Paul Is Dead

Claim: Beatles member Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike/sound-alike, with the band allegedly hiding "clues" about his death in album covers, lyrics, and songs played backward.

Origins: Rumors circulated on U.S. college campuses in 1969, amplified by a detailed article in the university newspaper of Drake University and a subsequent radio interview, then went viral in the pre-internet media landscape of the time.

Why it's false: Paul McCartney is alive and has had a continuous, well-documented public career, including recent live performances and interviews. The "clues" (the Abbey Road cover's supposed funeral procession imagery, backward-masked messages) are retroactive pattern-matching applied to ordinary artistic choices; McCartney himself has repeatedly and humorously addressed the rumor, including titling a 1993 live album Paul Is Live.

Status: Now viewed as an early, relatively harmless example of how rumor and pattern-seeking can spread rapidly even without any social media, often cited by psychologists studying apophenia (seeing meaningful patterns in random data).