By Steve Dougherty
In a way-out election year in which “weird” has been a watchword, the wackiest reports from the campaign trail about Pet Eating Aliens, Sinister Cat Ladies, Government Launched Killer Storms and Arnold Palmer’s Amazing Member seemed ripped from the headlines of the mock-shock tabloid, Weekly World News. The adventures of P’Lod the Space Alien, multiple Elvis clones and U.S. Senators from Planet Gootan emblazoned on the News’ front page seem almost tame by comparison.
Weekly World News bills itself as the “World’s Only Reliable News” source. Headlines about a half-human, half mammal (“BAT BOY LEADS COPS ON 3-STATE CHASE!”); a surprising religious artifact (“JESUS’ SANDAL FOUND IN CENTRAL PARK!”) or an epic battle between unlikely foes (“DWARF SLAYS BIGFOOT! “) are reliably reported upon. But not even at the tabloid’s all-caps loopiest could it ever out-weird much darker real life Q-Anon whoppers about baby-blood drinking celebrities.
As this year proves more than ever, the line between real world fact and fiction is so blurred they have become one. A 2001 Washington Post description of Weekly World News as a media outlet that “prints news dispatches from a parallel universe, a weirdly familiar dream world where popular culture mixes with urban legends, paranoid delusions and bizarre fantasies,” pretty well sums up the on-line alternate reality world we all inhabit today.
And so, let us revisit a few of the more shockingly improbable Election ’24 story lines highlighted below, along with eerily similar reports that have appeared over the years in Weekly World News.
“IN SPRINGFIELD, THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS . . . THEY’RE EATING THE CATS!”
It was a benign, non-threatening migrant from a foreign planet whose existence was first reported by Weekly World News in the tabloid’s famous “HILLARY ADOPTS ALIEN BABY!” scoop on June 15, 1993. Discovered in the wreckage of a spaceship that crashed on Rich Mountain in Arkansas the month before, the alien infant was christened John Stanley Clinton by the proud First Lady and her husband, the President. The alien was shown in later issues of the News cavorting on the White House lawn with, but not eating, the Clinton family pets, Socks the cat and Buddy the dog.
And so it came as a surprise to many of the 67 million viewers tuned in to watch his debate with Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, 2024, when Trump inveighed against aliens from the mysterious island of Haiti said to be abducting and devouring household pets in the middle-American town of Springfield, Ohio. “They’re using them for food!” he exclaimed, leaving some viewers to wonder if he was reading teleprompter text provided by the Weekly World News team.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: SHAPE-SHIFTING SOVIET NAZI DEMOCRATS!
“It is the enemy within and they’re very dangerous,” Trump continued. “They’re Marxists and communists and fascists and they’re sick.” Trump went on to single out Democratic California Reps. Adam Schiff and former speaker Nancy Polisi. `These people—they’re so sick and they’re so evil.’” —New York Times Oct. 16, 2024.
As Weekly World News reported in 2022, former president Trump had been fully briefed about enemies within the halls of Congress by P’Lod, the politically connected space alien whose reputation had recovered from the scandal of decades earlier when his steamy love affair with Hillary Clinton was revealed. (See: “ALIEN IN SLAMMER AFTER FISTFIGHT WITH BILL!”).
By now a well-known Washington fixer, P’Lod was advising a new President. In its shocking scoop headlined “8 US SENATORS WHO ARE ALIENS!” the News reported that P’Lod “spoke with reporters after he met with President Trump just two days ago.” Naming names, P’Lod, who reportedly left Chuck Schumer off his list because the Senator from New York “came out of the alien closet two years ago,” told the president that there were four Republican –Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham — as well as an equal number of the usual Democrats among the extraterrestrial eight, all of whom “hailed from Planet Gootan.”
DEMONIC FORCES LET LOOSE IN THE LAND!
“He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists . . . they’re pouring in. And this guy just left it open.”
Viewers could only surmise that former President Trump was not a loyal Weekly World News reader when he let slip that disinformation during his June 28, 2024 debate with Joe Biden. An old WWN blockbuster — “GATES OF HELL ARE OPENED” — was accompanied by an illustration in lieu of photographs of the cataclysmic event in a remote area. It showed demons escaping from their s—t underworld to wreak havoc across the globe. The exclusive report clearly stated that the border between our world and hell below was destroyed not by the machinations of the current President, but by earthquakes and deep drilling through the earth’s crust by the oil industry.
POWERFUL CAT LADIES PLOT TO DESTROY THE AMERICAN WAY
Female members of Congress and the Biden administration are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”—JD Vance 2021.
Vance clearly missed the recent Weekly World News story about “RENT-A-BABY,” the innovative service company that offers its millennial target audience the opportunity to dip their toe, if not dive into parenthood. “Rent-a-Baby comes as a lifeline to a generation known for delaying major life milestones like marriage and starting a family.” With its less divisive take on a complex social issue of concern to millions of family and career juggling workers as well as cat lovers, the News story might help Vance better shape, if not make sensible, his point.
JOE BIDEN CLONED IN DEEP STATE PLOT
“Biden Clone # 15 is clearly the tallest of all the clones in use.” That post, by @BGatesIsaPsycho on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, was picked up by a better-known Internet troll. “NO DOUBT! Biden replaced by a clone,” @realAlexJones wrote this year. The always believable Infowars founder continued: “there is no doubt that’s not the real Joe Biden. The Deep State has completed its coup over the executive branch and is guaranteed to attempt another election theft.”
Achievement of immortality through human cloning, a dream of many, is long proven reality in the pages of Weekly World News. It was the first media outlet to report that Osama Bin Laden had cloned Adolf Hitler and dragooned him into service with Al Queda. In its meticulous chronicle of the strange afterlife of Elvis Presley, the News headlined its report —“ELVIS WAS CLONED—IN 1976!” —a full year before the King faked his 1977 death. Which explains how multiple Elvisi were spotted in the years after the tabloid eventually pronounced Elvis “really dead,” of a heart attack.
No matter how bonkers today’s political discourse gets, Weekly World News has been there first. Killer storms are created and controlled by sinister forces? The News’ broke the story of attacks on the environment by powerful forces years ago: “ALIENS RIP HOLES IN THE OZONE LAYER!” and “TEENAGE ALIENS USE OUR GLACIERS FOR PARTY ICE!”
But the News brand of comedy was never cruel—or dangerous. No space aliens have been threatened with death or had their tires slashed or been hounded by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis as the Haitian immigrants in Springfield have. The Weekly World News has never urged militia gangs to take up arms against good Samaritans like the dedicated and hard-working FEMA disaster workers bringing relief to storm victims in the Carolinas.
Though polls indicate that most supporters accept the Trump-Vance campaign’s fall back that MAGA world’s most outrageous fabrications are “satire” and “just shtick,” the fact remains that none of them are truly funny.
If you’ve wearied in the last days of the campaign, take a look at the latest on-line edition of Weekly World News. Whether it’s the report on Elvis’s ghost making new music with deceased Nirvana producer Steve Albini, or the photo of a 9-foot reptile strolling with actress Anna Kendrick who has been “QUIETLY DATING THIS GIANT LIZARD WITH A PIG’S TAIL FOR YEARS!” the World’s Only Reliable News source can be relied on for a rare moment of mirth as the 5th of November nears.
