Beatles Hoax

“Paul Is Dead” Rumor

In 1969, a rumor began to spread that Paul McCartney had died in an automobile accident in 1967 and had been replaced by the band with a look-alike. Speculation regarding Paul's possible death was perhaps fueled by his relative absence from the media, from which he says he was taking a break at that time. The first known printed mention regarding the rumor appeared in an article written by Tim Harper that appeared on the front page of the September 17 edition of the Times-Delphic, the student newspaper for Drake University in Iowa. Harper claimed to have learned about Paul's death from his friend, Dartanyan Brown, who said that he heard it from a musician who lived in his dorm, who in turn claimed that he heard of Paul's death somewhere in coastal California.

Tracing the rumor back to its origin has proven an impossible task because it involves a pattern of information transmission that folklorists specializing in urban myths refer to as “friend of a friend” (FOAF), in which one source references another, which points to yet another, and so on. In October 1969, disc jockey Russell Gibb of WKNR in Detroit related the rumor. Later that same month, Roby Yonge of radio super-station WABC in New York City discussed it at length on his show. Before long, the rumor had become such a pop culture phenomenon that it was reported upon by such respected mainstream news and entertainment media outlets as the New York Times, Life magazine, and Time. In response to the rumor's rapid spread, the Beatles issued a press release denying that Paul was deceased.

...