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POSTCARD USA: Space aliens dump Ms Hilton —Khalid Hasan

There is no shortage in America of those who believe that Batboy lives. And who knows, they may be right. If Bush can be president for two terms running, then anything is possible here

After all my years in this business, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one honest newspaper in the world: The Weekly World News. Why? Because not a single word that it prints is true. With other newspapers, New York Times down, you don’t ever know if what you are reading is true. With WWN, you know where you are. If that is not honesty, then no such bird exists.

George Orwell, after having written hundreds of thousands of words for newspapers, was constrained to observe: Truth was never published in newspapers. I wish he were around in 1979 when the Weekly World News was launched. He would have greatly appreciated the honesty of its columns.

It is another matter that many of WWN’s readers have more faith in what they read in its pages than they have in the scriptures. They actually believe that every word they read there is true. My take on that is: if it works for them, no one should have a quarrel with it.

One of the weekly’s running stories is Batboy sightings around America. There is no shortage in this country of those who believe that Batboy lives. And who knows, they may be right. I look at it this way. If Bush can be president for two terms running, then anything is possible in America. David Perel, the weekly’s executive vice president explained what the difference between the New York Times and his publication was. “A guy calls up The New York Times and says ‘My toaster’s talking to me,’ The New York Times hangs up on him. And then he calls us up and says, ‘My toaster’s talking.’ We say, ‘OK. Put the toaster on. We want to talk to him’.”

The weekly paper which you can pick up at any grocery store checkout from one end of America to the other, is printed in black and white. No colour. Those who make regular appearances in WWN’s pages include the Bat Boy and a space alien named P’lod, who is said to have had an affair with Hillary Clinton. Other WWN favourites are Big Foot, Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and alien abductions. The paper also reports that Elvis Presley has been sighted, the theory being that he is not dead. He only pretended to be dead. There is little doubt that some believe Elvis to be alive. And that reminds me of what Dorothy Parker said when told that President Herbert Hoover was dead. “How can they tell?” she asked.

WWN has a thing about Oprah Winfrey, as is evident from the stories it has run about the daytime television diva. Headlines: ‘Oprah is an alien,’ ‘Oprah ate my baby.’ One story reported that Oprah was worshipped on a distant planet and there was even an Oprah bible. One recent story said a graduate student and his computer had exchanged vows in a private ceremony at a prominent technology institute. Jim Romberd, the groom was reported to have said, “Tears were streaming — live, over the Internet — from those few friends who were unable to join us.” The story went on to say, “Jim, who has enjoyed very little human dating, insists he’s the first to interface in such a manner. He calls the practice ‘gigamy.’ ‘The machine’s given me so much joy that I finally decided to do the honourable thing and make an honest computer of it. Now we’ll create a domain together,’ he said. ‘We’ve designed our own ring networks.’ “

WWN’s David Perel in an interview with a website called Badmouth was asked what the mainstream media could learn from his weekly on how to get it right the first time. He replied, “That’s why our new slogan is ‘America’s most reliable newspaper.’ It’s a question of going into the jungles of the Amazon and finding that dinosaur that’s alive. It’s getting those Pentagon sources and getting the truth about the ‘spy cat’ — the cat that was taught to talk in a government lab and then was sent over to Iraq to gather intelligence. I think it’s just pure perseverance — plus a lot of time at the bar after work.”

Perel was told that a lot of news organisations were cutting back on their international coverage to save money, while WWN appeared to be ‘bucking that trend’. He explained, “Wherever the story is in this solar system, we are going to send a reporter there if possible to get it. No question about it. We’re not just going to sit in this newsroom and take what comes across the wires and rewrite it. We’ve got to go out. We’ve got to pound the pavement. We’ve got to fly past the rings of distant planets to get the exclusives.” He said WWN “excels at finding scoops that are timeless, because the rest of the press has been so derelict in their duty to report on the rest of the solar system and psychic phenomenon. It’s just left this area wide open for use to bring it to America, the world, the galaxy.”

One of my favourite WWN stories ran under the headline ‘Paris Hilton Rejected by Alien Body Snatchers’. It went on to quote an alien by the name of Vortrex who said, “As soon as we beamed the Earth woman you call Paris Hilton onto our ship she began criticising our wardrobes, hair styles, and makeup. My wife Vizbin is the personal stylist for everyone on this ship and suffered emotional injury.”

I am asking Weekly World News to fly a team of space aliens to Pakistan to monitor the 2007 elections. Since the government has floated the fantasy that they are going to be ‘free and fair’, what better monitors could one ask for than space aliens!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net

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