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Episode Notes for
The Rise of Bat Boy

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Blake Smith: Have you ever wondered how those tabloid newspapers get their stories? Today on Monstertalk we’ll go behind the scenes with an insider to find out all about the Weekly World News and its most iconic recurring character, the monster child known as Bat Boy.

[Intro]

[Voiceover: MonsterTalk!]

Blake: Supermarket tabloids. I remember growing up I always thought the Inquirer – the National Inquirer was a…

Karen Stollznow: Skeptical Inquirer…

Blake: No, no, no, not the Skeptical Inquirer…[laughter]…the un-Skeptical Inquirer…because inquiring minds want to know. I always thought the National Inquirer was a uh…

Karen: This is the one Ben works for right? The National Inquirer.

Blake: I believe so. Is that right, Ben?

Ben Radford: Well, actually that was, uh, as I understand it, that was one of the reasons they named it the Skeptical Inquirer. It was a little bit of a parody on the National Inquirer, so there is a link there, as I understand it.

Karen: Oh, I didn’t know that. History, yeah.

Blake: Wow. Nice history. Bam! [laughter] Anyway, the National Inquirer always seemed a seedy… and unreputable paper when I was younger, you know, when I was a kid kid, like pre-teen. At some point it switched over to being, it seems like, I’m not going to say like it’s reputable, but more like People and it used to run Big Foot and UFO stories, if I remember correctly, and now it runs different celebrity news, but that gap of paranormal stories was filled in by a newspaper called the Weekly World News and another one called The Sun, which is color, but the Weekly World News was black and white and today we’re going to be talking too someone who actually worked at the Weekly World News, so that’ll be interesting.

Karen: I don’t think we had that in Australia. I remember the National Inquirer, I remember just being in the supermarket queue and seeing an article about a man phones his wife from the grave, or something, or woman raped by gorilla, that sort of thing…

Blake: Yeah…

Karen: …which you don’t even believe is a queue.

Blake: [laughter]

Ben: Now is there some reason to assume that he is who he claims to be? I mean, this is the Weekly World News, after all. Have we checked his bona fides on these?

Blake: [laughter] Yeah.

Karen: He could be Bat Boy himself.

Blake: He could be. It looks like Bat Boy was probably written by a stable of writers, but we’ll get the answers to those questions in the interview. I met this guy at Dragoncon while I was manning the Skeptic magazine table. He’s a comic artist, among other things, but he used to work for the Weekly World News and so we started talking and he agreed to come on and answer some important questions about Bat Boy, so I don’t want to spoil it. If you’ve never seen Bat Boy, though, we’ll include a picture in the show notes, but Bat Boy was a, uh…

Karen: That much I’ve seen.

Blake: He’s an interesting Photoshop-type creation…I’m not actually sure how he was created ‘cause that might have pre-dated Photoshop to some extent…

Ben: In a government laboratory…

Blake: Well, we’ll see. He was, uh, it might have been in the late 90s he first appeared, I’ll have to look…

Karen: They’re saying on-line that he was born in 1990, so he’s more teenager than boy.

Blake: Well, so he was a boy to begin with, so it must have been in the late 90s.

Karen: So he’s a teen now.

Blake: So he’s a teen now. That’s funny. [laughter] He’s ready to go and fight in the Gulf War. [laughter]

Karen: But not drink beer. [laughter]

Blake: But, you know, as a skeptic…let me just back it up. Regardless of that, at one point I realized, at some point I realized that this magazine was not serious. [laughter] And I don’t mean that it wasn’t true, I mean it literally wasn’t serious, it was…

Karen: It was just like last year or something…

Blake: It was this morning [laughter]

Karen: [laughter]

Blake: …and I feel devastated for it to have taken this long. No I just thought it was interesting because I don’t know what percentage of the readership was in on the joke. How many people took the Weekly World News seriously? I assume a small number took them seriously. I gotta assume most of the people read it as humorous.

Ben: My guess is that they seemed to do pretty effectively is mix in the bullshit with the real and that’s obviously one of the ways you get people to wonder about it as you put in grains of truth into it and then it helps to have people believe the lie.

Blake: Chunky bits of truth make the whole stew seem true.

Karen: Oh, that’s a beautiful quote.

