Lucille Ball’s Fillings: Detecting a Japanese Spy Operation

There’s a popular Hollywood story about Lucille Ball. She told several people, including Dick Cavett, that the temporary fillings in her mouth picked up radio stations – even detecting an underground Japanese Spy Ring during World War II! This episode is a bit of a departure from our normal episodes as we try to get to the truth of the famous tale. And since this is a “Mythbusters” style podcast, we bring on Cliff and Harrison of the “Try This At Home” Mythbusters watch-along podcast to chat about the story! 

That was Lucille Ball on the Dick Cavett show. It aired March 7, 1974 and, as she described, she’s describing something that happened decades before in 1942. And as sad as it is, it strikes me that some of my listeners aren’t familiar with Lucille Ball.

Lucille Ball was an iconic American actress, comedian, and producer best known for her groundbreaking role in the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, where she captivated audiences with her unparalleled comedic timing and endearing personality. As one of the first women to head her own major production company, Desilu Productions, she played a pivotal role in shaping the television industry and championed innovative programming, including the development of Star Trek and The Andy Griffith Show. Her legacy endures as a trailblazer for women in entertainment, embodying American resilience, creativity, and humor.

So from a Hollywood heavyweight like Lucille Ball, a story like the one she told Dick Cavett really gained a lot of attention and has been told in Hollywood ever since. 

And there are two pieces to this claim really, and every source I found who has tried to find the validity of the story has broken it down this way: Claim One: Can a human pick up radio waves with fillings in their teeth? And then Claim Two: Did this lead to the discovery of a Japanese Spy Ring in America?

So first, we’ll talk about the idea of fillings somehow catching radio waves out of the air. Starting sometime in the 19th century, metal was starting to be used to fill cavities in teeth. But early on, it was really just any metal they could get their hands on. So it wasn’t unusual to see fillings made of tin, silver or gold. Then in the 1920s and 30s, dental amalgam started to be used. This was a combination of copper, tin, silver and mercury. While dental amalgam is still being used in America, many dentists now use porcelain composite material instead. So Lucy’s fillings would have been amalgam.

The idea of metal fillings picking up radio stations is a pretty common story. I grew up in a time when all fillings were metal fillings and I definitely heard about this concept, but that could be just from television and movies. It was sort of a trope in the 70s and 80s that was used as a plot point in sitcoms and movies. One of the earliest was a similar concept on an episode of the Partridge Family. It was the first season – episode 16 called “Old Scrapmouth.” Lori gets braces and starts hearing things. Fun fact about this episode – it features a young Mark Hamill!

I personally remember an episode of Gilligan’s Island with the mouth-radio trope.

So that was the family dentist explaining that Lori was picking up radio signals from what he called Piebald Syndrome. Which is a real syndrome, but has nothing to do with this. I feel like that’s just a word they decided to use and ran with it and back when this aired in January of 1971, it’s not like people were going to fact check it. And while the idea of picking up radio signals with metal braces is rare, it’s possible. Without getting too much into details, here’s what would happen. 

When a radio signal is transmitted through the air, the information is coded in one of two ways. Either the space between the hills and valleys of the waves are changing, which is called Frequency Modulation, or the actual height of the waves are changing, which is called Amplitude Modulation. We know those as FM or AM. Once they’re sent out, to hear them you need a detector of some sort and a speaker. The detector would have to be a rectifier which, in radio is something that takes those modulations and converts them into the information that was sent, which is sound patterns. Then that information is amplified by the speaker so we can hear it. In the case of braces or fillings, they would have to be acting as the rectifier or detector. So in theory it’s possible and apparently would only be possible with Amplitude Modulation, or AM radio signals.

But does it actually happen? Adam and Jamie on Mythbusters tested out the theory on Mythbusters Season 1 Episode 7, which aired in 2003. The episode, if you want to check it out, is called “Penny Drop,” which is about the idea that if you drop a penny off a tall building it could kill someone. 

So in that episode, they attempted this idea and it didn’t work, so they considered the myth busted. They concluded that a galvanic cell reaction between two teeth fillings and saliva could have resembled Morse code, but wasn’t radio. But does that mean it’s not possible? Well I personally don’t think so. Mythbusters is a great TV show, but sometimes their methods aren’t the most scientific – mostly because this is a TV show and they have to make it interesting. And one of the things that convinces me that it’s possible and the myth is NOT busted is because there are actually a small amount of anecdotal, yet peer reviewed and scientifically sound studies telling stories about this actually happening. 

There’s a piece by R.A. Boza and S.B. Liggett from 1981 called, “Pseudohallucinations: radio reception through shrapnel fragments.” And they found that a combat veteran who had shrapnel in his head WAS, in fact, able to hear AM radio signals that were being transmitted and he was able to hear those due to the metal that was in his head.

In another case – this was 1961, a 12 year-old boy in Chicago had a missing front tooth replaced with a cap held in place via a brass wire was able to hear radio stations in his mouth. This all went away when the dentist removed the brass wire. 

There are a handful of these professionally recorded anecdotes. And if you look for this on the internet, you’ll find hundreds more – people claiming that it happened to them. 

A professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Robert Hunsucker, says it can actually happen.

He says, “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.”

