The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 725 - Beatle Mysteries

May 28, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

53:03

Edition 725 - Beatle Mysteries

Two items from a recent tv show on Beatles themes. First, British author and documentary -maker David Whelan with what he says is new evidence on the death of John Lennon in 1980 and details that were never mad public before now. Second, the "Paul Mc Cartney is dead " conspiracy theory that has been running for more than half a century. Author Donald Jeffries has researched how it came about - and why some people still believe it...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, I'm very pleased, just for myself.
	Don't want to sound over-pleased, but I'm very pleased that the sun is still shining, and we're moving towards the time of the Gemini.
	In fact, we're in the time of the Gemini people now, aren't we already?
	It's May the 21st, I think.
	So definitely my time of year.
	Sky's still blue.
	Trees are green.
	What's not to like?
	Hope everything is okay in your world.
	I'm gradually sorting myself out bit by bit after recent events and hopefully we'll continue so to do.
	But there's an awful lot still to be done.
	I won't bore you anymore with those tales.
	Thank you very much for your emails and your suggestions, the things that you tell me.
	You can always get in touch with me by going to my website, theunexplained.tv, following the link, and sending me an email from there.
	Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work.
	Okay, two items from my TV show recently.
	Both of them connected with the Beatles.
	Now, I guess, and I've been thinking this through, it's inevitable that if you are the greatest band in the world, and we know that Freddie Mercury was wonderful and Queen were amazing, I love them.
	And Madonna is incredible, and we've just recently lost the stunning Tina Turner.
	You know, so many people have such enormous great presence.
	I was also reading that in the last week or two, Cher, always a big fan of Cher, turned 77, which is a star, and she still looks and sounds great.
	But the Beatles were a cut above everything, weren't they?
	I mean, all right, I'm biased because I'm from Liverpool, and I can remember, as a little boy, my mum being very proud of what she called our boys.
	Because the Beatles took the message of Liverpool and our sense of humour and our way of doing things and our generally mercurial demeanor.
	The Beatles took that to the world.
	And for years, I would go to America and people would say, oh, you're from Liverpool.
	That's where the Beatles are from.
	That's after they'd laughed themselves silly at my name.
	Howard Hughes, really?
	You're putting me on.
	But they'd be amazed that I was from Liverpool.
	So the Beatles were special.
	So inevitably, all kinds of controversies and stories will arise about them.
	So the two people, number one from a few weeks ago, David Whelan, author and TV producer, who believes there may have been a second gunman, over and above Mark David Chapman, involved in the death of John Lennon on the 8th or 9th of December, 1980, depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on in time zones.
	And he's got a lot of information, he says, that others do not have about this.
	So the views that you will hear are David Whelan's views.
	He's first, then Donald Jeffries, who's just written a book about and around, more importantly, the whole Paul is dead conspiracy.
	The idea that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a fake Paul or Fall, who's been Paul McCartney ever since.
	It is, on the face of it, outrageous and outlandish and really doesn't have any traction.
	But there are a lot of people who believe this, and, you know, some of them very sincerely.
	So, Donald Jeffries decided to write a book not only about how this came about, this idea, but also about the impact that it had on a number of people's lives, including some very famous people that he's spoken with.
	So Donald Jeffries and the Paul is dead conspiracy theory we'll talk about in the second part of this.
	Two interviews from recent TV programmes, and I hope that you like this.
	And certainly, being Beatles-themed, I thought I ought to run them together and put them here for posterity's sake, as they say.
	If you want to get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	And once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the care and concern that you've had about me.
	You know, for a while, in the wake of that fire, things were very much coming unstuck.
	And I wasn't quite sure if I was going to come through it all this time.
	It's been very difficult, and I've been trying to deal with it, and there's a lot more to deal with.
	But just knowing that there are people there who actually care is a marvelous thing.
	So we mustn't ever lose the capacity to care about other people.
	We know that there are some horrible people in this world, but most people are okay.
	And you proved that point to me.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	Guest number one then from my TV show, author and TV producer David Whelan.
	And some information about the death of John Lennon in 1980 that perhaps we hadn't heard before.
	MSN.com ran this story.
	The man jailed for John Lennon's murder could be innocent.
	This is the headline, claims a bombshell documentary.
	Exclusive research throws doubt on the murder of John Lennon in New York.
	British author David Whelan has examined the fatal shooting on December the 8th, 1980, or December the 9th, depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on, I remember.
	Three-year investigation.
	We've got him online to us now.
	David, thank you very much for coming on.
	Thanks for having me, Howard.
	Those headlines were pretty hard-hitting.
	They certainly grabbed my attention.
	Is that so?
	That Mark David Chapman may not have done it?
	In my opinion, yes, indeed so.
	It's been a strange three years.
	It wasn't something that I was looking for.
	It came to me in lockdown, the story.
	I was listening to a podcast about JFK and someone mentioned on this podcast that the doorman at the Dakota when John Lennon was murdered might have been a CIA operative.
	So I thought, that sounds very interesting.
	I need to look into that.
	Literally went home, very early lockdown days, started to research, started to look into the murder, which I, like everybody else for 40 years, thought was a straightforward open and shut case.
	Mark Chapman shot John Lennon.
	He waited for the cops to turn up.
	He said he did it.
	Still in jail to this day.
	And that's kind of how I thought the thing went down.
	But the more I started to look into it, Howard, the more I realized this isn't right.
	There's anomalies left, right, and center here.
	And from that point onwards, I just went deeper and deeper into the case.
	And I think the first thing I realized was that no investigation actually took place in the murder of John Ennon, which is absolutely shocking when you consider the magnitude of the man who was killed.
	When you say no investigation took place, what does that mean?
