Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  The rational way to investigate the JFK assassination—or any other mystery—is to start by looking at the solid, testable evidence, and then following it to see where it leads. Every time this has been done, it has led to Lee Harvey Oswald. However, conspiracy theorists have come to their conclusions by working backward and beginning with the idea that the Warren Commission Report is a lie and everything in it is uselessly unreliable. Thus freed of any and all evidence, the conspiracy theorist can land on whatever conjecture he prefers. This is what all the theories have in common: they differ from the government’s official story.

  Now, to accept the version of events laid out in the Warren Commission Report, you don’t have to get rid of the background info brought up in the conspiracy theories. Kennedy had taken actions against organized crime, and probably was disliked by that community. He had taken actions against Cuba, and Communists probably did resent him. There were probably elements in the CIA who were frustrated with Kennedy’s lack of progress against Castro. He was a civil rights leader and the Ku Klux Klan probably did dislike him. When he was vice president, Lyndon Johnson probably would have liked to take over as president. However, every president makes decisions that ruffle some feathers. It is not possible for any US president to be universally liked. These facts are not proof of assassination conspiracies.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Today, Lee Harvey Oswald would have been even easier to convict than he would have in 1963 had he survived to be tried. One reason is that our psychological profiles of killers are much more refined. Psychologically, Oswald fits right in with other ideology-driven murderers such as the Oklahoma City bombers, the Columbine High killers, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, and so many others. Oswald was an angst-ridden loner, frustrated and angry with the system, his grip on reality overshadowed by an imaginary official campaign to repress him. The reason we’ve been able to develop this profile is that, tragically, sometimes such individuals do act out.

  Paul McCartney

  * * *

  Date: 1966

  Location: London, England

  The Conspirators: The Beatles

  The Victims: Beatles fans

  * * *

  The Theory

  A community of staunch conspiracy theorists believe that Beatle Paul McCartney left the Abbey Road studios one night and died in a car accident. The Beatles then found a look-alike who has lived and performed as Paul McCartney ever since. These theorists point to what they believe are clues on the record jackets and in the music, which they claim the surviving Beatles planted to spread the message that Paul had been killed.

  The Truth

  Paul McCartney’s fatal car crash never happened, he did not die, and he was not replaced with a look-alike.

  The Backstory

  The Beatles formed in 1960 in Liverpool, and within just a few years were the most popular rock band in the world. Inevitably, stories and rumors began to spring up around them. One of these was a story among the Beatles’ UK fans that stated Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on January 7, 1967, on the M1 motorway. This rumor was repeated to the point that the Beatles’ fan club had to refute it in the February issue of The Beatles Book Monthly:

  But, of course, there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles’ Press Officer found when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper safely locked up in the garage.

  But this story got its biggest boost almost three years later, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, in the United States. During those intervening years, some of the Beatles’ most famous albums came out, in 1967, 1968, and 1969, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles (better known as the White Album), Yellow Submarine, and Abbey Road. And it is in this collection that fans started to notice certain details that they perceived as oddities, details that seemed related to the old story about Paul being killed in a car crash. One of these fans was Tom Zarski, a student at Eastern Michigan University, who called into a radio program hosted by disc jockey Russ Gibb in October 1969.

  This was the first time Gibb had ever heard the story, and at first he was skeptical, given that all famous people had stories made up about them, sometimes even deliberately by public relations companies. But Zarski told him, on the air, to play the Beatles’ song “Revolution 9” backward. Gibb did so, on the radio. He later said:

  A very pronounced English accent says, “Number 9, Number 9,” and it very clearly said, “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.”

  Well, that floored me. That absolutely floored me.

  From that moment, the story reached a level that can only be described as hysteria. Kids from all over the United States began calling in with clues they had either heard in the music or seen on the album covers.

  It just so happened that Gibb was good friends with guitarist Eric Clapton, who often worked closely with the Beatles in the UK and knew them well. On air, Gibb called Clapton and told him of the rumor that Paul had been killed and replaced:

  And he said, “No, what are you talking about? What, Paul McCartney is dead?”

  I said, “Yeah, they’ve got it in a record, and they’ve got it on so forth . . . ”

  He said, “No, that’s not—” and then he said, “Wait a minute,” he said, “You know, come to think of it, I haven’t seen Paul in about a month and a half.”

  And that did it. After he said that, all hell broke loose.

  Fred LaBour, a student reporter at the University of Michigan, heard the radio broadcast, and got to work at his typewriter. Two days later his article appeared in The Michigan Daily: “McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought to Light.” It began:

  Paul McCartney was killed in an automobile accident in early November 1966 after leaving EMI recording studios tired, sad, and dejected. The Beatles had been preparing their forthcoming album, tentatively entitled Smile, when progress bogged down in intragroup hassles and bickering. Paul climbed into his Aston Martin, sped away into the rainy, chill night, and was found four hours later pinned under his car in a culvert with the top of his head sheared off.

