon. Rumors only declined after a contemporary interview with McCartney was published in Life magazine in November 1969.
On September 17th, 1969 The Drake Times-Delphic published what is widely considered the first printed account of Beatle Paul McCartney’s supposed death. Days after Drake undergrad Tim Harper asked the question “Is Paul Dead?” on the TD’s front page, college papers across the country ran with the story and the theory of “Paul is Dead!” raced across America.
On October 12, 1969, a Detroit disc jockey, Russ Gibb, received a call from a listener (“Tom”) insisting McCartney was dead and suggesting he play the Beatles’ song ”Revolution Nine” backwards. Gibb did, and heard “turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man.”
The following excerpts are from the article:
Jaw line: “The mandibular curve between the two sets of photos showed a discrepancy of over 6 percent, well beyond the threshold of error. But there was more. Changed the development of the mandibular profile: before 1966 each side of the jaw is composed of two curves, since 1967 appears to be a single curve. There is therefore a curve morphological different.” [Andriola and Alessandra Di Fabio Gigante, “Ask Who Was the ‘Beatle,’” WIRED Magazine, July 15, 2009]
Lips: “Compared to the previous picture, that of Sgt Pepper’s show clearly that the commessura lip, that is the line formed by the lips of the two, it was suddenly stretched. Which obviously is not possible and that the whiskers cannot camouflage. In other words, the phenomenon is all too frequent these days, the lips can be inflated and increased in volume, but the width of the lip commessura cannot vary that much. Maybe slight, but this is not the case for the photos examined: here the difference between the before and after is too strong to have been caused by any surgery.” [Andriola and Alessandra Di Fabio Gigante, “Ask Who Was the ‘Beatle,’” WIRED Magazine, July 15, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/mw83db]
Nose: “[A]lways under the mustache of the McCartney Sgt Pepper’s, maybe it was trying to hide something else: what the experts call it the nose-spinal or sottonasale [nasal spine: http://www.revisionrhinoplasty.com/anatomy.html]. This is the point between the two nostrils where the nose begins to fall off the face: ‘This is also in this case a distinctive feature that medicine cannot alter surgery. It can change the shape of the nose but not the nose-cord,’ says Gabriella Carlesi. ‘And McCartney from the first group of photos and the second point that clearly varies’” [Andriola and Alessandra Di Fabio Gigante, “Ask Who Was the ‘Beatle,’” WIRED Magazine, July 15, 2009]
Ears: “Technically called trago [tragus]. All we have two, one by ear, but the characteristics are different for every human being. ‘In Germany, a recognition procedure craniometric, identification of the right ear is even tantamount to fingerprint, ie the collection of fingerprints,’ recalls Carlesi. But what is trago? It is the small cartilage covered with skin that overhangs the entrance to the ear and ear canal, like the whole ear, cannot be changed surgically. How then to explain the differences between the right ear of Paul McCartney in a previous snapshot to 1966 and probably a built in the late nineties? It is not only to betray trago a different conformation as well as other parts, just above the ear canal entrance, measurements and dell’antelice propeller. Things that ordinary mortals might seem irrelevant or unclear, but instead, every day, allowing the experts to locate and identify persons, bodies, photographs.” [Andriola and Alessandra Di Fabio Gigante, “Ask Who Was the ‘Beatle,’” WIRED Magazine, July 15, 2009]
This comp is from a Beatles book (left) & from an interview “Paul” did during a Wings tour circa 1976 (right).