	It means the NYPD at the time thought they had their man and didn't bother actually looking into whether there might have been a second shooter or whether there might have been a conspiracy around Mark Chapman being in that driveway that very night doing apparently a very evil act.
	To give you a bit of context, I've spoken to everybody that was at the Dakota that night, that was working at the Dakota that night, apart from the doorman, who we'll get to in a moment, who's now sadly dead.
	And they all said that the very next day, or actually the very next morning, John Nennon's blood was being mopped up by the Dakota staff.
	The driveway was open that very next day.
	People were coming, going over the crime scene.
	There's a couple of very important doors that John was walking towards in the Dakota driveway.
	And it's very important that you get the geography right of the driveway because nobody really quite understands where John was and where Yoka was and where Mark Chapman was.
	But when you do figure out where John was and where Mark was, it's kind of very difficult for Mark to shoot John in the back, which is where Mark thought he shot John.
	And in fact, one of the things that you say is that you have unearthed evidence and you've even talked to the trauma surgeon on that night that suggests that he might have been shot from the front and certainly not shot in the places quite as high up anyway, the torso, as was originally suggested.
	Yeah, Mark Chapman to this very day thinks he shot John four times in the back.
	There's no reason for Mark to lie.
	That's what he thought he did.
	I mean, if he shot him in the front, why wouldn't Mark say I shot him in the front?
	But Mark's convinced.
	And as are the NYPD and the media at the time, that's what went down.
	When I spoke to the surgeon for the first time, we were having a discussion about other surgeons in history that have tried to take claim for what Dr. Halloran did, especially one called Stephen Lynn, who said that he held John's heart in his hand very famously.
	Stephen didn't do that.
	He was in the room, Stephen Lynn.
	He was the head of the ER at the time, but he didn't actually try and save John Ellen's life.
	So the real doctor for 30 years, Dr. Halloran, kept quiet and kept in the background and allowed Stephen Lynn to go on numerous documentaries and take the credit.
	2011, Dr. Halloran had enough.
	He came out and said, no, I'm the doctor that did it.
	Stephen Lynn's got a bit carried away.
	So when I spoke to Dr. Halloran, I was just talking to him in general about this Stephen Lynn issue.
	And I kind of almost said to him, almost as a kind of, by the way, just tell me again, where was John Sean in his back?
	I wanted to get, you know, a kind of, because that's what I assumed it was, like everyone else did.
	And he said, oh, no, he wasn't shot in his back.
	He was shot four times in his upper left chest.
	And it was a real kind of Roy Schneider kind of Jaws moment where I just, everything just went into strange focus.
	And I thought, oh, my God, this is really weird.
	So I asked him to verify.
	And he said, yeah, four shots went in upper left chest, just above the heart.
	Very tight professional grouping of gunshot wounds.
	And three bullets, there was three exit wounds that came straight out of his back in a direct line of fire.
	And I asked him whether he was sure about exit and entrance.
	He said, oh, yeah, he's a very experienced surgeon.
	He said, entrance is slightly smaller, bullet holes, exit, it comes out slightly bigger.
	So I thought, well, this needs further investigation.
	So it took me a while to go over that bombshell.
	And I asked him who else would know this information.
	He said, well, he worked with two nurses at the time who were there helping him try to save John Lennon's life in the ER room.
	So I contacted those two nurses.
	And what's interesting about the two nurses is not only did they help Dr. Halloran try and save John Lennon's life on the surgeon's table, but they also helped to wash John and shroud him after they failed to save his life.
	And that's a procedure that they did twice because the chief medical officer at the time turned up at the Roosevelt Hospital that night.
	And he was due to get John's body a few hours later.
	But Elliot Gross turned up and he asked the nurses to unshroud John and let him get a look at John's wounds, which is very strange because he was due to get John's body in a few hours.
	So the nurses just thought he was some strange guy trying to get in.
	They couldn't believe that a chief medical officer would do that because they knew he was about to get his body a few hours later.
	But Gross insisted.
	So they had to unwrap John, let Elliot Gross walk around his body, check the wounds, and then they had to re-wrap John and re-shroud him again.
	Now, what's interesting about that is that allowed the nurses to get a good look at John's wounds twice.
	Actually, three times, because they helped try to save John when he was on the surgeon's table.
	So they saw those wounds unequivocally three times without any sort of mess around it.
	It was very, obviously they washed him twice.
	So I said to them, what's the deal with the entrance and exit wounds?
	And they said, oh, it's four in the upper left chest, three out of John's upper left back, direct line of fire.
	Unequivocally, that's what John Lennon's wounds were.
	So I had three people that all corroborated this.
	And then I went back to talk to the lead detective of the case, a guy called Ron Hoffman.
	And I said, Ron, what do you think happened?
	And Ron, to this day, still thinks John was shot in his back.
	And when I put to him the medical evidence, he couldn't fathom it.
	He couldn't understand how they could think that.
	And he thought, well, maybe they got it wrong.
	And maybe, you know, they didn't understand an entrance and exit wound.
	And I said, well, Ron, they're very experienced nurses and doctors.
	They understood how an entrance and exit wound can be, you know, seen by medical people.
	And they kind of, what's really important about it is you can't really get shot from the back when there's four going in the front and three going out the back because that would, you know, it's a bit like JFK and RFK.
	You can't get shot in the back from the front.
	So that was a big deal for me.
	And I knew from that point onwards that I had to keep on investigating and keep on trying to find out why Mark Chapman thought he did something he couldn't do.
	But Mark Chapman had a gun, didn't he?
	And he used it.
	Well, he certainly, I think he did have a gun.
	But what's interesting how it is, when the police turned up to arrest Mark Chapman, there was no Gun there with Mark Chapman.