Blake: [laughter] Your soup of lies, it’s got a beef base of truth. I was going to say, at some point they gave up, I mean at some point they seem to have really stopped trying to make it seem convincing at all because pictures of aliens shaking hands with Bill Clinton…

Karen: [laughter — unintelligible]

Blake: [laughter] That was Hillary. [laughter] No, they had a lot of Clinton photo shopped-type pictures with this alien who was apparently involved in the government. It almost seemed like it was one alien, you know, not like lots of aliens like there’s just this one alien who is doing everything, so…

Karen: Well, Stan Romanek and Jeff Peckman would believe that.

Blake: It did seem up to their impressive standards. For our listeners who do not know who that is that’s the people, they’re in Colorado, right, who are trying…well they did the famous or infamous video of the peeping tom alien and then they’re trying to get legislation passed in Colorado so that they can have an official government position involved with greeting aliens…

Karen: [unintelligible] …commission…yes, yes, and studying them…

Blake: That seems like a shovel-ready project, as they would say. I’m not sure what they would be shoveling, but it seems shovel-ready. Ben, what’s your take on supermarket tabloids?

Ben: Pretty much like everyone else’s except that one thing that’s interesting about it is that you do have a now-evolving mythology about these creatures whether it’s lake monsters or Champ or Big Foot, what have you, and so in some ways the information you see in these tabloids is not that much different than you’re not gonna see on websites about reports of monsters and stuff. There’s some slight differences, but ultimately a story’s a story, so the other element to it is that when I was looking into the origin of Chupacabra in Puerto Rico 1995, the supermarket tabloids there actually played a very significant role in creating and putting out the Chupacabra stories and descriptions and things like that, so there was definitely a tabloid element of sensationalism that helped promote the Chupacabra into the worldwide stage.

Blake: With the Weekly World News, in particular, I keep thinking that since at one point they started publishing a little disclaimer at their front saying that this is for entertainment purposes only. I wonder if it’s not more like The Onion or maybe like a precursor to The Onion just not quite as funny. There was some very funny stuff in it if you actually opened it up and got past the cover. They had some psychic who would give advice to people and the advice was just ridiculous, amusingly ridiculous and they had a guy named, Ed Anger, who was kind of like a rightwing pundit, but, to the point it was just over the top crazy and amusing not like crazy racist or crazy fascist, just amusing. It was funny. There was some very funny stuff in there.

Karen: So, it was like the Blair Witch Project to begin with…

Blake: This was my recollection, but it seemed like the magazine tried to be somewhat realistic and it seemed like they were running stories and all the stories seemed to take place overseas. It was the Weekly World News and you wouldn’t necessarily bother to check the facts on a story that was in, Sri Lanka, Colombia, you, know, places that for you it might not be easy to get to. And I shouldn’t say Colombia, because we probably have listeners in Colombia. [laughter] …more remote places than the average American reader would see.

Karen: But these are still the kinds of stories you see in American media today. You get some second-hand stories and they’re translated from other languages and there’s no evidence to support the stories.

Blake: Oh, yeah, and they still run these kinds stories legitimately, as fact, in other magazines. As far as I know, the National Inquirer still does these little bits like from around the world, you know, a girl survives a fall from 20,000 feet or something ridiculous. And then you go and read the story and say, well, maybe she did or maybe she didn’t or someone lived on the outside of an airplane all the way from one city to another. Maybe that really happened, maybe it didn’t. It’s hard to check the facts.

Karen: You know, like the story that woman in Croatia or a teenage girl who was 13 and awoke from a coma and couldn’t speak Croatian any longer she could only speak German and she had only begun learning that in school and wasn’t fluent until that point.

Blake: But the way the story was written it had seemed more that she had miraculously learned to speak a new language.

Karen: Exactly, she just woke up and was suddenly fluent in a language that she’d never had exposure to.

Blake: You can’t keep credulity out of the market as a selling point; I mean people certainly use credulity or lack of critical thinking in everything. How many commercials, if you think through, there’s a huge logical fallacy in the commercial, but they’re selling the product with it.

Ben: Yeah, I think that’s pretty standard in journalism in general. There’s the tendency to sensationalize anything whether it’s CNN, or ABC News, or Fox. Editors know that people want to read attention-grabbing headlines and so even if it sort of stretches the truth a little bit or if it’s not quite true, as long as they can sort of qualify it in the story itself, they’re happy to do that.

Blake: I find myself not shaking my fist at the Weekly World News. I’m amused by it. It’s gone, it’s out of business now, but it amused me. I used to have friends send articles to me that they’d cut out that they thought were funny, um, and it just, it was just a funny magazine.

[Voiceover: MonsterTalk!]