Teeth & Palate: “There are impossible things and things that are possible but at the cost of operations long, painful and never perfect. Especially if done in the sixties. Now, careful examination of some pictures of McCartney before and after the 1966 autumn leaves, it must be said, in amazement: ‘First of all there is right upper canine,’ observes Carlesi Gabriella. ‘In the photos prior to 1966 is known as protruding relative to the line of teeth. It’s the classic case of a tooth that lack of space it ends up misaligned, pushed out by the pressure of other teeth. It is curious that the same canines in the photos from 1967 forward, but without ever protruding apparent reason: the images show that the space would have to be aligned with the neighboring teeth. It’s like if you wanted to recreate is a detail in a mouth where such an anomaly would have never been able to express.’ The real crux of the reasoning of dental identification suggested by Gabriella Carlesi covers the whole palate of McCartney that before 1966, appears close to the point of justifying various misalignments of the teeth, although in less obvious forms of upper right canine. After the publication of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, however, the palate of McCartney widens considerably, to the point that the front teeth do not rotate on the axis more as before. With the only on, than the usual canine. ‘A change of the shape of the palate, Carlesi concludes, ‘in the Sixties was not impossible but would be very traumatic, the result of an actual intervention maxillo-facial. In practice McCartney should have been subjected to an operation that would involve the opening of the suture palate, broken bone and then a long prosthetic and orthodontic treatment. In other words, for a change so sensitive in the sixties to McCartney would be required not only a particularly painful and bloody, but also the use of a fixed orthodontic multiband then, for over a year. Which would not have been possible to hide and would be obvious repercussions on the performance of a vocal professional singer.’” [Andriola and Alessandra Di Fabio Gigante, “Ask Who Was the ‘Beatle,’” WIRED Magazine, July 15, 2009]
The following comp is upside down to break the viewer’s normal conditioning. The nose on the right is markedly longer than Paul’s nose on the left. The images are screen captures from the Aug 19, 1966 Memphis interview (left) and an interview in Dec. 1966 in front of EMI studios. Both are supposedly Paul.
For more background information, please check out these radio interviews
Murdering Paul McCartney (1942-66)
After outlining the major theories regarding the replacement of Paul McCartney of The Beatles in 1966, we would like to progress to a tentative theory of our own regarding his murder. We admit that the physical evidence is slim, but there are other sources of evidence which lead one to piece together a plausible narrative of his assassination.
The Evidence
We acknowledge that there is no corpse, making a case of murder a bit more challenging than usual. The primary fact is that Paul was replaced in 1966, a fact confirmed by the forensic work of Carlesi and Gavazzeni published in 2009 showing that the individual masquerading today as Paul McCartney is indeed a different person than the Paul of 1966 and prior.
The evidence that we have about the circumstances of his death relies in part upon the lyrics and clues from Beatles albums beginning with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Although many so-called clues are ambiguous and could have alternative interpretations than those put forth by the Paul Is Dead community, we believe that their cumulative weight, bolstered by various statements of former Beatles, Heather Mills, and Sir Paul McCartney support the thesis that Paul is Dead.
The Publicity Stunt
There are many who claim, frothing at the mouth and shaking their heads more violently than Baby ever shook It, that the Paul Is Dead rumor is a gigantic publicity stunt. That allegation is a complete and total non-sequitur. We could concede that someone perpetrated a publicity stunt without at all undermining our contention that Paul is dead.
Did the Beatles really need a publicity stunt c. 1967-69 when Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and Abbey Road albums had rocketed the Beatles to the apex of their fame?
The bottom line is that a publicity stunt neither proves nor disproves death – the argument is almost infantile.
The Theory
The theory we maintain concerning the sequence of events preceding and following McCartney’s death may be briefly stated. McCartney was assassinated sometime between August 25 – 27, 1966, somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles – our hunch being San Francisco – and returned to England where the body was staged in a fake automobile accident discovered September 11.
Beginning as early as August 28, McCartney imposters were used until a permanent replacement could be doctored to resemble the dead McCartney, the switch operation completed in late November by the time recording for the Sgt Pepper album began.
The Explanation
The last known appearance of Paul McCartney was at the August 25, 1966 Seattle concert, after which date he is seen no more. What the public does see is a cavalcade of Paul imposters all of whom look distinctly different from the others. This person is often known as Faul, but we will identify his real name following.
If Paul was last seen on August 25, it would be reasonable to assume that he died near the place of his last known presence. He was en route to Los Angeles that evening, where on August 28 a fake Paul gave a press conference with the other Beatles.
That his managers had an imposter in place so quickly suggests that certain parties had planned the murder well in advance. And the fact that a fake one was seen landing in San Francisco suggests that he had died August 25-27. But of course this is not necessitated by any of the facts – simply a reasonable conjecture.
The Dates
We are aware of other dates given for his death, especially the one provided cryptically in the drum on the cover of Sgt Pepper. The drum date is said by many to be November 9, 1966, but others argue that the day and month should be flipped to give 9/11/1966, a matter to which we shall return.