	Mark Chapman's gun somehow ended up at the back of the driveway at the Dakota.
	Most people believe the doorman, a guy called Jose Podermo, kicked Chapman's gun to the back of the driveway, but no one can really verify that.
	A couple of witnesses said he might have done that, but it was, but Jose Podermo's witness statement for some reason has never been released.
	So we'll never really know what Jose Podermo did or see.
	Mark Chapman believes his gun was shook out of his hand by Jose Podermo, but some other people counter that.
	But the bottom line is, by the time the cops had got there, another Dakota staffer, a guy called Joseph Manny, who's a lift operator, came up to the Dakota driveway, picked up the alleged weapon of Mark Chapman and took it down to his basement and stuck it in the drawer.
	So when the police arrived, the chain of evidence on the gun was completely broken.
	And I'm barely certain, going through all the police records, that there was no, in fact, I've asked the lead detective, there were no fingerprints taken on the gun.
	There were no fingerprints taken on the scene.
	So if it went to court, I think you'd have a hard time proving that that gun was definitely Mark Chapman's.
	But Mark Chapman, to this day, believes he shot John with that gun five times in his back.
	So we have to kind of figure out why Mark Chapman thought he did something he feasibly couldn't really have done.
	Now, a lot of people think that John turned around, and that's a pretty, that's a kind of obvious thing to think.
	If, well, if Mark says he shot him in the back and John turned around, he would have gotten shot in the front.
	But going by witness statements, most importantly, going by Yoko Ono's witness statements, Yoko specifies in the police lead detectives' notebooks that she never actually turned around.
	In fact, she quoted it, we did not turn around.
	So if you listen to the people that were in the Dakota driveway that night as well, that were listening by a window, they also did not hear Mark Chapman call out to John Lennon.
	And in fact, Mark Chapman, to this very day, has said he never called out to John Lennon.
	And John Lennon didn't turn around.
	He shot him in his back.
	So you have to kind of, if you logically assess it and look at it that way, Mark Chapman was having some kind of psychotic episode where he was believing he was doing something that he wasn't actually doing.
	So then you think, well, was he hypnotized?
	Was he under some kind of spell?
	So I started to investigate whether there was any hypnotists in Mark Chapman's life.
	And frankly, Mark Chapman's life was awash with hypnotists.
	Some that were connected to the church, some that were connected to the military, some that were connected to intelligence.
	And that's before he was arrested.
	So to me, it began to look like perhaps, and I'm only saying perhaps because we don't have all the evidence at hand yet, Mark Chapman may have been groomed to commit the act that he thought he was committing.
	And the key question is...
	You were saying?
	Sorry, sorry, go ahead, Harold.
	Yeah, the key question is, did Mark know what he was doing?
	And was he trying to, a bit like a kind of Christian jihadi, was he trying to, you know, be under the orders of other people behind him?
	I mean, there are those who have claimed over the years that he may have been some kind of Manchurian candidate.
	In other words, somebody brainwashed into doing that.
	There's never been any proof and that stuff has always been very fringe.
	Well, let's get to that.
	I think what's interesting about Manchurian candidates is it was something that came out of the very real CIA program called MKUltra, which came, which was developed after the Second World War and reached its sort of nexus in the 60s and early 70s.
	It came out after the Watergate hearings that the MKUltra was a real thing and the CIA were trying to create a Manchurian candidate, amongst other things.
	They wasn't just looking for a kind of brainwashed assassin via MKUltra, but they were also looking for, they were exploring telepathy, they were exploring truth serums.
	It was a wild and wacky program, MKUltra, and there was well over 100 different sub-projects in it.
	But one of the main sub-projects was creating a Manchurian candidate.
	The person that they went to to help them achieve this was a guy called Milton Klein, who was a psychiatrist who also had a kind of sideline in hypnosis.
	And Milton Klein in 1979, and anyone can find this on YouTube.
	If you go to my YouTube channel, Assassination of Lennon, you can see the clips on there.
	In 1979, Milton Klein went on a documentary series for ABC and as bold as brass said to the camera that he could create a Manchurian candidate to commit an act of evil, an act of murder.
	This was the guy that Mark Chapman's defense decided to send into Mark Chapman's cell alongside three other hypnotists, two for the defense, one for the prosecution, who all had sidelines in hypnosis.
	These guys had complete access to Mark when he was in his police cell when they were assessing him.
	There was nobody overseeing what these guys were doing.
	So they had Mark all to themselves.
	And what's interesting about their visit to Mark Chapman's cell is after they all visited Mark Chapman's cell, Mark Chapman decided he wasn't going to go to court and go with the temporary insanity case that they were trying to build for him.
	He decided to plead guilty and not get the trial of the century, not get the fame that they all said Mark Chapman was looking for.
	And you have to kind of wonder, did Mark do this through the little voice in his head, which is what he said, made him pleading?
	He said he was influenced by a book called Catcher in the Rye, didn't he?
	Yeah, well, that's really interesting, Catcher in the Rye, because that kind of comes in, I think, was a bit of a red herring.
	He clearly picked that book up after the murder.
	He started reading it.
	It's very bizarre behavior.
	After Mark was arrested, initially it was all about Catcher in the Rye, Catcher in the Rye, Catcher and Rye.
	But very slowly, that started to fade away after he had lots of visits from different preachers and pastors.
	And he started to sort of morph into demons made me do it.
	I was under the possession of demons and the devil made me do it.
	So he kind of switched sides from catching the ride to demons.
	But ultimately, Mark, I don't think really understands to this day really why he did it.
	And what's really interesting about the testimony he gave immediately after the murder, possibly a few hours after the murder, where I've got the statement, he had no idea what he'd done.
	He couldn't understand why he did it.