Blake: So today we’re gonna interview writer and web comic author Tye Bourdony. Tye’s the creator of the on-line comic, The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi, and has had his comics published in Cracked magazine, Sci-Fi magazine, and Star Trek magazine and before all of that, he worked at of the most astonishing media outlets in American history, the Weekly World News.

Tye Bourdony: [laughter] I never heard it put quite that way, but I would agree with that.

Blake: For our listeners who might not know, what was the Weekly World News and how did you get involved with it?

Tye: The Weekly World News, it’s a shame it’s gone, although I think it still has a bit of an on-line presence and I want to say, perhaps it’s The Sun that still carries some Weekly World News magazines, which was one of its sister magazines, but the Weekly World News was the place where individuals who were interested in the paranormal and just kind of wacky, off-the-cuff stories that you couldn’t get in mainstream media. It was a black and white it was one of the tabloids, it was part of American Media, and so they put in everything from Big Foot sightings to Loch Ness, aliens, any, all kinds of things. That’s just scratching the surface. But they were around for quite some time and it was, I think, it was very well known for the home of Bat Boy as well.

Karen: In the later years of the Weekly World News, the magazine explicitly admitted it was an entertainment publication. Do you think that the readers actually got this?

Tye: I think some did and some didn’t and the reason I say that is because one of my favorite pastimes, if you will, at the Weekly World News was sitting at the receptionist’s desk and answering the phones.

Ben: That must have been interesting.

Tye: I would love doing it. It was very interesting just because of the kind of calls that would come in and I handled them very professionally and I took the calls as real as I possibly could. I’d listened intently and handled every single one with the most professionalism I absolutely could, but heard some whoppers, I gotta tell ya. By the same token, I also spoke with individuals who absolutely believed every single word of the Weekly World News and, on any given week, maybe thirty to forty percent or so of the stories were true and rest were entertainment. Some folks knew this inherently and just loved the Weekly World News or enjoyed reading it from time to time and some didn’t. One thing in particular that comes to mind and this was about a story that was entertainment and it had to do with a preacher who could heal you by, forgive me if this offends anyone, by urinating on that affected portion of your body.

[laughter]

Karen: I think I’ve heard of that person.

[laughter]

Ben: I think I saw a video.

[laughter]

Tye: You probably did. In any regard, I got quite a few calls of individuals trying to get in contact with this preacher and this is where it turned a little tough for me because it wasn’t your ordinary…they weren’t that week or two weeks, I believe, as I recall, were a little tough, not just for me ‘cause I only did it, you know, I used to eat my lunch at her desk, it was just a pastime of mine, but she was the one who caught the brunt of it and for those few weeks or whenever she got a tough on, she’d give it to me. But these were folks with terminal illnesses, a couple of them, calling to contact this individual. Now that’s where it got tough because my heart went out to them, but I was not allowed to say that that story was entertainment.

Blake: Right, because when you’re so sick that having someone pee on you is your last hope, you’re in trouble.

Tye: True! But also imagine, they had no where else to turn and I can remember one lady crying over the phone and, my gosh, you know…yes, it’s entertainment, but when it gets…when that happens you’re out of …and I’m a real sensitive guy, you know, I’m creative, but I’m also, you know, that was probably the hardest thing. To get back to your original question, a lot of folks knew it was entertainment and a lot of folks, they didn’t. And, I guess, that’s what the appeal was. I think during the 80s when Dick Kulpa, he was the managing editor for a long, long time and he was also the publisher of Cracked magazine, that’s how I became involved with the Weekly World News. When the Weekly World News was at its height of popularity, I think they were close to a million copies a week and that’s a lot, so I’m a lot of them were enjoying our stories, but I’m sure a lot of them were believing it because, by the same token, there were stories in there that were as true as we could uncover them. Where do you turn to when you want to read about the paranormal or UFOs for instance. I uncovered a few leads that, when I talked to the individuals, and I’m a skeptical guy, but when I talked to individuals, you know what, I believed them. I believed, at the very least, that they believed in the story, and those were dealing with specifically, what I’m thinking about now were UFOs. As a matter of fact, specifically this one story I’m thinking about, this gentleman claimed to have been abducted by aliens at a very young age and they imbued him with the ability to understand computer language and the man never graduated high school, but he was a very high paid, well-established computer programmer. And to listen to the man, and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, he would talk, what seemed to me just off-the-cuff, in ways that the established UFO kind of speech of grays, and what have you, goes. So it sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so, in that case, I would say, that that’s based on true-ish story, you know, at least according to him. I don’t know if I digressed a little bit there.