  LaBour’s article went viral and was quoted in newspapers all across the United States. The story was even picked up by both of the two most popular national magazines, Time and Life. LaBour’s article did not give a source for any of the facts of the car accident, but he did point out some twenty clues found in Beatles music and art. These included details like Paul being barefoot and out of step with the other Beatles in the famous Abbey Road crosswalk photo; his back being turned in one photo; wearing a black flower when the others were wearing red; and certain images of text believed to symbolize dates or ages if reversed or turned upside down. Such claims go on and on.

  Details matching the crash story can be found in the lyrics of many Beatles songs. “She’s Leaving Home” includes the line “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins,” which is when the crash happened; “Lovely Rita” is about the attractive meter maid who caught Paul’s eye and distracted him as he drove (though it’s not clear how anyone would have known this); “Good Morning Good Morning” says “Watching the skirts you start to flirt, now you’re in gear”; and the song “A Day in the Life” continues with his car crash from distraction with “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.” Some of the songs, played backward, include phrases such as “Turn me on, dead man, turn me on” (from “Revolution 9”); “Paul is dead now, miss him, miss him, miss him” (from “I’m So Tired”); and “Paul is dead, ha ha” (from “I Am the Walrus”). There are others as well.

  The Explanation

  Although there was plenty of discussion from conspiracy theorists that Paul was dead, there wasn’t any evidence that a car crash had happened, nor any signs from Paul McCartney or his family or friends that anything had happened to him. No police
, medical, or news reports mentioned the death in public of one of the world’s most famous people.

  While it’s true that fans found all of these details in the Beatles’ records, and one did call in to Russ Gibb’s radio show to talk about them, what’s not true is a single word that Fred LaBour put into his Michigan Daily article that really started the furor. He made the whole thing up, inspired solely by the radio interview and his own stack of records. He even made up the 1966 date of the car crash, which is why it differed from the 1967 date the Beatles’ magazine debunked. LaBour has always openly declared that it was fake, and that he never meant for it to get so out of hand.

  Nevertheless, the facts never get in the way of a good story. Even today, hoaxed “new evidence” is always being produced, including a 100 percent fabricated “deathbed confession” by George Harrison. A documentary film has even promoted the made-up claim that British MI5 intelligence agents were behind covering up the death and planting the look-alike. What the history of urban legends tells us is that as long as the Beatles’ music continues to live (which will probably be forever), so will the hoax of Paul McCartney’s death.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Decades after the breakup of the Beatles, Paul McCartney released a solo album titled Paul Is Live, which contained a number of tongue-in-cheek references to the old conspiracy theory that he died and was replaced. Its album cover was an altered version of the iconic Abbey Road crosswalk photo. The original 1969 cover featured a VW Bug with license plate LMW28IF, which theorists interpreted to mean he’d be 28 IF he had lived; the 1993 Paul Is Live album had this altered to LMW51IS, meaning that he IS 51 now. A clever chap, that Paul.

  Elvis Presley

  * * *

  Date: 1977

  Location: Memphis, Tennessee

  The Conspirators: Elvis Presley, the FBI, possibly other unknown individuals

  The Victims: Elvis fans everywhere

  * * *

  The Theory

  Arguably the world’s biggest superstar of the late 1950s, Elvis Presley was the personification of rock and roll. After a successful career in both music and Hollywood, history records that Elvis died young at forty-two of a drug overdose. As wildly famous as this heartthrob was, there were bound to be people who just refused to believe he was dead. Enter the conspiracy theories!

  Some say that Elvis faked his own death in order to escape the pressures of fame and live out his life as an ordinary anonymous citizen. Others claim that he was heroically assisting government agents fighting either organized crime or the drug trade, and is living in the Witness Protection Program. There are even claims that he is on Mars. Suffice it to say that the theories certainly cover a wide range.

  The Truth

  Elvis died at his Graceland estate in Memphis on August 16, 1977.

  The Backstory

  Especially during the last decade of his life, Elvis enjoyed a fast-moving celebrity lifestyle that was far over the top, and included chronic drug abuse. One night at his Graceland estate in Memphis in 1977, he had a heart attack and died while sitting on his toilet. His body was discovered in his bathroom by his girlfriend, Ginger Alden. He was transported to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. The body was autopsied with multiple doctors present. The cause of death was a combination of prescription drug overdose (he had fourteen drugs in his system) and cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by a Valsalva maneuver (straining on the toilet, leading to heart stoppage; constipation is common among drug abusers). An open-casket service was held at Graceland and the body was viewed by thousands of fans. A cousin of Elvis accepted an $18,000 bribe to allow a National Enquirer photographer to take a picture of Elvis’s corpse, which ran on the front page. Bolstered by a vast amount of evidence, the truth is that Elvis died that night in 1977.

  Fans all over the world were incredibly distraught. One of these was Gail Brewer-Giorgio. Immediately after Elvis’s death, she wrote a novel blatantly based on Elvis’s life called Orion: The Living Superstar of Song. The book was about a rock star, Orion, who has humble Southern origins. But the fame is too much for him, so he fakes his own death, buries a wax dummy, and lives in freedom with a false identity. It was, perhaps, her own projection of what she wished the truth could have been for Elvis.