	He had nothing against John then.
	And he didn't remember pulling the hammer of the gun.
	He didn't remember aiming the gun.
	And he remembered feeling surprised that the bullets were working.
	has been remarked on before.
	And in fact, that came across in that famous interview that he did with Larry King on CNN some years ago, which was a moment that still...
	It's a most bizarre conversation.
	One of the other things that you brought out in this was that there were, you say, 120, I think it was, pills found in Mark David Chapman's room.
	And it has never been revealed what they were.
	There were three different types of pills, all amounting to 122 in total.
	They were unverified because they didn't know what they were, and they were sent off for lab analysis.
	Now, what's interesting about these pills is they turned up in a hotel that Chapman was staying in the night before he allegedly killed John Lennon.
	The New York District's attorney's office and the NYPD over the years and at the time have made a big thing about this very strange display where it had photos and music tapes and Bibles and catching the rye and they love discussing all these things that Mark laid out in his hotel room.
	The one thing they missed and the one thing they decided not to tell the public was these 122 unidentified pills.
	Now, if they were vitamin pills, I think they would say, it would say on the bottle that they were vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D. But why was Mark Chapman worried about his health at that point?
	Okay, so all we can say, this is an initial conversation, Stefan, and we haven't got time to go into every cross T and dotted I. However, what you've done is that you've thrown up a bunch of questions.
	Yes, that's all I want to do.
	And what's going to happen after that, though?
	You can't just leave them hanging there, can you?
	No, no, I won't.
	No, I've gone very early with this.
	My book's not due out till the end of the year, and the documentary will be the same.
	And I've gone early, Howard, for the reason that this is quite a shock for people.
	This was a shock for me when I found out all this information.
	And I think it's going to take time for people to get their heads around it.
	And I want to slowly drip feed out information via my YouTube channel, via my Substack, which is davidwheland.substack.com.
	If you go there, you're going to see articles.
	And I'm very slowly going to reveal it all.
	And these people you talked about, like the guy in the trauma room, you've got interviews with those people on your documentation.
	Yeah, I've interviewed everyone.
	I've interviewed the doctors, the nurses.
	I've interviewed the lead detective, all the cops that were there.
	I've interviewed friends of Mark Chapman.
	I've interviewed people that worked at the Dakota that night.
	I've interviewed everybody.
	And I'm pretty sure now I've got a pretty good handle on what happened that night.
	What's really interesting about getting a hold of the detectives' notebooks is there's a lot of witness statements in there that have not been revealed to the public.
	And when they come out, people will get more of a handle on what exactly went down that night.
	Because what's really strange about it, Howard, is it's one of the most famous crimes of all time, but it's one of the most misunderstood crimes of all time.
	And I don't think people really have a handle on what went down in that driveway that night.
	And I think that's...
	And the man we've been having the conversation with is David Whelan, who's come out with a few things about the John Lennon death that throw up some questions.
	And that's all they are at this stage.
	Your thoughts about that?
	Welcome.
	David Whelan there.
	About John Lennon.
	John Winston Lennon.
	One of my great heroes.
	And somebody, I think, who would have been, he already was, but would have been an incredible sage at aged 80, which he would be now, wouldn't he?
	I wonder what he'd have to say about this world and the people we see governing us.
	That would be interesting.
	Okay, part two then.
	Donald Jeffries and the Paul is dead conspiracy theory.
	So many of you have sent me emails over the years asking me to talk about this, and it's very hard to find good and credible people to talk about this subject.
	You know, I'm massively interested in it.
	Why wouldn't I be?
	Because I was born into the Beatles era and I'm a scouser born in Bootle.
	You know, so why wouldn't I be involved?
	I can remember my mum seeing the Beatles on TV when I was a little tiny boy.
	And she'd say, look, Howard, there's our boys.
	And that's the way we felt about John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
	They were our boys.
	See, I started talking in my local accent then.
	But they were.
	They were part of us.
	In 1966, there was an incident.
	Well, it's claimed there was an incident that led to the substitution of the Paul McCartney that we know and love, it is claimed, with another one, in order that the Beatles and their legendary flamethrower success, I shouldn't use that phrase at the moment, but their amazing success could continue.
	Donald Jeffries has written a book around this, and I'm glad he has.
	I'm just going to read a little bit from one of the opening paragraphs.
	In the fall of 2021, I was a guest on Coast to Coast AM in America, which is like a big version of that in this show in the US.
	George Newri, the host, asked me to weigh in on the Paul is dead controversy.
	Being a lifelong Lenin expert, I stated that I'd spent precious little time studying that particular body of evidence, and I really knew nothing about it.
	When pressed for an opinion one way or the other, however, I shrugged and said that I found it highly unlikely that the Beatles entourage could have discovered another human being who so closely resembled Paul McCartney and who possessed Paul McCartney's unique ability to write unforgettable songs and to sing them with such utter grace.
	Let me tell you, I was lucky enough to meet Paul.
	It is 20 years ago now.
	20 years ago today, no, it wasn't quite.
	He was a wonderful man to meet.
	I felt so privileged to meet him.
	And we talked and we were in Chris Tarrant's studio and they gave me a moment or two to talk with him.
	And we talked about Liverpool.
	And the great thing about Paul, when you meet him, is that he concentrates entirely on you.
	And he's not aware of everything else going on around him.
	He's listening to you.
	We talked about Liverpool.
	Did you go back there?
	It was like talking to an old mate from Liverpool.
	So I've met Paul.
	I guess you could say that I've got a skin in the game here.
	Donald Jeffries is online to us now.
	He has written a new book about the Paul McCartney Is Dead theory idea.
	Donald, thank you very much for coming on.
	Well, thanks for having me.
