If you are of a certain age (I won’t say how old exactly), you might remember a tabloid newspaper called The Weekly World News — a black-and-white paper featuring huge headlines with multiple exclamation marks about Elvis living on the moon, or a mutant child known only as “Bat-Boy.” It was usually sold in a rack by the cashier in the grocery store, along with its sister paper the National Enquirer, The Sun, and other rags, and before the Internet came along it was the source of an almost infinite number of hilarious and bizarre urban legends and stories, most of which were clearly fake. It also featured a column by a right-wing lunatic known as “Ed Anger,” who hated foreigners, yoga, speed limits and pineapple on pizza and was a big fan of the electric chair and beer.
I loved reading the Weekly World News, and after I started down the path to becoming a journalist, I often joked about ending my career — as some British tabloid veterans apparently did — living in Boca Raton, Florida where the paper was based, and inventing ridiculous stories about alien, complete with photos and artists renderings. It sounded like a ton of fun. And then, after I had graduated from journalism school and was working at my first job as a reporter for a weekly newsmagazine in Alberta, I wound up helping the editors of the Weekly World News publish a story — and this one was 100-percent real, even though it sounded like something made up.
The magazine where I worked, which was known as Alberta Report (it no longer exists) — was chronically underfunded and understaffed, and so the reporters and editors often scrounged around for stories from secondary sources that could be reported easily. An editor in British Columbia happened to read in a medical journal about a man who had chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD, and often washed his hands and showered dozens or even hundreds of of times a day due to a fear of germs. This man’s mother — whether sarcastically or as a result of the exhaustion of caring for her mentally-ill son — reportedly said “Well, why don’t you shoot yourself then.”
So the man, known only as George, got a .22 and shot himself in the head. Instead of killing him, however — as doctors said it likely would have if it had traveled even a few centimetres in either direction — the bullet performed a kind of modified lobotomy, and cured the man of his OCD (although he reportedly lost his sense of smell).
Believe me, I know this sounds extremely fake, but it appeared in a reputable medical journal called the Physician’s Quarterly, and news outlets from the New York Times to the Associated Press reported the story — including interviews with the doctor who was treating George at the time. Alberta Report published a story about it first though, and not long afterwards I got a call from a man who said he was an editor at a US newspaper, and was interested in republishing our story. When I asked where he worked, he said “The Weekly World News,” and I almost couldn’t believe my ears.
He asked if we could send him some of the material from the journal and the photos we had used for the story, and I checked with my editors and then shipped them off, and eventually the story appeared in the Weekly World News. And it soon became obvious that at least some of the stories in the tabloid — even some that seemed too weird or incredible to be true — were actually legitimate news stories. All the editors at the News had done was to add adjectives like “incredible,” and “amazing,” and a lot of exclamation marks (I think they quoted a made-up expert as well, as they often did).
I learned later that News editors at one point read local newspapers and other publications looking for such stories, and then clipped them out and rewrote them. Joe Berger, a former White House correspondent who served as a WWN editor from 1981 to 2001, recalled that about 80 percent of the stories originated this way. “We had three or four clippers who were surrounded by mountains of newspapers,” he said. “We spent the day looking at newspapers throughout the world, clipping weird stories. About 50 percent were about people narrowly escaping death; someone falling off a cliff, or hanging off a tree branch for four days until they were rescued.”
Eddie Clontz, a high-school dropout who was the editor-in-chief at the News for two decades, said that many tips came from readers who called in; their stories were checked, but never past the point where they might disintegrate. “We don’t know whether stories are true,” said Clontz, “and we really don’t care.” As the bizarre local stories started drying up, the News began inventing things out of whole cloth, like Batboy.
Unfortunately, the Weekly World News stopped publishing in 2007, after David Pecker (yes, that’s his real name) bought it and the National Enquirer. The name Weekly World News was later acquired and there is a website where similar types of stories are published — there was even a musical about the invention of Batboy at one point — but the site seems to mostly be promotion for a play called Zombie Wedding, and the glory days of the paper are clearly long gone. I am proud to say I played a small part in one of the stories that ran in the paper at its peak, alongside reports of a new galaxy shaped like a human fetus and the garden gnomes who were undercover operatives for the CIA.