Posts Tagged ‘WKNR’

Halloween Special: Remembering the ‘Paul is dead’ hoax

By 1969, the world has already experienced the summer of love, the murders of Martin and Bobby, and fear and suspicion was rampant. So when a college student named Tom called a popular Detroit radio DJ talking about evidence he discovered that suggested that Paul McCartney of the Beatles had died, it set the world on fire.

Even though there was no internet chat rooms, blogs or 24-hour cable news, this rumor spread very quickly and was difficult to refute, given the volume of so-called “evidence.”

The shortened version of the story is that Paul McCartney had a minor car accident in 1966. Rumors about the accident were amplified to the assertion that he had crashed his car and was beheaded. He was then replaced by a lookalike, but the Beatles had left clues in their music and album art about the switch.

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