Since I started this thread I've been having some fun exploring the old "Paul is dead" rumor. I remember it clearly from when it originally happened, but my information sources were pretty limited back then. Thanks to the internet I can read stuff, look at pictures, and listen to audio clips in a way that wasn't possible back in the day. I found a lot of stuff that I'd never heard of before, along with the old familiar stuff
The basic story is that Paul was supposedly killed in a car accident in 1966. The band covered up his death and replaced him with a lookalike, then spent their remaining time together loading up their albums with clues about his death. The public finally figured it out in 1969, a few months before the Beatles broke up.
I never thought Paul was actually dead because this story was too silly for me to believe even when I was fourteen. It would have been really hard to cover up the death of someone so famous, and it doesn't make any sense to cover it up and then post clues all over the place for millions of fans to see and hear. The band always insisted that there was nothing to it at all, and overexcited fans were making something out of nothing. But a lot of people thought the clues were planted as an intentional publicity stunt, and that's what I always thought.
After reviewing the evidence it seems possible that maybe it really was just fans making a big deal about nothing. If clues WERE being planted, it looks like the number of clues that were found are greater than the number that were put out there intentionally, because some of them are pretty far-fetched.
Some fun facts:
1. People who still believe the story call the post-1966 Beatle "Faul", for false Paul.
2. One of the most entertaining clues was probably just a fluke, because who would have guessed that "number nine" played backwards would sound like "turn me on dead man". But I would like for this one to be intentional, because then the dreadful "Revolution #9" track would actually have a point to it. Here's a link to the clip:
The clip starts with the word "yes". If you listen to the end you discover that "yes" played backward is "si" which means yes in Spanish. Pretty funny.
3. If you hold a mirror against the middle of the drum on the Sgt Pepper album cover, you get some quasi-numerical gibberish that can be turned into a "date of death" if you use a lot of imagination - it's 1 One IX, aka 1 1 9 which is usually interpreted as November 9 (American style) but could be September 11 (British style). This is followed by the words "he die" with a little arrow in between them pointing straight up at Paul. I can just imagine crazy fans pressing mirrors against every inch of the album covers to see what they could find.