Ben: No, no, in fact, I was going to ask you about that, I mean, you said that there was at least a little, some measure of investigative journalism. Did you, do you consider yourselves to be investigative journalists? Did you all do any of that? To what extent was there any investigation?

Tye: That’s a great question. Let me go back to this story I was just telling you about because I think it’s a perfect example. It just so happens but while I’m sitting there, this man’s wife called. She called about herself. Apparently she had, gosh, I want to try and get it right, but she had died twenty some odd times and the doctors had given her x amount of time to live and she had far surpassed it and had been brought back to life many, many, many times. I thought it was quite interesting and we subsequently wrote the story about her, as I recall. In the context of talking to her, her husband’s experience came up. Now the first thing I thought was, oh, ok, come on. It sounded a little suspect, but the more I listened, I do have an open mind, and as everyone at the Weekly World News, you would have to say, had a very open mind. And, so I found that story intriguing. Dick Kulpa was there at the time, I told him about it, he thought it was a great story, he said, let’s run with it. One of my jobs at the Weekly World News was coming up with leads and so I would come up with leads in a few different ways. One of them was everyday somebody would walk by each of the different desks, The Inquirer, The Sun, the Weekly World News, and then there’s two others…The Star…this was before The Star had moved to New York. And so what you would do is just flip through just looking for any story that grabbed your attention from twenty some odd papers from around the world. So that was one way we would get really wacky stories. The other was phone calls. Folks would call in all the time and they would, you know, I’ve talked to people who were illegitimate children of Elvis, I’ve talked to many alien abductees, I’ve spoken to lovers of Big Foot…when I say lovers, I mean folks who have had intimate relations with Big Foot. So that was one of the ways we also got stories, so in the particular case, I thought it was a great story and I believed that he, at least, believed the story, and so it got approved and then it would get assigned to one of the writers. The writer called the gentleman for an interview, did an interview, and then the story appeared. We didn’t change anything, you know, we didn’t need to in this case. Often times, you know the saying you can’t make some stuff up, you know, it was just so either well thought out or true. You know, sometimes the story wrote itself from the mouth of the person who was telling the story. That’s just one example of a wacky story that I can’t say is not true, you know?

Blake: [laughter] Obviously, we’re big skeptics and like to see lots of evidence, but at some point, the Weekly World News started putting a disclaimer in the front saying they were an entertainment publication. So what happened, did something happen that made that become part of it?

Tye: You know, I’m a lawyer now, I wasn’t then and we used to have, as you walked in from the front, and the home offices and they’re still there, as I understand it, are in Boca, and when you walked in there was human resources on the left and a couple of other administrative offices and there was this long corridor of lawyers whose job it was to read every single page that we and every other magazine put out. And so, while I don’t have the inside scoop as to why that happened, I would probably tell you that they had something to do with it. But in the time I was there, nothing happened that was of any kind of importance that makes remember why they would have done that. So I can only assume, you know, maybe somebody sued them and they put that disclaimer there, but as a lawyer, it sounds like a legal disclaimer to me, but I don’t have the inside skinny on that, I’m sorry. [laughter]

Karen: So you never had any lawsuits that you were aware of?

Tye: Many! Sure! [laughter] Tons of lawsuits. [laughter] I can think of one that was an honest mistake. A lady’s photo was used and we didn’t have permission to use her photo, so she sued. And the context with which she was portrayed wasn’t, in her opinion, wasn’t true. So I think she sued us for libel. Then other folks, you know, would sue for similar things, as I recall, that’s the only that really stands out in my mind. I know The Inquirer and all the other rags, they were getting sued all the time. For us it was little different, you know, gray aliens don’t necessarily bring suit [laughter] on Earth, anyway, maybe in another part of the galaxy, but not against the Weekly World News. But I do know we would get sued from time to time, but, you know, they wouldn’t tell us a lot of stuff on things like that. Things would just change. You know, from now on when you take a photo, when you use a photo, it would have to be done this way. I can remember that stemming from some kind of lawsuit, as I recall. New guidelines on using photos and new guidelines on the way we would say a source came about something, but we wouldn’t too many specifics unless we were asked about them, you know.

Karen: That seems like a very innocuous thing to be sued for considering all the things you were publishing.

