Paul Is Dead

The clues were on the album covers, believers said. He walks barefoot to this day.

The 1969 rumor — McCartney dead since 1966, replaced, with clues seeded across albums — grew from a Drake University paper and a Detroit radio call-in to international coverage; LIFE magazine's cover investigation ('Paul is still with us') settled it commercially. McCartney remains alive and touring. The entry is the archive's cleanest specimen of clue-hunting as a participatory game: the evidence was generated entirely by the search process. It links backmasking (its method) and predictive programming (its interpretive style).