Bill Gade is a regulatory affairs officer for Radio Amateurs of Canada, an organization of radio enthusiasts based in Ottawa, Canada. And Gade says, “Consider the humble crystal radio. It has no batteries, but it can pick up radio signals through a grounded wire antenna. To put it simply, it works by electricity being able to flow through the radio in one direction and not the other. That same one-way flow can make your braces or a filling vibrate in sync with music on the radio. If the signal is good enough, you can clearly hear the song.” And this was documented in the 1970s by a student at Carleton University, where there was a girl who got 580 CFRA radio on her braces. The accounts there are that it came in so clearly that bystander could play “Name That Tune.”

John M. Beggs, a Physics Professor at Indiana University, says all you need is an antenna: something to pick up radiation in the air. Even tiny scraps of metal can get the job done. When the metal makes contact with water, such as the saliva in your mouth, a miniature semiconductor is born. Now, he says, all you need is a speaker.

Audio speakers generate quick vibrations, correlating with the sound waves of a song on a radio signal. Beggs proposes that as Lucille Ball was driving down a bumpy road, the speed of her car might have been just enough to create vibrations from the loose fillings in her mouth. Her mouth echoed the sound, and “violà—music in her head!”

So there definitely seems to be a fair amount of experts that say it’s possible. There’s definitely a large amount of anecdotal evidence. 

But that’s just the first part of the story. The second part has to do with whether or not Lucy’s fillings picked up an underground Japanese Spy Ring.

In her story, Lucille Ball first mentioned that she heard music and through her friend and fellow actor, Buster Keaton, was able to figure out that she was driving by a 50,000 watt radio tower in Goldwater Canyon. And apparently, the part about that radio station being there was corroborated. But the meat of this story was whether or not this actually uncovered a Japanese spy ring.

There WERE Japanese Spy Rings uncovered in Southern California during World War II. There’s actually well-documented evidence of the Japanese having secret spy bases all over the world in the early 1940s. In 1941, secret Japanese Spy Rings were uncovered in Southern California and Tijuana Mexico. All of these stories can be found in newspapers at the time, but they’re all pretty much prior to Pearl Harbor, which happened in December of that year. 

Here’s one I found in a newspaper. This is from July 28, 1941 and the headline reads: “Japanese Spy Ring in USA.” It says “Washington believes that a strong Japanese spy ring is operating on the west coast of USA. Picked G-men have been sent to Los Angeles, San Fransisco and Seattle in the last 2 days to tighten up anti-sabotage and anti-espionage activity in those cities….3 suspected Japanese ringleaders left hurriedly for Mexico City yesterday and G-men who broke the Nazi spy ring so spectacularly a few weeks ago believe that a constant flow of information concerning airplane production and troop ship movements from a Japanese resident is being supplied to the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles. If the Pacific situation worsens, Mr. Roosevelt, who is going to get really “tough” can be expected to expel Japanese Consulate officials from the country, besides seizing the leaders of the alleged Japanese Spy Ring.”

Well as we know now, the Pacific situation did worsen that December. And by February, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. Anti-Japanese sentiment was high – as was paranoia, which could be expected given the attack on Pearl Harbor and several other instances, including a Japanese submarine being discovered off the coast of Santa Barbara. 

But when Lucille Ball tells the story, she mentions that is happened when she was working on the film, “Du Barry Was a Lady,” which was shot in 1942, after Japanese internment and after the U.S. cracked down on any Japanese operations happening in the U.S. And there don’t seem to be any reports of these types of spy rings being discovered in 1942. 

There’s also the fact that this story popped up 32 years after it allegedly happened. So was it a case of conflation of myths at the time, public hysteria and fears about the Japanese? Well we DO know that Lucy told at least one other person when it happened, because that person was Ethel Merman, who wrote it into musical “Something for the Boys” in 1943. In that musical, a female defense plant worker picks up radio signals with the fillings in her teeth. 

The last piece of the puzzle concerns the FBI. Because of FOIA requests, we can read that the FBI had an extensive file on Lucille Ball. I was actually able to read some of these in person at the FDR Library in New York when I visited recently, but you can actually read the entire file. Some of it is redacted, but most of it is there in black and white. The reason they had a file on Ball was because of McCarthyism and the Communist scare of the 1950s. Apparently, Lucille Ball had registered as a Communist for the elections of 1936 and 1938. This, combined with a lot of her dealing with Hollywood groups put her on their list of people to watch. In those days, many Hollywood Activities were being linked with Communism by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The files are super interesting to read. Lucy was never charged with anything, because she explained to Congress and to the FBI that she only registered as a Communist to appease her Socialist Grandfather, and that she never actually partook in any activities of the party. 

The important point here is that there’s nothing in her file. Nothing unredacted anyway, that talks about her involvement in uncovering an underground spy ring. It seems like if this were the case, the FBI would have definitely had their nose in it and it would be reported in the file. So this seems to be an argument against the story being true. 

Here’s my problem. I usually end these stories by saying “The Internet Says it’s True.” And I just can’t do that for this one. You can probably see now why this is a different type of episode. Normally, I need stories that are 100% confirmed true. But this was just such a fun story – I couldn’t just trash it. I wanted to share it with you. It’s such a cool Hollywood tale. All the components are there, but we can’t be sure that it’s 100% true. So here’s how we’ll get around that. The story is this. Lucille Ball told a story that she was able to uncover an underground Japanese spy ring through hearing their transmissions in the fillings in her teeth. The Internet…and Lucille Ball…say that’s True.

To listen to the “Try This at Home Podcast,” visit: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/try-this-at-home/id1756122197

Review this podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-internet-says-it-s-true/id1530853589

Bonus episodes and content available at http://Patreon.com/MichaelKent 

For special discounts and links to our sponsors, visit http://theinternetsaysitstrue.com/deals