Did Lucille Ball Use Her Fillings to Spy?

Rumor has it that Lucille Ball once picked up a spy's radio signal with her fillings -- but could it be true? Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/lucille-ball-fillings-spy.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff.
Lauren Vogelbaum here. Lucille Ball is a true Hollywood legend.
Emmy winning comedic actress, creator and star of a groundbreaking
TV comedy, first female head of a major TV studio,
The list goes on. She was also known for her
shrewd business sense and straight shooting honesty. But there's one

(00:25):
weird blip in Ball's life story, and it's morphed into
another sort of legend, the urban kind. If it's true,
it's just a strange but charming story about an actress
who made an inadvertent discovery. And if it isn't, we
might have to rethink our assumptions about Lucille Ball, at
least the straight shooting honesty part. Here's the story. One

(00:47):
evening in two in the thick of the Second World War,
Ball was driving home from a day of movie filming
when she suddenly heard music and then realized the sounds
weren't emanating from the car video but from her mouth.
The next day, Buster Keaton told her that her new
lad dental Fillings had probably been broadcasting a radio station.

(01:09):
A week later, also on the commute home, her mouth
started admitting morse code, and this time she alerted the authorities,
and the FBI eventually busted a Japanese gardener who was
operating a spy ring out of a tool shed. It
sounds like the ultimate urban legend, right, But this isn't
a baseless rumor started by some anonymous gossip monger. The

(01:32):
source is Ball herself. She told the story on the
Dick Cabit Show in nineteen four into at least two biographers,
The tale has morphed over the years that no time,
for example, did Ball ever claim she actually used her
fillings to spy. But the basics remain the same, and
Ball always stood by them. The problem is the entire

(01:54):
tale is pretty much unverifiable. Other than Ball's accounts, there
seems to be no record of the case. The generally
reliable snopes dot Com pronounced its status undetermined. The TV
show MythBusters used several angles to investigate the story in
two thousand three and couldn't confirm any of Ball's claims.
The hosts had no luck with their experiments involving vintage

(02:16):
radio equipment and human skulls fitted with fillings. They concluded
that the combination of the metals and balls saliva caused
a galvanic reaction, which created a current in her mouth
that could have resembled Morse code. The real kicker, though,
was the revelation that Ball's FBI file doesn't mention the case.

(02:37):
So why would Ball have invented such a story. No
one has the answer to that either. At the height
of the communist scare in the nineteen fifties, she was
briefly investigated by the House on American Activities Committee, so
some think she might have created the filling story to
see more patriotic, but that's a pretty big stretch. There
are so many easier ways to broadcast that message. In

(03:00):
the end, only Lucy knows, and maybe that's just how
it's supposed to be. Today's episode is based on the
article did Lucille Ball use her fillings to spy? On
how stuff Works dot com, written by Alison Cooper. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeart Radio in partnership with how

(03:21):
stuff Works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang.
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