DominicCobb said:
Warbler said:
zombie84 said:. It strikes me as similar to the likely scenario of how the Beatles started playing on the Paul-is-Dead theory
I just did a quick internet search to find out what the Paul-is-Dead theory was. I had never heard of it before. So let me get this straight, some people actually believe that Paul McCartney died in 1967 and a look-a-like has been posing as McCartney ever since? So they believe that the guy performing at Olympics opening ceremony was not Paul McCartney, but a look-a-like? My god, people are crazy.
If I'm not mistaken, people don't really believe this anymore. I think it was just a side-effect of Beatlemania - some people looked for meaning in the songs, and a select few thought what they found meant that Paul was dead. I'm also pretty sure that it quickly became little more than a joke after the Beatles heard of it.
Yeah, this has faded away now, but even in the 1980s it was at least remembered seriously, even if not taken that way. In 1998, my grade 8 teacher gave us a Beatles lecture shortly before we moved on to high school. He did this with every graduating class, a bit of a tradition for him, which speaks to how much the Beatles impacted the baby boomers. And at the end of it, he would walk us through every single Paul-is-Dead easter egg that had been identified. I really doubt he believed any of it himself, but it made for an entertaining presentation, complete with "I buried Paul!" sound clips and such. I already knew about it all though. I was really into paranormal stuff and cryptozoology in the early 1990s--almost assuredly due to the X-Files being popular--and would read a lot of books relating to stuff like that at the local public library. A lot of them would go on about the Paul-is-Dead theory. So it was a pretty big part of baby boomer culture and Beatlemania history. I don't know who actually believed in it at any point, but I'm sure there were enough who at least for a time recognized it as a real possibility. With all the JFK murder theories, moon landing hoaxes, Area 51 and Rosewell, etc. circulating at the time, and with stuff like Watergate coming out and all these crazy stories about Vietnam (agent orange) and stuff like Manchurian Candidate, it wasn't so unbelieveable. Plus the Monkees were still around, so you could see how easy it was to get a Beatles substitute.
Even today there are still some people who believe Tupac is alive and there are many books proposing Kurt Cobain was murdered, just as people years ago refused to believe Elvis died, so this isn't so out of left field. I mean, a significant proportion of Americans even believe 9/11 was staged. Heck, Dave Mustain, of Megadeth, thinks Obama staged the Aurora DKR shootings to impose gun control. Dave Mustain! People will believe anything. My parents to this day still believe JFK was killed by the CIA, even though it's been shown multiple times how a single gunman inflicted the damage from that vantage point through re-creations (wasn't there a Myth Busters episode about this?). My university had an entire course about rational thinking, where the semester-long example was a total deconstruction of the JFK theory showing how implausible it really was when you consider how unlikely it was to go off without anyone blowing the whistle, aside from the physics simulations. Yet lots of Americans, and even many non-Americans, will hear nothing of it. Like I said, people will believe anything. The Paul-is-dead connections actually hold together better than most conspiracies!