Ringo Starr and the Paul McCartney death confession

As far as conspiracies go, they don’t get much more persistent or infuriating that the decades old theory that Beatles star Paul McCartney died in the 60s and was surreptitiously replaced by a lookalike as to not have any adverse effect on the bands growing popularity.

And if you believe today’s rumours, you would have heard that fellow Beatle, drummer Ringo Starr, actually confessed the theory was true in an interview with Hollywood Inquirer.

Well, no, actually. He didn’t. It’s an online rumour that traces back to the World News Daily Report, a fanciful fake news website that deals explicitly with fake news. In the fictional story they published, it claims that Ringo Starr revealed that the band had “panicked” after McCartney died in a car crash, and that led to him being replaced with a look-a-like – the Paul McCartney we know today.

An excerpt from the article reads –

The article then goes on to essentially regurgitate “factoids” associated with the decades old conspiracy, including the assertion that the McCartney look-a-like is named William Shears Campbell and the ridiculous notion that the band tried to subtlety inform the public of McCartney’s death via clues in the lyrics of their future songs.

World News Daily Report is a serial nonsense starting website that has also published other fake articles such as the claim that the Smithsonian admitted to destroying evidence of human giants, that a whale was found in the middle of a field in Utah and that loggers accidentally cut down the worlds oldest tree.

Since the World News Daily Report published the fake article, various conspiracy-spreading websites like beforeitsnews.com have published the article as well, leading it to go viral across social media.

The “Paul is Dead” claim is a long running conspiracy theory that has its roots well back in the 60s. However no matter what your take on this theory, we do know that Ringo Starr has given no such confession.