Tye: [laughter] It does, but imagine if you saw your picture in the magazine and, you know, it wasn’t the case, I’m not saying it was or not, I couldn’t say, but, you know, she got offended [laughter] and she sued, so it happened.

Ben: In the long history of the Weekly World News there’s been several recurring monsters that have been on the covers and big stories about them including the aliens, Bat Boy. Who created these characters or are they real?

Tye: You mentioned Bat Boy so let me talk about Bat Boy then. I would tell you that Bat Boy was the brainchild of Dick Kulpa and there were pictures of Bat Boy and some of those pictures, I know for a fact, the body came from one of the production guys who just happened to have the kind of body type that we thought Bat Boy would have.

Ben: Hale and lean?

Tye: You know, lanky, well, you know, the ears and the wings were I think added with Photoshop [laughter] but, I can’t tell you how Dick Kulpa would answer this officially, but I will say, because I knew Dick as well, he was wonderful guy and he had a passion for the Weekly World News…he said that Bat Boy came from a real-ish kind of, you know, mutant or something, if you will. I never saw that mutant, I never talked to that mutant on the phone, I never saw a photo of that mutant or whatever you would want to call Bat Boy…freak of nature, what have you. The Bat Boy that was seen image-wise on the Weekly World News, that Bat Boy, we made him. We had great artists and digital artists on staff, but where Bat Boy came from, the impetus for Bat Boy, I think, in part, may either be urban myth or something in Dick Kulpa’s travels he came across, but then Bat Boy became stylized and became one of the more popular characters in the Weekly World News. But he wasn’t an early character, as I recall, Bat Boy was kind of towards either middle or late end of the Weekly World News run. He was there a few years before I got there. So speaking specifically about Bat Boy, largely the brainchild of Dick Kulpa, but there is some level of truth to what made him create Bat Boy. I don’t think I could get any more clearer on that, I know it’s not clear, but, as I understand it, there’s some truth to Bat Boy. I can’t tell you what that truth is, I don’t know. Dick Kulpa would be the guy to tell you about specifically about Bat Boy. Now the stories I reported on, and when I say reported on, I was not a reporter, I would uncover leads for the Weekly World News. That was one of my jobs. And so those leads that I uncovered with respect to Bat Boy were totally fabricated. Some of the leads I would come with, based on some kind of source, and some of the leads, I would just watch the news and if I saw an interesting headline, I would take out one of the names and put in either vampire, mutant, you know, freak, or alien and, you know, one of them would fit better than the other. So some stories were based on truth and some stories were just, you know, creativity gone amok, if you will.

Blake: He’s got kind of an elaborate back-story…

Tye: Bat Boy?

Blake: Yeah, Bat Boy. He’s got like this human Dr. Ron Dillon who manages him or watches after him or studies him or whatever and he’s spotted all over the place…

Tye: All over the place.

Blake: Sometimes he’s riding on top of the subway, he’s living in tunnels, I think he’s backed political candidates…

Tye: He has, yes. He’s also worked with special ops in the Iraq war, as I recall…

Blake: There you go.

Tye: Yeah, he was helping fighting against insurgents. As the lead I uncovered, so to speak, [laughter] he helped eradicate some vampire nests, as well, in the United States ‘cause there were ongoing vampire wars while I was there. I don’t know if those wars are still ongoing or not.

Blake: [laughter]

Ben: We’ll dispatch a reporter.

Tye: [laughter]

Blake: I guess he is more of a regular bat, though not a vampire bat, right?

Tye: Bat Boy?

Blake: Yeah.

Tye: It’s so funny, when you brought that back story up about his keeper, I hadn’t thought about that in years and I do recall something like that now, but the only thing I can remember about Bat Boy was all the different exploits that he would go through. Something about Bat Boy clicked with the public. They liked Bat Boy and as I think about it now, I think a Broadway show or, not Broadway, excuse me, but in London there’s the equivalent of Broadway and they had a run of some kind of Bat Boy: The Musical…

[Music: Bat Boy: The Musical]

Tye: …and Bat Boy: The Musical has been in the United States as well, I believe, there’s a comic, so, you know, there’s something about Bat Boy kind of is intriguing to folks, I can only assume from an entertainment perspective. But also, something else about Bat Boy did resonate with folks and it resonated with Dick Kulpa and he got it from somewhere, so there’s something about Bat Boy that folks liked and so, you know, I can’t tell…I’m trying to be, uh, I’m trying to think a little more and I can’t …

Blake: Well, you had a character named Matthew Damon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals. [laughter] I guess he had a lot of encounters with Bat Boy. Who is Matthew Damon?

