Feb 23, 2022 7:00 AM

The True Story of the Viral False Teeth That Fooled the World

Paul Bishop vomited his dentures into a Spanish trash bin 11 years ago. Then a DNA analysis seemingly returned them to his home in the UK. The truth, it turns out, is even weirder.

PAUL BISHOP'S ODYSSEY started—like all great mysteries—with the arrival of an unsolicited package. The thick envelope bearing a Spanish postmark immediately struck Bishop as odd. The 63-year-old civil servant from Greater Manchester wasn’t expecting any mail from Spain. He didn’t even know anyone in Spain. And he certainly wasn’t expecting what he found inside the package: A complete top set of false teeth. His own teeth, in fact. Teeth he had last seen 11 years ago on a boozy holiday to Spain. Teeth with a story to tell.

Within hours, Bishop was a viral news sensation. He gave interviews to his local BBC news program, then national radio and TV stations. By February 10—the day after he received the package—Bishop’s story was everywhere. For a few days, the internet hummed with the story of Paul Bishop and his marauding teeth.

Here’s what happened—according to Bishop. Eleven years ago he was on a holiday in Spain celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday. One night, after a full day of drinking, he attempted to down what was left of his pint of cider. It did not go to plan. “I washed it down in one but could feel it coming back up,” Bishop told the Manchester Evening News. Bishop vomited the contents of his stomach—and his top set of dentures—into a bin. That was the last time Bishop saw his teeth, until he received the mysterious package.

A letter accompanying the teeth described how they had ended up on Bishop’s doormat. First, the dentures were found by Spanish waste collectors, who sent them to the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB)—one of Spain’s largest public research bodies. After years in storage, the dentures were discovered by a junior technician, who swabbed them for DNA. The technician looked up the DNA in a database and found a match: Señor Paul Bishop. Cross-referencing those records with the British Council in Altea led to Bishop’s address in Greater Manchester.

Case closed. Or was it? From the moment I read of Bishop’s denture adventure, something about it didn’t add up. How did Bishop’s DNA end up on a European database? Why was a national research organization swabbing items found in a bin? And who was this junior technician so determined to reunite queasy British tourists with their false teeth? Solving this mystery, it turned out, would require the help of a forensic DNA expert, three dentists, some stamp collectors, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Well, the Buckingham Palace press office, to be more precise. I would come to realize that nothing could stand in the way of a good yarn once the viral news machine was underway. And the tooth, I would soon find out, was not exactly what it seemed.

If there was one man who could confirm the denture’s origin story, it was the letter’s author: José Juan Sánchez Serrano. A quick Google search seemingly confirms that he works at the CNB, the same organization whose logo appears atop the letter accompanying the teeth. I had some questions about the “EuroNationals” DNA database mentioned in the letter. Perhaps Serrano knew who ran the database, or where the DNA sequences within it came from? I email him and, four hours later, he replies. “I have not written such a letter, and to my knowledge we have no access to such a database if it exists.” In fact, Serrano hadn’t worked at the CNB for years. The online profile linking to his email was out of date. So why had his name appeared at the bottom of the false teeth letter? “My guess is as good as yours,” Serrano tells me.

I wasn’t satisfied with a guess. I needed to find out where these teeth came from. And to work that out, I needed to go to the source of the story. I needed to talk to Paul Bishop.

When I get him on the phone, Bishop sounds exhausted after several days of media attention: At 7 that morning he had been on national TV talking about his teeth. Since he first emailed his local BBC news channel hours after receiving the teeth in the post, the media blitz has been nonstop. “Next thing you know, it’s going all over the world, newspapers and magazines and what have you,” says Bishop. Fortunately, Bishop already had experience dealing with the media. As the general manager of one of the UK’s oldest working men’s clubs—a type of community-run bar common in the UK— he had helped whip up some media attention to attract new members. He had even sent the Queen a letter, inviting her to see the club for herself. She had politely declined in a letter sent by an aide.

Bishop lays out some facts about the teeth story. He had given a DNA sample to Greater Manchester Police in 2007 or 2008, which might explain why his DNA was in a database. He is “pretty sure” that the teeth are his, although they no longer fit him. And he says that although he was a regular visitor to Benidorm on Spain’s eastern coast, he hasn’t been there since before the pandemic. He also sends me photos of the envelope, with franking marks showing that it had been handled at a Spanish post office on February 2, the same date printed at the top of the letter. The year the letter was sent is unidentifiable from the photos.

When I tell Bishop that Serrano hadn’t authored the letter, he has no idea who the real author might be. None of his friends at the working men’s club are the type to create such an elaborate hoax, he says. Plus, it seems like an awful lot of effort for a joke. The person would have to source some false teeth, then fabricate the letter and send it all the way from Spain. “I don’t know anyone who’s capable of pulling off a prank like that,” Bishop says.

If Serrano didn’t send the letter, then perhaps someone else at the CNB did. After all, somebody had gone to the trouble of paying 10.15 euros ($11.50) to send the teeth 860 miles from Spain to the UK, and the letter was printed on CNB letterhead with the research center’s number at the bottom. The evidence seemed to point squarely to the research center at the heart of the mystery.

Susana de Lucas, head of scientific culture at the CNB, does not agree. “We heard about the news, but as far as we know that’s not a real letter from us,” she tells me. “The CNB has not sent it, that’s not our heading, and we do not perform that kind of research and tests.” Only one journalist—a Spanish writer—had called the CNB before publishing to verify the letter’s authenticity. The headings and footer in the printed letter aren’t the same ones used in official CNB letters, de Lucas says. “I think it was someone making a joke, but I find it very hard to believe it is someone at the CNB.”