	I should clarify that it was written with Bob Wilson and it was actually Bob Wilson's idea.
	He was the impetus behind this.
	It talks.
	I write a lot and I'm busy with other projects.
	So this was basically Bob talking me into this.
	No, you came across as being very reluctant in doing this.
	It wasn't your first choice.
	Well, I love the Beatles, and I'm certainly, you know, people can look at my titles of my other books, and I certainly am drawn to controversial topics.
	I don't shy away from conspiracies and corruption.
	But this was one that, but again, it's an interesting subject.
	And I don't think anybody's really had done this.
	What Bob felt that no one had really done a book devoted to this.
	And what we decided to do is it was a fun book to write because we got a bunch of celebrities, including people that were in the music industry.
	We got a member, Lawrence Schuber of Wings, Paul McCartney's later group.
	We got a guy, Steve Boone from The Love and Spoonful, which is a huge group in the 60s.
	I know people like Susan Olson, who was on the Brady Bunch, Cindy Brady and Sally Kirkland, actresses like that.
	We got Ed Labore, who was the guy who's generally credited with starting The Legend or whatever, and he doesn't do very many interviews.
	So we had Gregory Peck's son, Tony Peck.
	So these are, it was a fun book to write because it was basically asking them the same questions and letting them know how they were impacted by the Beatles in general and what they thought of the Paul is dead rumor.
	And the funny thing about it is, and this includes me, even though I was very little when all of this came down, it affected so many people's lives because you ask anybody who was around and about in the late 1960s, you know, no matter how old they were or whatever they were doing, chances are they heard this because it was reported.
	Now, we're not saying that, you know, this is a thing and this actually happened.
	It's not really that we're reflecting on now, but we're reflecting on, aren't we, the impact the story had on people and the way that a rumor, a theory, a pack of information like this can spread.
	Even in an era that was pre-internet, you know, we had, what, we have AM radio back in those days.
	We just didn't have anything.
	We had newspapers.
	But nevertheless, this is a story, unlikely and crazy as it may seem, and to an extent fueled by the Beatles themselves, who I think played up to it, that really got traction.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I said Fred Labore, even something like that, where he's generally credited with originating the Paul is dead rumor.
	He described being at the University of Michigan and listening to a radio show where a caller phoned in and was talking about it.
	So obviously it was already in the air somewhere.
	So it's kind of, and I talk about it in my introduction.
	I went into this in some depth and tried to figure out where did this began.
	And it's really hard to determine exactly where it began, but you alluded to the fact that the Beatles had fun with it.
	And that's one thing that Bob and I both agree with.
	Neither one of us think that Paul is really dead.
	There are many reasons for that because certainly I can accept a lot of things, but you're talking about being able to find a look-alike that looked enough like him to fool everyone who happened to be left-handed, played left-handed bass, could write these incredible songs, sing exactly the same.
	And one thing that's lost that I've been mentioning on people is that if you accepted that Paul McCartney became Billy Shears, and that's the name of the guy that's generally credited for those who believe in it, William Campbell, also known as Billy Shears, if he was the one who took Paul's place,
	then you'd have to credit him with probably being a better songwriter than Paul McCartney was, because most people, if you look at the history of the Beatles, the early Beatles, the Beatle mania type were dominated by John.
	The early Beatles were John Lennon-centric.
	He wrote most of the songs.
	He sang most of the songs.
	He was the clear leader.
	Unquestionably, if you look at Hardin's Night, you can see that because he was still the leader at that point.
	But by 66, or certainly after that, then you have the Sergeant Pepper era.
	Sergeant Pepper was dominated by McCartney.
	It was McCartney's idea.
	He wrote most of the songs.
	And then down Abbey Road, by that time, the last album, again, it's just completely McCartney eccentric.
	So if it wasn't McCartney, then you'd have to assume that Shiridz wrote all the songs, basically most of McCartney's songs that have come to be critically acclaimed.
	And he somehow was able to take over the leadership.
	That would be a hell of a feat to achieve.
	Is it correct, and this is one part of the story that I didn't recall until I read it in the book, that Brian Epstein, the mentor, the guide, the manager, boss of the Beatles, had a contest for a look-alike or was involved in a contest for a look-alike for Paul, and that's how Billy Shears, the man they called later Billy Shears, arose, was discovered?
	That's the story.
	That's the story.
	That's what they say.
	I mean, I certainly can believe they had a look-alike contest.
	Whether that was Billy Shears, I don't know.
	The Beatles mentioned the name Billy Shears, as you know, on the Sergeant Pepper album.
	And they basically claim he sees Ringo in their imaginary Sergeant Pepper's band.
	So I think, and you alluded to this earlier, even though I don't believe that Paul's dead, I believe definitely the Beatles, I don't think these clues were just found randomly by people.
	If you look at some of these, there's one where you have to hold a mirror up and look over your shoulder at a certain angle to the drum set and it says, I, you, die, or something.
	You know, things like that that are, you'd have to go, you know, put some effort into that to have people find that.
	So I think that the Beatles maybe thought this up as a public relations boy.
	People don't remember it by 1969 was when this came out.
	Although now we look at it as a period of great music from the Beatles.
	At that time, the Beatles were kind of slumping in terms of when they first started.
	This really reignited public interest.
	For me, as a little kid, I suddenly was interested in the Beatles again because everybody was talking about Paul's dead.
	So I went and bought those albums I hadn't bought later albums and looked for the clues.
	And I think a lot of people are like that.
	So I think that they knew what they were doing.
	If you look at some of the clues, and I talk about it in the book there, it took some effort.
	And I don't think you could, just these people are just some of it's certainly like the Abbey Road thing where you're looking at the license tag in the background and not even the exact date, but it's close to it or whatever, then the party would have died.