The Body
Some allege that the walrus reference by John refers to Paul’s body, to which a rescue worker likened Paul’s condition when it was recovered from its death scene. While the story is certainly apocryphal, we could run with it by stating that a body submerged under water would bloat, coming to resemble a walrus, meaning that Paul was dead quite a few days before being discovered.
More critical skeptics will dismiss the walrus clues as merely a reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem, but we will show how Beatles’ communications are layered with meaning, making fixation on a singular interpretation fraught with error.
We accept the 9/11 argument because it corresponds with the time of decomposition required to assume the state of a “walrus”. Brian Epstein also announced on October 3, 1966 that The Beatles would tour no more, meaning that the November date of death is too late.
Why would a manager announce to the world that a band of monumental popularity would stop touring, especially when Paul commented that they would continue to play before fans? Was he lying? Certainly life on the road was a pain, but to abruptly state that the band would stop touring when it had heavenly bills to pay is absurd. The only reasonable explanation is that Paul was dead.
Death of The Beatles
Not only was he dead, but so were The Beatles. The difference between 1966 Beatles and 1967 Beatles is stark and chasmic, the two irreconcilable. Clearly someone wanted the band and its influence for reasons other than entertainment.
The Beatles were a shock and awe band, inspiring and promoting behaviors in teenagers which were alarming to older generations. They were the wedge which higher powers wanted to embed in the social structure of America – and the world – for divide and conquer tactics. Besides, the world needed to be distracted from the murder of President Kennedy.
Some say that the Beatles were a product of the Tavistock Institute founded in part by Aleister Crowley. Although a reasonable proposition, one which we have come to endorse, it has limited evidence. Yet it is hard to imagine such young men wielding so much power without a wizard behind the curtains pulling levers. Indeed there is abundant evidence showing that crowds were paid to show up for The Beatles appearances, especially in America, meaning that these powers were very anxious for this band to succeed.
Our best guess is that Tavistock gained control of the second, post Paul Beatles.
The Rosetta Stone
Wizards there were indeed as one sees on the Sgt Pepper album cover. Perhaps the most disturbing figure on the cover is that of Aleister Crowley. Why would a monstrous, vile, Satanic person such as Crowley appear on the cover of the Beatles’ album?
The standard and best answer is that the cover represented favored characters of the Beatles, the cover designers, and perhaps some executives at record publisher EMI. Numerous accounts given by John Lennon and George Harrison support the claim that these persons were heroes of the band members. Supposedly the album cover was the brain child of Faul who also claimed that the characters on the cover were band picks. Adolf Hitler was dropped at the last minute as too controversial.
As such, it is very clear that the Beatles – certainly John, George, and Faul – were Satan devotees to varying degrees, the most convincing evidence being their endorsement of Aleister Crowley, a somewhat remote figure today, but even more obscure, especially to American audiences, in 1967. We suspect that the Beatles thought that they were being clever with their veiled references to Satanism, but time has divulged fully the truth of their loyalties.
Now there are those who say that the characters on the cover also represent those which the band disliked, but this is a stretch belied by the statements of the various Beatles and an eisegetical reading of the event. Redwel Trabant, author of the Sgt Pepper Code, stated consistently in his essays that the persons selected were those whom they admired in some fashion, Adolf Hitler included.
An argument against our Satanic readings of the Beatles’ religion is that their interests were more those of dabblers and curiosity seekers than that of true believers. More importantly, we would argue that Faul was the prime mover of this development – the true believer.
Paul the Satanist
Now regarding Faul, there is one argument that he was Ian Iachimoe, an owner of the occult art gallery Indica where Yoko Ono exhibited and met John Lennon. William Shears Campbell is said to be Ian Iachimoe, and Billy Shears is the band leader introduced at the beginning of the Sgt Pepper album, which in turn would be Faul McCartney. Lennon, incidentally, publicly met Ono in 1966 at Indica around the time of McCartney’s death. Did he know her prior to his public meeting with her? Ono is a witch and intelligence agent – making her a perfect Tavistock client or agent.
The Motive
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the McCartney murder is motive, of which many have been put forth. We believe that The Beatles’ apparent opposition to the Viet Nam war is a plausible explanation for his death, but we think it is too shallow.