The morning after receiving de Lucas’ email, I wake up to a long WhatsApp message from Bishop. “I think this has been sent anonymously, for whatever reason, by someone who works in the lab mentioned,” he writes. He points to the CNB heading on the paper, the Spanish words in the letter, and the lack of a postcode on the envelope as evidence that the sender was from Spain. Even if the letter wasn’t genuine, Bishop claims, someone had found his teeth, swabbed them for DNA, and returned them to him from Spain.

The notion of an anonymous teeth-returning vigilante is appealing. Who hasn't been dismayed after losing a prized possession while on holiday? If there is a masked DNA-swabbing hero out there reuniting holidaymakers with their lost trinkets, then it means nothing is truly lost. Not forever, anyway.

Of course, they’d have to get the DNA in the first place. Retrieving enough DNA to identify someone from 11-year-old lost dentures is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely, says Denise Syndercombe Court, a professor of forensic genetics at King’s College London. “If you take the DNA off and preserve it in something and stick it in a freezer, then probably 11 years later you can do that,” she says. But that would mean swabbing the dentures as soon as they were lost, not years after they were discovered in a recycling bin or garbage pile. And then there’s the question of the DNA database mentioned in the letter. Syndercombe Court struggles to think of a database that could give you someone’s name—unless the analysis was done on behalf of a law enforcement agency. All this leaves her “skeptical” that Bishop was tracked down by DNA analysis at all.

Shortly after Syndercombe Court casts doubt on the DNA analysis, I finally hear back from Buckingham Palace. Bishop did invite the Queen to visit the working men’s club where he was, and still is, general manager in 2020. Perhaps the return of the dentures was all a ruse to direct the world’s gaze once again toward Ridge Hill Working Men’s Club? Several of the articles about his teeth did mention that Bishop intended to display the gnashers at the club, after all. And if the Spanish letter was a hoax, then perhaps the letter declining the invitation that Bishop says was sent on behalf of the Queen was also faked?

Buckingham Palace soon put a stop to that line of inquiry. The letter from the Queen’s deputy correspondence coordinator was real, a spokesperson confirms. Bishop was not, as far as I could tell, a serial letter hoaxer.

By this point, it was clear that the letter had yielded all the clues it had to give. To find out more, I needed to go to the item at the very heart of this mystery. It was time to grapple with the teeth.

The dentures Bishop received in the post no longer fit him at all. Bishop puts this down to his mouth—and the sizes of dentures that go into it—getting smaller over time. “My mate who’s a dental technician tells me that every three or four years, your palate shrinks so whatever teeth you’ve got will eventually not work properly,” he says. But Bishop’s old dentures aren’t just too big for his mouth, they also contain too many teeth. Fourteen teeth, in fact: They were a full top set, minus wisdom teeth. And yet, in the video where Bishop removes his current partial dentures for a radio interview, it’s clear that his current false choppers contain only six or so teeth. Either Bishop has gained some extra teeth, or the teeth aren’t his.

Two dentists confirmed that unless Bishop has had teeth implants, then the most likely scenario is that the teeth he received in the mail belonged to someone else. A third dentist adds that something major would have had to change in Bishop’s mouth for the dentures to be impossible to cram in today. Bishop confirms on two separate occasions that he has never had implants. “They’re exactly the same [number], only slightly different with age,” he tells me. Bishop conceded that this new revelation meant that the teeth probably weren’t his after all. “It looks that way now, yeah,” he says.

With the teeth question answered, it was time to turn to the last remaining piece of evidence: the envelope. Susana de Lucas at the CNB had suggested that the stamps themselves might give a clue to the letter’s origins. The stamps in question bear the face of Juan Carlos I, the Spanish king who abdicated in 2014. These stamps—first issued in 2002—were replaced with stamps featuring the new king, Felipe VI, in 2015. So whoever sent the letter must have held on to those stamps for a long time, a poster at the stamp-collecting forum Stamp Community explains. Either that, or the letter was sent considerably earlier than 2022.

The envelope holds another tantalizing clue. The value of the stamps appears to add up to 10.15 euros. A little sleuthing into tariff cards from Correos, the Spanish postal service, reveals that the last time it cost exactly 10.15 euros to send a letter from Spain to the UK was 2018. This all hinges on the value of a single stamp, which appears to be worth 10 cents but might also be a similarly colored 50-cent stamp. Bishop sent multiple photos of the stamps, but in no photo was the value clear enough to work out the exact postage amount. What is clear, however, is that the value of stamps on the letter doesn’t match the amount it currently costs to send a letter of any weight from Spain to the UK.

THIS IS WHERE the story of the mystery teeth leaves us. Serrano didn’t send the letter, nor did the agency it’s purported to be from. The DNA analysis it describes is unlikely to succeed, and probably couldn’t be used to track down an address. (The letter also mentions that Bishop’s address was found through the “British Council in Altea.” A British Council spokesperson confirms it has no center in Altea.) Even the date that the letter was sent is hard to pin down.

Yet, despite all this evidence casting doubt on the teeth, not a single publication running the story seems to have checked the details at its heart. Buoyed by a momentum all of their own making, Bishop’s dentures are destined to become part of viral news lore. The truth behind the teeth simply doesn’t matter enough.

Bishop is adamant that he remains clueless about the origin of the dentures. “I’m as stunned as anyone,” he says, when I lay out the evidence for the letter’s uncertain origins. “I don’t know anyone that could think of a prank that deep and that involved.”

Updated 03/01/2021, 12:00 pm EST: This article originally misstated the number of teeth in the mystery denture. It contains fourteen teeth, not twenty-four.