///I was one of those junior high school kids at the time this story was making the rounds, and had great fun finding and interpreting the many "clues" that the Beatles had left in their records (and on their album covers). On Sgt. Peppers, that included his back-to-the-camera photo inside the fold-out cover, the "OPD" patch on his sleeve (reputed to mean "officially pronounced dead"), various interpretations of the car crash narrative in A Day In The Life, and lots of other things. On Magical Mystery Tour, there was the noodling at the end of Strawberry Fields, and a voice that reportedly said "I buried Paul" during the fade-out (it did sound like that, at least if you had already been told that's what it said; after-the-fact explanations by the Beatles indicated variously that the words were actually "I'm very bored," or, according to Lennon, "cranberry sauce"). On the White album, there was the gibberish at the end of I'm So Tired, which reputedly declared Paul dead if you played it backwards (I did, and you could sort-of hear it if you were predisposed to), lots of stuff in Revolution #9, and various other things. Abbey Road had a suit-wearing Paul walking barefoot (said to be the way corpses are laid out in Italy, I think) and out of step with the other three, who were variously dressed as the preacher (John), undertaker (Ringo), and grave-digger (George), and the license plate on the Volkswagen in the picture read "28IF" (meaning, supposedly, that Paul would have been 28 at the time "if" he were still alive). There were lots more, and because I was a young, impressionable kid, I remember all of them. It was quite a big story at the time, and eventually Paul issued a statement confirming that he was, in fact, still alive.////

All this stuff, with variations, was part of the original broadcast except for the playing the records backwards which gave birth to a new cultural phenomenon on its own. The Abbey Road cover was explained as John was Christ, Ringo is a minister, Paul is a dead man walking and George is a gravedigger. The guy in the photo is Paul's double because he's holding a cigarette in his right hand but Paul was lefthanded. The 28IF license plate is the same. The "Revolver" cover was explained that Klaus Voorman's drawing shows three Beatles facing forwards but Paul in profile. Another thing that became a staple that was not part of the broadcast was that Paul is the only one in Sgt Peppers holding a black instrument.