  In 1979, Sun Records signed an artist named Jimmy Ellis to their label. And Ellis just happened to have a speaking and singing voice that was virtually identical to Elvis’s. Sun Records was looking to see if they could do anything with their soundalike recording artist and decided to try to capitalize on Brewer-Giorgio’s book. So they released Ellis’s debut album Reborn, which featured a photo of Ellis dressed and groomed exactly like Elvis, wearing a Lone Ranger–style mask. They gave him the pseudonym Orion Eckley Darnell, which was directly lifted from Brewer-Giorgio’s book. For a few years, Ellis and Sun Records enjoyed the boost by having half their fans believe that Ellis was an incredibly talented Elvis impersonator, and the other half believing that he actually was Elvis, hiding in plain sight as an impersonator of himself. And so began decades of claims that Elvis was still alive, including conspiracy theories more varied than you can imagine. And, of course, the never-ending “Elvis sightings.”

  Over the years Brewer-Giorgio has remained the public face of this conspiracy theory. She wrote two books expanding on her theories, Is Elvis Alive? (1988) and The Elvis Files: Was His Death Faked? (1990). Then she wrote and was featured in two TV documentaries hosted by Bill Bixby (of The Incredible Hulk fame): The Elvis Files (1991) and The Elvis Conspiracy (1992). Call-in votes following the second program revealed that 79 percent of callers believed Elvis was still alive. By this time, Elvis sightings had become commonplace, and the Bill Bixby programs featured a number of people who claimed to have either seen or spoken to Elvis.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  In the December following Elvis’s death, a photographer snapped a picture at Graceland that has become known as the “pool house photo.” In this image (if you look closely) it’s possible to see the blurry image of a man, perhaps reclined in a chair, through a glass door. His face appears to be framed with long black sideburns, just like Elvis. People from Graceland quickly identified the man as Graceland security chief Al Strada, but Brewer-Giorgio declared this to be a lie that’s all part of the big conspiracy.

  As time went on, Brewer-Giorgio’s claims evolved and deepened in both scope and complexity. In her latest book, Elvis Undercover: Is He Alive and Coming Back?, she claims that Elvis had once sold an airplane to an organized crime family she called The Fraternity, and the FBI had approached him to work for them to infiltrate the group. But he was discovered, and the FBI whisked him out of danger and placed him into the Witness Protection Program. His death was faked as a cover story, and from then on, Elvis lived an anonymous life somewhere.

  But this was just a drop in the bucket full of Elvis books that came out in 1999, and the cause was an unexpected one: 1999 was an important year for many, due to religious beliefs that the Messiah would return in the year 2000. One of these was The Elvis–Jesus Mystery: The Shocking Scriptural and Scientific Evidence That Elvis Presley Could Be the Messiah Anticipated Throughout History by Cinda Godfrey, which posits that Egypt’s Great Pyramid is actually a temple to Elvis Presley (built in anticipation of his Coming thousands of years later), and that the most blessed of people have an image of Elvis’s face hidden in their fingerprints. Another was from self-described psychic Jay Gould, who claimed to be Elvis’s personal psychic during the last year of his life. In 1999, Gould published Elvis 2000: The King Returns!, which purports to be a series of psychic communications Elvis made to him in the decade after his death. By Gould’s account, Elvis said he’d been living with Martians but would return, like Jesus, in the year 2000 to make a series of startling revelations, perform new music with a band consisting of angels, and would personally redeem the poor and the suffering.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  One of the most popular pieces of e
vidence offered for Elvis’s faked death is that the middle name given to him by his family, Aron, is misspelled on his gravestone as Aaron. Various explanations have been floated for this, including the possibility that Elvis himself may have simply preferred the Aaron spelling. Nevertheless, how this is supposed to prove he’s not actually dead has yet to be determined.

  The Explanation

  In order to best understand the conspiracy theories surrounding Elvis, we need to understand the people who promoted them and their reasons for doing so. Gail Brewer-Giorgio was no ordinary fan of Elvis. She was obsessed. And when her book Orion sold poorly, she interpreted this to mean that some conspiracy was afoot, which of course meant that Orion must have accidentally told the truth about how Elvis actually did fake his own death, and some cabal wanted it covered up. However, in the same book, she also asserted an alternate claim: that Elvis was secretly a drug enforcement agent and was placed into the Witness Protection Program.

  Brewer-Giorgio makes a similar claim in Elvis Undercover, where she claims Elvis is in the Witness Protection Program because he was working with the FBI to infiltrate the mob group named The Fraternity. But on the FBI’s website of information that’s been made public via Freedom of Information Act requests, known as the Vault, there are all 760 pages of FBI information pertaining to Elvis. Most of it has to do with several actual extortion attempts made against him. There is no mention of him ever working for the FBI, or of any group called The Fraternity.