Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum here. Lucille Ball is a true Hollywood legend.
Speaker 1: Emmy winning comedic actress, creator and star of a groundbreaking
Speaker 1: TV comedy, first female head of a major TV studio,
Speaker 1: The list goes on. She was also known for her
Speaker 1: shrewd business sense and straight shooting honesty. But there's one
Speaker 1: weird blip in Ball's life story, and it's morphed into
Speaker 1: another sort of legend, the urban kind. If it's true,
Speaker 1: it's just a strange but charming story about an actress
Speaker 1: who made an inadvertent discovery. And if it isn't, we
Speaker 1: might have to rethink our assumptions about Lucille Ball, at
Speaker 1: least the straight shooting honesty part. Here's the story. One
Speaker 1: evening in two in the thick of the Second World War,
Speaker 1: Ball was driving home from a day of movie filming
Speaker 1: when she suddenly heard music and then realized the sounds
Speaker 1: weren't emanating from the car video but from her mouth.
Speaker 1: The next day, Buster Keaton told her that her new
Speaker 1: lad dental Fillings had probably been broadcasting a radio station.
Speaker 1: A week later, also on the commute home, her mouth
Speaker 1: started admitting morse code, and this time she alerted the authorities,
Speaker 1: and the FBI eventually busted a Japanese gardener who was
Speaker 1: operating a spy ring out of a tool shed. It
Speaker 1: sounds like the ultimate urban legend, right, But this isn't
Speaker 1: a baseless rumor started by some anonymous gossip monger. The
Speaker 1: source is Ball herself. She told the story on the
Speaker 1: Dick Cabit Show in nineteen four into at least two biographers,
Speaker 1: The tale has morphed over the years that no time,
Speaker 1: for example, did Ball ever claim she actually used her
Speaker 1: fillings to spy. But the basics remain the same, and
Speaker 1: Ball always stood by them. The problem is the entire
Speaker 1: tale is pretty much unverifiable. Other than Ball's accounts, there
Speaker 1: seems to be no record of the case. The generally
Speaker 1: reliable snopes dot Com pronounced its status undetermined. The TV
Speaker 1: show MythBusters used several angles to investigate the story in
Speaker 1: two thousand three and couldn't confirm any of Ball's claims.
Speaker 1: The hosts had no luck with their experiments involving vintage
Speaker 1: radio equipment and human skulls fitted with fillings. They concluded
Speaker 1: that the combination of the metals and balls saliva caused
Speaker 1: a galvanic reaction, which created a current in her mouth
Speaker 1: that could have resembled Morse code. The real kicker, though,
Speaker 1: was the revelation that Ball's FBI file doesn't mention the case.
Speaker 1: So why would Ball have invented such a story. No
Speaker 1: one has the answer to that either. At the height
Speaker 1: of the communist scare in the nineteen fifties, she was
Speaker 1: briefly investigated by the House on American Activities Committee, so
Speaker 1: some think she might have created the filling story to
Speaker 1: see more patriotic, but that's a pretty big stretch. There
Speaker 1: are so many easier ways to broadcast that message. In
Speaker 1: the end, only Lucy knows, and maybe that's just how
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article did Lucille Ball use her fillings to spy? On
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com, written by Alison Cooper. Brain
Speaker 1: Stuff is production of iHeart Radio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang.
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