The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Episode Notes for
The Rise of Bat Boy

IN THE PANTHEON OF AMERICAN MONSTERS, only one truly dominated the newspapers of the 1990s. Checkout lines everywhere were haunted by the bald-headed, wide-mawed visage of Bat Boy.

What was Bat Boy, and where did he come from? The MonsterTalk team interviews cartoonist Tye Bourdony, a former employee of the Weekly World News and creator of the online comic “The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi”. Bourdony has had his comics published in Cracked, Sci-Fi and Star Trek magazines. He provides a behind-the-scenes look at the rise and fall of the famous tabloid paper the World Weekly News and shares his insights about the paper’s most popular recurring character: Bat Boy.

On Wikipedia

• Weekly World News
• Bat Boy

Bat Boy Book

• Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed!

In this episode

• How much of the content of WWN was just made up?
• Did the readers know that the paper wasn’t “for real?”
• What is the origin of Bat Boy?
• What was the role of Bigfoot, Nessie and other cryptids at WWN?

Plus lots of stories about what it was like to work at one of the country’s most unusual newspapers.

Music

• Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
• Grocery-store ambient sound effects by ZuluT via freesound.org, used with permission under Creative Commons License.

Episode Transcript

Read a complete transcript of this episode.

The views expressed on this program are not necessarily the views of the Skeptics Society or Skeptic magazine.