Lucille Ball shares how her dental fillings found spies during WWII
Lucille Ball is a comedy icon that has always had a way of telling stories. She was a bit a head of her time on many things and wasn't afraid to let people know her thoughts but her delivery was almost always comedic even when she was being serious. It's like the joke softened the edges of her more serious musings.
Watching her old videos help to showcase this unique talent and recently one of her interviews resurfaced where she mentions her temporary fillings picked up on radio signal on the Dick Cavette Show in 1974. At the time, the temporary fillings were made out of lead which may have aided in the conduction of radio frequency.
Ball explains to the host that she had never gotten had that level of dental work done previously so wasn't quite sure what to expect when both upper and lower teeth were filled with the temporary lead fillings.
This also happened around the time of the second World War, shortly after America removed Japanese citizens placing them in holding camps. Ball casually mentions this fact in the middle of her story along with her disapproval of the practice presumably to provide more context to what was to come.
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"This particular night, it was about 1:15 and I was driving alone, I had 35 miles to drive and it wasn't any fun. It was just a normal night, I wasn't frightened or anything. I was just driving along," Ball shares with the audience and host.
All of a sudden Ball hears music but notices her radio isn't on when she reaches to turn it down.
After checking around to see if the music could be coming from another car or somewhere outside, she realizes as the music kept getting louder that it's coming from her mouth. Her eyes go wide while she mimics the beating of base beating against her jaws by tapping her fingers on her face.
"I could hear the tune and everything. I recognized the tune," Ball reveals to audience laughter. As she continues driving the tune fades out until she can no longer hear it. But the next day when explaining her experience to a coworker, he tells her that she drove by the radio station and her fillings picked it up. Ball jokes that she could "hardly wait to go by there again."
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But that wasn't the only time she picked up something she shouldn't have while those temporary fillings were in her teeth.
Turns out several days later while still waiting for her permanent dental work to be completed, she was driving near her home and picked up what sounded like morse code. This time instead of continuing to drive, she backed up so she could hear it more clearly.
"Morse code-like and I backed the car up and it got stronger and stronger. And I kept on backing it up until it really got strong and my whole jaw was vibrating," she demonstrates the vibration. "And then I got the hell out of there."
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Ball went back to work the next day at MGM where she informed the security office of what she heard.
They must've called the authorities because Ball says shortly after her informing the security office, they found an underground Japanese transmitting radio station. The actress doesn't share any further details on what happens in the clip, though the jury is out on if the the events actually happened the way she described.
Watch the clip below:
Many people have tried to verify if this was even plausible with "Mythbusters" claiming they've debunked it as they were unable to reproduce the results, while Snopes says it's undetermined. Bradford Family Dentistry located in California dove into this story citing other instances when this has happened while also getting information from an expert.
"A radio receiver is made up of an antenna, a detector to convert the radio wave to an audio signal, and a transducer, which is anything that acts like a speaker. In very rare cases a person’s mouth can act as the receiver and their body acts as the antenna. A metallic filling can act as a semiconductor that detects the audio signal, and the speaker would be something in the mouth that vibrates enough to produce noise, like bridgework or possible a loose filling," Robert Hunsucker, a professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, explains to the dental office.
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So is the story true? Possibly. The average American will likely never know since anything dealing with spies is usually kept pretty top secret. Either way, it's a wild story and Ball was an incredible storyteller.