Date: 1977
Location: Memphis, Tennessee
The Conspirators: Elvis Presley, the FBI, possibly other unknown individuals
The Victims: Elvis fans everywhere
Arguably the world’s biggest superstar of the late 1950s, Elvis Presley was the personification of rock and roll. After a successful career in both music and Hollywood, history records that Elvis died young at forty-two of a drug overdose. As wildly famous as this heartthrob was, there were bound to be people who just refused to believe he was dead. Enter the conspiracy theories!
Some say that Elvis faked his own death in order to escape the pressures of fame and live out his life as an ordinary anonymous citizen. Others claim that he was heroically assisting government agents fighting either organized crime or the drug trade, and is living in the Witness Protection Program. There are even claims that he is on Mars. Suffice it to say that the theories certainly cover a wide range.
Elvis died at his Graceland estate in Memphis on August 16, 1977.
Especially during the last decade of his life, Elvis enjoyed a fast-moving celebrity lifestyle that was far over the top, and included chronic drug abuse. One night at his Graceland estate in Memphis in 1977, he had a heart attack and died while sitting on his toilet. His body was discovered in his bathroom by his girlfriend, Ginger Alden. He was transported to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. The body was autopsied with multiple doctors present. The cause of death was a combination of prescription drug overdose (he had fourteen drugs in his system) and cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by a Valsalva maneuver (straining on the toilet, leading to heart stoppage; constipation is common among drug abusers). An open-casket service was held at Graceland and the body was viewed by thousands of fans. A cousin of Elvis accepted an $18,000 bribe to allow a National Enquirer photographer to take a picture of Elvis’s corpse, which ran on the front page. Bolstered by a vast amount of evidence, the truth is that Elvis died that night in 1977.
Fans all over the world were incredibly distraught. One of these was Gail Brewer-Giorgio. Immediately after Elvis’s death, she wrote a novel blatantly based on Elvis’s life called Orion: The Living Superstar of Song. The book was about a rock star, Orion, who has humble Southern origins. But the fame is too much for him, so he fakes his own death, buries a wax dummy, and lives in freedom with a false identity. It was, perhaps, her own projection of what she wished the truth could have been for Elvis.
In 1979, Sun Records signed an artist named Jimmy Ellis to their label. And Ellis just happened to have a speaking and singing voice that was virtually identical to Elvis’s. Sun Records was looking to see if they could do anything with their soundalike recording artist and decided to try to capitalize on Brewer-Giorgio’s book. So they released Ellis’s debut album Reborn, which featured a photo of Ellis dressed and groomed exactly like Elvis, wearing a Lone Ranger–style mask. They gave him the pseudonym Orion Eckley Darnell, which was directly lifted from Brewer-Giorgio’s book. For a few years, Ellis and Sun Records enjoyed the boost by having half their fans believe that Ellis was an incredibly talented Elvis impersonator, and the other half believing that he actually was Elvis, hiding in plain sight as an impersonator of himself. And so began decades of claims that Elvis was still alive, including conspiracy theories more varied than you can imagine. And, of course, the never-ending “Elvis sightings.”
Over the years Brewer-Giorgio has remained the public face of this conspiracy theory. She wrote two books expanding on her theories, Is Elvis Alive? (1988) and The Elvis Files: Was His Death Faked? (1990). Then she wrote and was featured in two TV documentaries hosted by Bill Bixby (of The Incredible Hulk fame): The Elvis Files (1991) and The Elvis Conspiracy (1992). Call-in votes following the second program revealed that 79 percent of callers believed Elvis was still alive. By this time, Elvis sightings had become commonplace, and the Bill Bixby programs featured a number of people who claimed to have either seen or spoken to Elvis.
As time went on, Brewer-Giorgio’s claims evolved and deepened in both scope and complexity. In her latest book, Elvis Undercover: Is He Alive and Coming Back?, she claims that Elvis had once sold an airplane to an organized crime family she called The Fraternity, and the FBI had approached him to work for them to infiltrate the group. But he was discovered, and the FBI whisked him out of danger and placed him into the Witness Protection Program. His death was faked as a cover story, and from then on, Elvis lived an anonymous life somewhere.
But this was just a drop in the bucket full of Elvis books that came out in 1999, and the cause was an unexpected one: 1999 was an important year for many, due to religious beliefs that the Messiah would return in the year 2000. One of these was The Elvis–Jesus Mystery: The Shocking Scriptural and Scientific Evidence That Elvis Presley Could Be the Messiah Anticipated Throughout History by Cinda Godfrey, which posits that Egypt’s Great Pyramid is actually a temple to Elvis Presley (built in anticipation of his Coming thousands of years later), and that the most blessed of people have an image of Elvis’s face hidden in their fingerprints. Another was from self-described psychic Jay Gould, who claimed to be Elvis’s personal psychic during the last year of his life. In 1999, Gould published Elvis 2000: The King Returns!, which purports to be a series of psychic communications Elvis made to him in the decade after his death. By Gould’s account, Elvis said he’d been living with Martians but would return, like Jesus, in the year 2000 to make a series of startling revelations, perform new music with a band consisting of angels, and would personally redeem the poor and the suffering.
In order to best understand the conspiracy theories surrounding Elvis, we need to understand the people who promoted them and their reasons for doing so. Gail Brewer-Giorgio was no ordinary fan of Elvis. She was obsessed. And when her book Orion sold poorly, she interpreted this to mean that some conspiracy was afoot, which of course meant that Orion must have accidentally told the truth about how Elvis actually did fake his own death, and some cabal wanted it covered up. However, in the same book, she also asserted an alternate claim: that Elvis was secretly a drug enforcement agent and was placed into the Witness Protection Program.
Brewer-Giorgio makes a similar claim in Elvis Undercover, where she claims Elvis is in the Witness Protection Program because he was working with the FBI to infiltrate the mob group named The Fraternity. But on the FBI’s website of information that’s been made public via Freedom of Information Act requests, known as the Vault, there are all 760 pages of FBI information pertaining to Elvis. Most of it has to do with several actual extortion attempts made against him. There is no mention of him ever working for the FBI, or of any group called The Fraternity.
Cinda Godfrey’s interest in Elvis was similarly unhealthy. As a born-again Christian, Godfrey wrote that she had been having trouble reconciling her religious views with her fixation on Elvis. But when she watched Brewer-Giorgio describe her conspiracy theories about Elvis on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988, she claimed to have had a revelation that tied everything together. Adam, Jesus, and Elvis were the Trinity, who walked on Earth in the person of Orion. As a result of her epiphany, she wrote the book The Elvis–Jesus Mystery. As for how her friends and family regarded her obsession with Elvis as a mystical, religious figure, she wrote:
I . . . could think of no one who supported me or encouraged me throughout this endeavour. In fact, my family ran like rats on a sinking ship and my passion for the subject of my manuscript actually estranged me from those I love.
Regarding the psychic Gould’s claim that he communes with Elvis from Mars, we can offer only author Christopher Hitchens’s famous Hitchens’s Razor: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” We look forward to Gould’s presentation of proof, or at least an explanation of what went wrong with Elvis’s 2000 concert with angels that we were supposed to get.
The more you take a look at the various origins of the Elvis conspiracy theories, the easier it is to understand why there is no evidence for them at all. They turn out to be, at their core, fairly disturbing noise from infatuated fans that says more about them than about The King.