	I mean, I think that's kind of stretching it.
	And what about the initials OPP that people have misinterpreted as OPD or officially pronounced dead on the Sergeant Pepper cover?
	Right, right, exactly.
	And as I understand it, it's for official Ontario Police Department or something.
	So some of that, yeah, is.
	But if you look at things like in the music video, I think it's your mother should know, for a magical mystery tour, the boys are dancing around and doing kind of choreographed numbers.
	Typical McCartney, what Lennon would denigrate as granny music, false granny music.
	One that was real vaudeville.
	That's what it was, wasn't it?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah.
	So they were doing something I'm sure Lennon hated.
	But when they were doing it, they made a big deal.
	And it certainly stood out that all the other guys had, the other three Beatles had red roses in their lapels.
	McCartney had a black one.
	Well, he must be dead, right?
	So McCartney's explanation for it made no sense because he said, well, we ran out of roses.
	Red roses, well, that's not true because you can see in the video, McCartney and all the rest of them were flinging red roses all over the place.
	Certainly had an extra, if they wanted to put it.
	So and the other thing where he hasn't addressed this that much, but when he addressed the Abbey Road, iconic cover where you see that the four of them are walking across the road and Lennon's supposed to be the preacher, George is the gravedigger.
	Ringo is the mourner.
	And Paul, of course, is the corpse.
	He's not wearing any shoes like corpses.
	But his explanation for that, when they asked him, he said, well, it was such a hot day.
	I kicked off my sandals.
	You kicked off your sandals to walk across incredibly hot pavement barefoot?
	I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me.
	So I don't know if they were playing with people or what, but I think they definitely knew what they were doing.
	Well, I think they'd reached a stage where they were so adept at what they were doing and they had such power that they came out with something that was completely unlike what they'd done before.
	And of course, they couldn't have done it without George Martin and Abbey Road Studios, but they came out with something that just nobody'd ever heard before.
	We had a disc jockey in this country called Kenny Everett.
	And, you know, the story goes that Kenny Everett was given an advanced copy of this, and he was on a pirate radio station, which was like an American station called Wonderful Radio London.
	And he was given the master tape or an acetate or something like that.
	And he just went straight on there and said, I've got this amazing new album from the Beatles, and you've all got to hear it.
	It's just incredible.
	And, you know, I also knew Kenny, wonderful, wonderful man.
	But it was a total, complete departure.
	And a lot of people asked, I mean, we know that, you know, substances inspired some of it, but people were asking questions from the very get-go.
	What could have inspired that?
	And what is the...
	My big sister Beryl got the album and I remember her playing it.
	And, you know, I was more interested in my toys back then.
	But we were all amazed at this theatrical thing.
	And of course, when you don't understand a thing, and I was tiny, I wouldn't have understood it, but most people didn't really understand it.
	You try and fill the void, don't you?
	And I wonder if that's how some of these stories and how that particular myth arose, because there was so much on the album that we just hadn't heard before.
	There was a whole narrative going on there that people wanted to come up with explanations.
	Well, if you look at just the cover of Sergeant Pepper was so much there.
	I mean, just looking at the pictures of the celebrities in the background, and some of the celebrities were kind of randomly and very oddly chosen.
	But what strikes you, and I remember as a little kid, when I heard about the rumor, I went and got the album.
	The first thing that strikes you, I think it stands out, is the rather funereal looking bass guitar.
	The bottom is much like a funeral wreath.
	And it's of course it has three strings instead of four that played in the world, of course.
	There's only three Beatles now.
	They're trying to tell you that.
	So I thought that was very odd.
	Wasn't that around?
	Didn't Paul have his guitar nicked, stolen at one point?
	Didn't Paul's guitar get stolen?
	The little one, and he had, or rather his original guitar was stolen, and he ended up with the smaller guitar.
	Well, that could be Papa.
	I don't know that they stole the string off of it.
	Yeah, I mean, I just think the way it's designed, if you look at it, it looks, I don't know about you, but the impression I get, it looks very like a funeral type of thing.
	That's the, that somebody died.
	I mean, when I look at Sergeant Pepper, that's the, what I see at the whole bottom, it's dominated by, of course, it's a bass guitar.
	And then if you look at the back cover, and I'll hold up my book, I promise my co-author, I'd hold up the book.
	But if you see in the back cover, in the back cover, we have just what you see on Sergeant Pepper, where you have Paul's standing with his back.
	And that, I don't know that any artist had done that before, because if you look at movies or any other part of entertainment, I went through this in my book on Bard Fame, these stars want to have their faces shown.
	Well, the only person who'd ever done that before, and not in the same way, was Elvis Presley, of course.
	You know, he would start with his back to the audience and then turn around and go, you know, and all the rest of it.
	Right, right, exactly.
	But I don't know that anybody, including Elvis, had ever had, because this is, again, this, you're trying to sell the record.
	You're trying to sell yourself.
	Would you want, and at that stage, he was the main songwriter on, he was responsible for most of the material on Sgt. Pepper.
	He has his back to the camera.
	So this play to the Urmans, what is different about Paul?
	Why is somebody holding a hand over his head?
	And certainly things like that was the Welsh symbol of death or something.
	I think Labor did make that up.
	But still, somebody stuck a hand over his head and that kind of thing.
	And then you have the Beatles themselves playing along with it.
	Because Lennon, who and I have in the book, both he and Harrison issued some very kind of angry statements saying, how stupid can anybody be to believe this?
	But here he is in the light album.
	He's playing along with it in Glass Onion and saying, here's another clue for you all.
	The Walners Paul.
	I guess George would be the least likely of the Beatles.
	And I've got a soft spot for George.
