The Paul McCartney Mystery
Sometimes what you see with your own eyes won’t fit your assumptions.
“Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.” — Jean Cocteau
Researching something else, I saw a link to a discussion about the Paul is Dead (PID) conspiracy, which holds that the Beatle Paul McCartney died in 1966 and someone else who assumed his identity.
I had heard about it, and decided to see what this is about. I was already persuaded that “Paul is dead” references in Beatles music and album art can be explained as symbolic of occult initiation, or was a hoax created by the Beatles, or was a result of people reading too much into things, or a combination of all three.
But as it turns out, it seems there’s something to PID.
Here’s some evidence that the person posing as Paul McCartney from 1967 on is not the same person as the Paul before, from most to least compelling:
- A scientific team in Italy studied facial features and “saw discrepancies in the facial features that could not be accounted for by error or plastic surgery.”
- “In 1969, Dr. Henry M. Truby of the University of Miami used samples from three Beatles songs sung by Paul McCartney (Yesterday, Penny Lane, and Hey Jude) and produced three very different sonagrams”, indicating not one but two Paul replacements.
- The new Paul’s six toes.
- As can be visible to anyone looking at before and after pics, there’s a height difference between the two.
- Paul paid child support to a former German girlfriend who gave birth in 1962, but in the 1980’s took a paternity test to challenge his fatherhood of the child. The result was in his favor. A replacement Paul, of course, would not have been the father.
- “In 1980 McCartney was busted for cannabis possession in Japan. His fingerprints didn’t match the fingerprints held on file for him from the Beatles tour there in 1966.” PID researcher Tina Foster has said in interviews that his fingerprints didn’t match with Interpol’s from an arrest in Germany from back when the Beatles played there regularly before they became famous. I can’t otherwise find this information online.
There are anecdotes reported by Foster on her blog Plastic Macca (which is also the the name of her book), or discussed by her in interviews, in which the “new” Paul seems to admit he’s not the same guy.
The facial and voice studies would have to be replicated by other scientists to have greater veracity, though I don’t see how it’s in any scientist’s interest to touch the subject.
On balance, however, I can see why some believe the Paul McCartney we know today is an impostor. And if that’s true, it’s also reasonable to assume that at least one replacement had been selected long in advance and had the musical and vocal training and plastic surgery to become a plausible double.
I know the word you’re thinking of: conspiracy. And that word often shuts down the mental process. But to say “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories” is not the same as refuting or “debunking” the evidence above.
Maybe there are refutations to any or all of these points. Maybe they are online and I couldn’t find them. But because we don’t know “who, what, where, when, why, and how” doesn’t mean the switch didn’t happen.
To say, “too many people would’ve had to keep their mouths shut; someone would have come forward by now” is also not a refutation of the evidence. To refute the evidence, it would have to be shown there were errors in fact or errors in gathering the evidence.
I don’t know the answers either. Even if I totally accepted the evidence above, I can’t even surmise that the original Paul is dead; the evidence only suggests he was replaced. The more one reads about it, the juicier the details, but if I accept that today’s Paul is an impostor, how that came about remains a mystery.
Maybe a grand conspiracy was involved, and that it really is possible for grand conspiracies to take place. And maybe that’s hard to swallow. Maybe we live in a computer simulation and the programmer changed up Paul to see if anyone noticed. That would also be hard to swallow. Maybe there’s some other answer. I suspect any answer would be hard to swallow. Whatever it may be, reality isn’t as it seems.
James Leroy Wilson writes from Nebraska. He is the author of Ron Paul is a Nut (And So am I). Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. If you find his articles informative or entertaining, your support through Paypal helps keep him going. Permission to reprint is granted with attribution.
