Recently, people have begun to realise that not all papers are as much guardians of the truth as we’d like to believe. Certain papers will print anything they care to make up, if they think they can get away with it – fortunately, they sometimes get it very wrong as several libel cases have shown. However, not all newspapers believe that it is necessary to print hurtful lies about people to produce an entertaining and successful publication – one example of this is “The Weekly World News”.

It’s an American paper – in tone, it is similar to the Sunday Sport, but it doesn’t have the naked women on every second page that it’s British cousin does. The two papers do share a close relationship – many of the stories printed in the Sport first appeared in the Weekly World News i.e. “World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon!” & “World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon Vanishes!”. It’s actually an off-shoot of “The National Enquirer”, but while that paper concentrates on ‘celebrity’ stories, the WWN has no bounds set to it.

I like the WWN. It strikes me that it is much less harmful than certain papers I could mention for three reasons :

• It makes things up consistently – the gutter press leaven their poison with just enough truth to make it plausible.
• Its fabrications are entirely harmless – no-one is ever hurt by them, and the odds of an alien from Mars suing for damages are pretty minimal, I’d have thought!
• The ‘journalists’ (and I use the term loosely) on the WWN have far better imaginations than most. Instead of being obsessed with X having an affair with Y, their stories are a wider range of fiction than is found in most local libraries.

Somewhere near here you’ll see a few example stories from recent issues of the WWN. I feel a few of them require a little more explanation… :

WORLD WAR II BOMBER FOUND ON MOON HAS VANISHED – “An American warplane that was found on the moon last spring has vanished, thwarting a multi-national probe that was to determine how it got there in the first place. The moon-bound World War 2 bomber first made headlines when a Soviet probe photographed it at the bottom of a crater in late March. Dr Wilhelm Greder of the Swiss UFO group CONTACT said it is almost certain that space aliens are somehow connected with the plane. “It would have taken a space-ship of enormous size and sophistication to move it. We’re just about 99% sure that is what happened. It’s almost as if someone or something was aware of our investigation and took the plane before we found out too much”.

HIS DOCTOR DAD… ‘Rick Gibson eats tonsils like they’re going out of style: on crackers, with cheese or straight. He just opens wide and scarfs [I assume this is some obscure Americanism for eating! Ed.] them down! “They’re not much to look at but they sure are tasty” said the 36-year old man from London, “They go great with anything’. Turns out his father is a doctor and can keep him supplied with these delicacies. As for the taste, the very best ones taste like hard oysters, the worst ones like pencil erasers…

WOMAN WITH TWO HEADS… “A female communications student is suing her local TV station, claiming officials there discriminated against her when they denied her a job – just because she had two heads”. The job she was going for was as an anchorwoman on a news programme! One of the quotes of the year has to be “I was twice as intelligent as any other candidate they considered, and although I have two heads, both of them are pretty”. The case has touched off a major debate in Bulgaria, whre it happened – station chief Kiril Mihailov’s comment ; “We are not in the business of providing jobs for freaks”.

HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE DESCENDED FROM A SPACE ALIEN.

• Eye color green or blue, and set wide apart in the head
• Feet smaller than normal with longer toes
• Ears large and close to the head ( is Prince Charles half-alien? )
• Hand and fingers long and slender. Nails perfectly formed but weak
• Face delicate, but sharply chiselled. Lips full or very thin
• Hips fuller than average or downright wide.
• Hair red or blonde
• Body build small to average. Bones are usually weak and thin.
• Personality – smart, perceptive & intelligent, but likely to be a dreamer.

Beep, beep. However their biggest scoop deserves to be reported in full…