	I think George was enormously talented and didn't get the recognition, perhaps, in life that he deserved.
	But I can't imagine that George would have wanted immediately to play along with this.
	Now, we're going to talk, there is one elephant in the room question here that I'm going to ask you, but I'm going to save that until after we've taken some commercials here.
	And we'll then talk about the way that this rumor, this collection of circumstances and little snippets of information all mixed together in a strange melange, how that all came together and how that spread around the world.
	Donald Jeffries is here.
	He's the author of From Strawberry Fields to Abbey Road, A Billy Shears story.
	And none of us is saying that this is a serious thing or this happened.
	But the idea that got implanted in millions of people's heads that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident in 1966.
	And to preserve the momentum of the Beatles' success story, he was replaced by another person.
	One Billy Shears, perhaps.
	And, you know, that story went like wildfire.
	The question that I've been hanging on to since we were playing the commercials there, Donald Jeffries, did you ask Paul for an opinion?
	No, I did not have access to him.
	And I think, you know, and I want to be very careful, too, because I understand that sometimes this can be a sticky situation.
	I shouldn't have been so adamant about saying that the Beatles were definitely involved.
	It just looks that way to me.
	That's my speculation, that they probably did this for public relations, but I don't know that for sure.
	So I want to make that Twitter that I'm not making it.
	No, no, I think it's wise that you do, but I think, you know, being a scouser myself, being a Beatles fan like most of the world, we know that they like to joke.
	And it is a plausible scenario that perhaps they've heard some of this stuff.
	I can imagine John's reaction to it.
	And maybe, who knows?
	Maybe they incorporated some of it and maybe they didn't.
	We don't know.
	We don't know.
	But it's certainly, regardless, it gathered world attention.
	And we're talking about here over, you're talking about over 50 years later.
	And we're still talking about it, even though really the phenomenon itself burned out.
	I mean, I remember, again, I heard about it as a little kid, and then I forgot about it probably within, you know, a couple weeks, I guess.
	And so it was that kind of thing.
	And I describe in the book how it did really fizzle out very quickly.
	But especially when the internet came along, and I wanted to present the other side in some way.
	And there are lots of people out there that really, really strongly believe that, you know, fall is the real thing.
	This is what they call the fake fall.
	Yes, fall.
	Fall.
	And they believe it very strongly.
	And it's kind of complicated.
	But I stayed away from most of them because the problem is they're very adamant about it.
	And they get very argumentative.
	And they think you're stupid if you don't say what they're talking about.
	So I didn't want to go there.
	But I did get a guy that I think presented at least a reasonable case for why people believe that.
	So people can read that in there as well.
	And I look at it like I told them, coming from where I come from, the things I write about, if you could convince me that this was a cloning experiment, then I would accept it.
	Because they say, because that's what it would look like to me.
	So if you want to say, hey, we have secret cloning, well, come up with something like that.
	It's more believable.
	But the idea that someone at a look-alike contest just happened to have this, because you look at somebody like McCartney and Lennon, and I was a Lennon guy.
	So McCartney, I said about McCartney, no one has ever written so many great songs and so many songs that I don't like either.
	Matter of fact, especially in his solo career, it's kind of amazing to me the disparity.
	And that's what originally maybe got my attention with this theory when it was reinvigorated on the internet.
	When the internet came around, you started getting people talking more and more about it because they talk about everything on the internet.
	And I thought, well, you know, if you look at the time when he died and then when he came back, there was a difference, I think, you know, certainly than the early people.
	Well, I mean, good that you mentioned that because one of the key planks of those who've believed this over the years is a comparison of the physical appearance of Paul.
	And I've got a theory about this myself, but we've got, I think, one image here.
	It's almost like a kind of before and after, isn't it?
	That we can probably show here, I'm hoping.
	It should be coming very soon for our viewers.
	Okay.
	Left is younger Paul.
	Right is Paul.
	I would say Paul with the Tash on the right-hand side of your screen, if you're looking there.
	I would say we're talking 1966 early on the left.
	And on the right, we're talking Paul circa 67, maybe.
	Does that work for you?
	Yeah, you know, I see.
	And it's, I mean, I've had people, you know, I talk about it and they analyze a mole that was supposedly on its chest.
	It wasn't there.
	There are people who've, I've watched some of these videos when I've had nothing better to do with my time.
	And there are people who analyze the distance between his eyes and the way that they're oriented and his nerves and stuff like that.
	Now, here comes my theory about this.
	Whenever people have run this past me, and I have to say that over the years, I haven't been able to find that many good people to talk about it, so we haven't done it very much.
	Also, I thought, you know, it's ridiculous.
	But, you know, when you look at these things, okay, they might have a point.
	But my point would be, from my own life, my facial appearance changed radically from, say, 19 to 21.
	My face was much rounder, and there's Paul on the left there.
	My face became more angular.
	The proportions of things changed.
	Oddly enough, between 19 and 21, my hair seemed to become, hard to believe now, became darker, right?
	I've looked at photographs of myself and I've thought, there must be something wrong with the film there, because did I really have hair that dark?
	But multiple photographs, I changed.
	And at a casual glance, the people in the photographs Could be different people.
	But it isn't that.
	It's just that your physical appearance changes.
	And I think some of these proponents of the Paul is dead theory, and they say, look at the way that, you know, completely different face, they don't allow for the fact that facially, as we get through those crucial years of our lives, we all change.
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	When you look at something like John Lennon, I think John Lennon's appearance changed way more.
	When you look at John, when John was 40, just before his sad, tragic, and untimely death, you know, he became very thin and his features became very angular and he didn't look like himself.
	Which of us does?
	I mean, look, it's a fascinating theory.
