Here is The Beatles famous album cover for Help! The album cover features the group with their arms positioned to spell out a word in flag semaphore, leading most to assume that the band is spelling out the word HELP.

According to cover photographer Robert Freeman,

“I had the idea of semaphore spelling out the letters H.E.L.P. but when we came to do the shot the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn’t look good. So we decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning other arms.”

The best graphic positioning of The Beatles ended up spelling out out NUJV. Check out our detailed graphic below…

This is what HELP would actually look like in flag semaphore.

For some reason on the U.S. (American) release on Capitol Records John, Paul and Ringo were rearranged spelling out NVUJ instead of NUJV.

Paul is Dead believers thought NUJV was meant to be “New Unknown James Vocalist” as James is Paul McCartney’s real first name.