Parallel Universe Where the Beatles Never Broke Up

Del Puerto Canyon is located near Livermore, in California's San Antonio Valley. Miles from anyone, it was here where James Richards began chasing his dog on September 9th 2009.

What happens next sounds like bad fan-fiction on a theme of X-Files, Wonderland and Oz, but Richards swears it is true.

The dog was forty yards ahead of him, hurtling after rabbits. In hot pursuit, Richards failed to notice a rabbit hole on his track. His foot slipped into the hole and he went flying.

He came to sitting in an armchair, in a residential room, with the sounds of traffic whizzing past. His head was sore and bandaged. He had no idea whose house this was, and that was worrying.

He'd lost consciousness in a wilderness, so had to have been transported away. His visions of having been abducted, whilst helpless in the desert, weren't alleviated when the door opened to emit Jonas. The tall, dark-haired man gave Richards 'a greasy vibe'.

Yet Jonas was the perfect host.  He checked on Richards' head wound, then gave him water to sip. Later, as Richards remarked that he was hungry, Jonas cooked him food. He said that he didn't usually take in strangers like this, but Richards was obviously in a bad way. Later, Jonas helped Richards get home.

So far so random act in the kindness of strangers. But this wasn't the strange part.

Understandably perturbed about no longer being in Del Puerto Canyon, Richards asked where he was. Jonas blew his mind with the answer, 'About 20 feet from where you fell.'

This was impossible. Richards came from Livermore and he was familiar with the terrain of the San Antonio Valley. He knew there was no house within twenty miles of where he'd been knocked out. But before he had chance to become even more concerned by the apparent lie, Jonas explained himself further.

They weren't in the same dimension as that in which Richards had fallen. He was indeed close to the same space, but not time. Jonas had taken him through a portal into a parallel world.

Jonas wasn't randomly wandering in a different world, when he encountered the injured James Richards. He was an explorer, working for a dimension terrain broker, and our Earth was his latest venture.

He was there on business, assigned by his job. To prove it, he had a Parallel Travel machine sitting right there in the room. It was a portal device, quite easily obtained, but expensive.

It took a bit of back and forth, comparing notes, for the full story to tumble out. NASA hadn't been so heavily funded in this world. The Space Age hadn't kicked off in the 1950s. The USA never put a man on the moon. Instead, all of its resources had been diverted into the A-RPD - a program to develop travel between dimensions.

Jonas mentioned that his brother had been to see The Beatles live in concert last night. He reported that they still had it. The gig rocked.

Richards scrambled, wide-eyed, to learn more about this latest astounding fact.

In our world, the world's most famous band went through an acrimonious break-up in 1970. Two of its members are now dead. But not so in this parallel reality.

Richards asked to hear their latest album. But Jonas wasn't a massive fan himself. He had Sergeant Pepper (which sported a cover similar to our own, but slightly different figures depicted in the collage of famous faces), but nothing else as shop bought albums. However, he did have cassette taped copies of a couple of albums, pilfered from his brother's originals.

One of them was the Beatles LP Everyday Chemistry. It wouldn't be found in the record collections of even the most ardent fan on our Earth. It was released there years after they split up here.

With a tingling sense of the creeping surreal, Richards listened to those tracks. This more than anything convinced him that he wasn't the butt of some elaborate joke. He wasn't hallucinating with concussion. He hadn't been spiked with acid.

That music was recognizably The Beatles, but nothing that he'd ever heard before.

Bursting with excitement, Richards asked if he could take this new Beatles album back with him, when Jonas portalled him home.

But the dimension explorer was stern about it. With vague threats about Richards' personal safety, Jonas was adamant that there would be no souvenirs from this trip.  No photographs, no items and certainly no tapes. His expression as he said this left Richards in no doubt as to where that danger might be found.

It was for that reason that he eventually took the pseudonym James Richards. It would make it harder for Jonas to track him down, especially since he lived nowhere near to where he'd traveled to another dimension.

However, sometime after this conversation, Jonas left the room to answer his doorbell. Richards promptly repaid his rescuer's kindness by stealing a tape, then rearranging those left on the shelf so that the theft wouldn't be immediately obvious.

Hence when Jonas opened a portal to escort Richards back, the latter carried Everyday Chemistry by the Beatles in his pocket. He had to buy a tape player from Wal-Mart in order to enjoy it at home!

Alone in his own dimension - our world and reality - Richards was once again surrounded by the wilderness of the Del Puerto Canyon. A section of ground was scorched where the portal had run, but otherwise all remained the same.

But for the music in his pocket, James Richards' proof of a journey into a parallel universe, where the Beatles did not break up.

When James Richards posted his story online, there were few who believed it outright. Yet that album took a little more explaining.

It's taken the combined efforts of Beatles fans all over the globe to piece together what happened, and they still haven't assembled all the elements.

The parallel universe story is a hoax. Each track on the tape is a composite of solo Beatles stuff, some of it very obscure. Snatches of songs are mixed together, sped up or slowed down to disguise familiar riffs.

For example, Talking to Myself contains bits from Paul McCartney's Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, John Lennon's Stranger's Room and George Harrison's Stuck Inside a Cloud.

The great fun for Beatles aficionados now is to sort through the songs, and identify all that was lifted to create each audio collage. That's the part which hasn't entirely been completed, but they know that each chord is out there somewhere.

Perhaps you can now join in!