	And one of the reasons for you doing this book is to analyze the impact it had on various people's lives.
	And I wonder if you want to just offer me a couple of those.
	I know that you spoke with the very famous Ivor Davis, Hollywood journalist, a British guy.
	You know, what did Ivor tell you?
	Well, Ivor Davidson, he's been on my show before.
	He's a good friend of Bob Wilson, my co-authored, and certainly people don't know.
	I mean, Ivor Davis was, he toured with the Beatles during their original 1964 tour of America.
	That's when people, America came to know Beatlemania.
	He was there with them.
	He was in the hotel rooms with them.
	To what extent he shared their success with the crowds, I don't know, but I think he was partying with them and everything.
	So he certainly had the entire Beatles experience like no one else ever has.
	And since that time, he's great.
	It interested me.
	He was in the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot.
	I thought about that.
	So he fascinated me.
	And he's certainly he doesn't lend any cringe to this area, but he was kind enough to offer his experiences because he was an insider.
	He was the closest thing we could get to getting Paul Arengo, maybe somebody like that.
	What about Joey Ramon's brother?
	Yes, Mickey Lee.
	And he, in fact, he just had sent my co-author Bob Wilson a nice note about how much he loved the book.
	Yeah, and we actually got, because Bob had some connections to the Ramones from his old, he had a show called Tomorrow and Everett Oats that he produced with Warren Brown, who did the artwork cover.
	And they had a lot of these people on.
	Jude Kessler is a foremost expert in the world.
	And John Lennon, who's written like a bunch of volumes analyzing every detail of Lennon's life.
	She wrote the forward.
	But you had Mickey Lee, Joey Ramon's brother.
	And then you had Very Ramon, who was the widow of D.D. Ramon.
	And she's also been very kind and gracious about what she thought of the book.
	But I mean, I talked to people like, I don't know how many people in England remember our television shows, but there was a show called Lassie that was very popular back in the day.
	John Probix played Little Timmy on there.
	And I've got to know him somewhat online.
	And he was in California at the time, young guy.
	So he went and saw the Beatles whenever they, you know, when he could out there.
	And there were other people like that as well.
	So some of these people saw them live.
	And I never had that opportunity.
	And then you had somebody like Sally Kirkland, an award-winning actress, who I came to know through my JFK assassination research, because she's in Oliver Stone's JFK in the first scene, as a matter of fact, playing somebody.
	But her and I hit it off very well.
	She's a very interesting character, very gracious woman, but she became good friends, friendly enough with Ringo Starr that she became an ordained minister and she married Ringo's body digger.
	She was presided over the ceremony when she's met Ringo many times and so forth.
	So people like that.
	There are people that, you know, we didn't get to talk to any of the Beatles, but I missed a trick for this show, Donald, because one person that I do know and I got to know well from my Liverpool radio days and should have had on tonight was Paul's stepmom, Angie McCartney in Los Angeles, who produces her own range of McCartney's British teas there and does all sorts of things.
	She is an amazing person.
	She would have been the person, you know, had I been had my thinking head on tonight, then we'd have done that.
	One person suggested by text here that maybe you could have got a facial recognition expert to work through some of those experts, some of those images, and determine it.
	Well, you know that, and I wrote it in the book, and again, I don't lend much credence to this, but supposedly they did have something like that done.
	Was it, and I think it was McCarthy's arrest in London, McCartney's arrest for marijuana back in the day?
	I think they did, was it fingerprint analysis or something?
	And they claimed it wasn't the same fingerprints or something.
	And the details are in the book, and I apologize for not having it right on the top of my head.
	It's a myth and legend, isn't it?
	So how's the book doing then, Donald?
	Is it selling well?
	Well, it's sort of, you know, I was on Coast to Coast last week, so, and that always gives things an eight to 10 main listeners, so that's a nice start for anything.
	And you've got to say that, and I didn't hear Coast to Coast or George's show that night, but the fact of the matter I've found is that having lived in Liverpool, brought up there, been on the radio there for years, you find that a lot of American fans who visit Liverpool, they have an encyclopedic knowledge that a lot of us over here don't have.
	You must have found that from that appearance on radio.
	Well, sure.
	Yeah.
	There's America still, again, Eatle meaning.
	And I described a lot more of it in my book on Bar and Fame.
	It's more of an overall book.
	It was my last book before this about show business.
	And I talked about the strategy that Brian Epstein employed to market the Beatles.
	And people can look about that where it's never been done before.
	And, you know, I was seven years old at the time, and it prepared people like me for, I never heard of it.
	It really built up momentum for it.
	Like you've never seen any kind of hype like that.
	Sadly, we're out of time, but Epstein, the family ran a music store in Liverpool called NEMS, which was their music business.
	I used to get my records there when I was a little kid.
	Happy days.
	Thank you very much, Donald Jeffries.
	The book, if you want to see it, is Strawberry Fields to Abbey Road, a Billy Shears story.
	Not one, but two conversations about the Beatles.
	Firstly, David Whelan, you heard, with some different information.
	And he says, new information about the death of the great John Winston Lennon.
	I wonder what he would have had to say about this world today, hey?
	We can only guess, but I can imagine quite literally.
	And then, of course, latterly, you heard Donald Jeffries on the Paul is dead conspiracy theory and the impact that it had on people and the fact that in a pre-internet age, this story spread and spread and spread and people are still retailing it.
	And I'm still seeing videos about it on YouTube, even all these years later.
	And as I said in the conversation, I met Paul McCartney and was absolutely transfixed by him and thought that he was incredibly kind to be so interested in me as we talked about Liverpool.
	But that's 20 years ago.
	Not 20 years ago today, to quote a famous Beatles line, but it was 20 years ago.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
	So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been the Unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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