Others have noted that Paul, after an encounter with Mark Lane, became convinced that President John Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy rather than through the idiotic lone nut theory manufactured by the perpetrators.
Offering to lend his talents to a musical on the subject, authorities may have feared that the popular entertainer would open way too many minds; so they murdered him as they did so many other witnesses.
The realization that a band this powerful needed to be controlled probably inspired the Powers That Be that they could hijack the group for their own needs. In particular, with the Viet Nam war escalating, and the Bush Crime Syndicate needing a market for its drugs being shipped out of the Golden Triangle, the Beatles’ advocacy of drug use could be a huge boon to their trade.
Thus Faul’s interview in 1967 admitting that he used LSD was basically a paid advertisement for drugs being sold by the US government imported from Southeast Asia.
As we have noted elsewhere, the post 1966 Beatles were worlds apart stylistically and musically from the pre 1967 band. This difference, then, is what the cover of Sgt Pepper symbolizes – the death of the old Beatles and the birth of the new, an evolution which probably could not have occurred with Paul still in the band.
There were also the messy underworld connections of the Beatles, due in part to manager Brian Epstein’s heavy gambling habit, wherein ownership of the Beatles may have passed into new hands as a settlement of debt. Perhaps Paul was the fly in the ointment whose presence and objections were no longer needed.
While all of the above are probably part of the stew, we believe that Faul’s lust for fame and fortune fueled his conspiracy to remove Paul from the band in order to remake it into a blatantly Satanic outfit to lure millions into the dark world of Lucifer.
In any event, unless Paul was a human sacrifice, his elimination may have been required because he would not go along with the new direction the band’s handlers wanted to take it. He was the fool on the hill thinking he could chart his own course.
The Beatles ended their US tour in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, San Francisco being the frothy home of Anton Lavey, Ken Anger, and the Church of Satan.
The Culprits
So where are we? We are at the point of nominating a murderer – if not a group of murderers. We believe that Faul was the front man of the coup who was assisted by Paul’s brother who has gone along with the conspiracy for pecuniary and religious reasons. Both are Satanists, and human sacrifice is part and parcel of that occultic faction. The motive was fame and money for their part, and for the handlers, a vast new drug market whose supply was brought under the control of the Bush Crime Syndicate.
Many state that Beatles’ albums and lyrics are replete with clues about the murder of Paul. To a point we agree, though many are intentionally misleading and may well reference the death of Tara Browne. But the scariest part of that phenomenon is that there are so many knowledgeable clues that one must wonder how anyone but the murderers could know so much. And we cannot rely upon them to be entirely truthful – only half truthful as a good Satanist would be.
One of the principles of the occult is to hide meaning in symbols which only the initiate knows. Speaking forward and backward (backmasking) was one of the many skills Crowley urged upon his adepts. Indeed the Beatles albums are replete with these artifacts, a fact which Faul acknowledged in the Beatles Anthology.
We don’t expect many supporters of our view, to put the case mildly. The details are gruesome and a shock to at least 2-3 generations of music lovers. However, we must follow the facts and fit them most consistently with the personalities and actions of the people involved. To suppose that Faul murdered Paul seems an outrageous claim to most Beatles fans and observers, but Satanism, to say the very least, is entirely outrageous itself.
The Art
Thanks to Clare Kuehn, we discovered an astonishing work of art, executed by John sometime during 1966 – 71, in which he depicts a dead man bludgeoned death, holding a shovel, attended by his dog, on a bright sunny day. Kuehn likens the drawing to the fool tarot card, linking it to The Fool on the Hill song.
We agree that the picture sympathetically depicts the death of a loved one. We would argue also that the picture evokes painful loss and clues relating to the death. The shovel in our mind indicates that Paul dug his own grave, so to speak, by attempting to defy powers who had other ideas for his life or band than what Paul may have had in mind, or broached subjects they wished to remain covered up.
In short, the art work was John’s extraordinary record to us about the events on and around September 11, 1966 which took from the world The Beatles and gave it Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The only point upon which we are dogmatic is that Paul McCartney was murdered on or before September 11, 1966. Others are subject to new interpretations, and new clues. The power of the media is enormous, and we are gullible to its seductions. What the media gives, the media takes away.
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