Tye: You know, a lot of…some of those reporters were fictional reporters.

[gasps! laughter]

Tye: I believe that that reporter, as well as…Blake, when we spoke, Ed Anger? Ed Anger, remember, you mentioned Ed Anger when we spoke. Ed Anger was also a fictional reporter. He wasn’t actually a real person. I forget the name…

Blake: He’s more than a real person. He’s…[laughter]

Tye: He’s an angry real person. But, no, it was just someone who one of the writers…I think it was one person who did Ed Anger, but it may have been more than one, you know. You were assigned the story leads and if it was a story based on truth, then you called and did some kind of investigative journalism. If it was an entertainment story, you made it up, and then your editor, you know, took out his red ink pen and crossed this out and crossed that out and then you’d submit it to the attorneys and they would cross this out and cross that out and then you’d get the final version for the fictionalized versions.

Blake: Right, right…

Tye: For the others, a lot of times, they were largely untouched because they really did come from a source and, you know, you can go with those, so…

Karen: Huh, I’ve never heard of a publication that relied so much on its lawyers and legal department.

Tye: But think about it, the Weekly World News was under the umbrella of American Media Incorporated. American Media Incorporated is the home of The Inquirer…is the home of…and so…I mean, the paparazzi, who pays their bills? The Star, The Inquirer, In Touch and all the others, but if you ever read those stories, it doesn’t say so-and-so said that they saw so-and-so or Madonna do this or whomever, it says “a source”, and so you have to be very careful when…there’s more leeway when you have a source. You don’t necessarily have to divulge the name of that source. But, nonetheless, because of the nature of whispers and innuendos and gossip inherent in the tabloid industry, you have to have lawyers who are saying, ok, we can say this, we can’t say this, you can say this, don’t say this…that’s what their job was. You know, at first when I first got there it was like, “My God, what do they need lawyers for?” and then, when you worked there for a little while, you realized, “Oh, yeah, they definitely need lawyers.” They were always getting sued, you know, and a lot of celebrities won!

Karen: Speaking about the paparazzi, did Matt Damon, the actor, ever complain about this Matthew Damon, this alter ego?

Tye: Not that I know of. What’s the alter ego’s name again?

Blake: Matthew Damon, yeah Matthew Damon…

Tye: I don’t remember his name so much forgive me.

Blake: Matthew Damon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals or Matthew Damon, S.O.S…

[laughter]

Tye: Forgive me; I guess you would think I would remember that guy. I don’t remember that one.

Blake: Most people just remember Bat Boy and the alien. That’s the two covers that come to mind, I think…

Tye: Yeah, yeah…

Ben: …shaking hands with Bill Clinton.

Tye: I got that t-shirt, by the way…

Blake: [laughter]

Tye: You want to hear a great story about that, by the way?

Blake: Sure.

Tye: His…that alien’s name was…I believe it was something like, Plog, or something like that, ok? Now here’s something weird, whoever that alien backed, won, by the way. ok?

Blake: OK?

Tye: Weird. It is what it is. You can go check. Whoever that alien backed wound up winning. Now there was a story he was some kind of ambassador from one of the alien worlds that apparently we are very in tune and in touch with, and he had an affair with Hillary Clinton, ok? And apparently Bill Clinton and this alien got into a fistfight. And, you know, on the cover of one of the magazines you will see Bill with a black eye. Obviously we would have the magazines a week or two in advance, right? And so, I had the magazine where Hillary was on the cover with the alien, so I knew she was going to be on the Tonight Show. I sent a copy to the Tonight Show saying, you know, I just thought it was fun. So turns out Jay Leno, he brings it up. He goes, look I’ve got to ask you about this because everybody’s talking about it and he pulls out the Weekly World News, on TV, and he says, can you comment to this? And she looks at it and she laughs and she said, you know, I took him to one state dinner and they make all this fuss.

Blake: [laughter]

Tye: …and it was funny and it was really funny and Jay Leno was kind enough to sign a copy and send it back to me, which I have framed. But I will say no more on that. Either she was being facetious and she going with it or she took him to a state dinner and I don’t know if something happened…

[laughter]

Tye: Obviously, that was probably an entertainment-wise story, but that’s one of my favorite stories, you know, because, on TV, she said, I took him to one state dinner, so I thought that was fun.

Blake: Great story.

Tye: Interestingly, though, I sent her that signed copy by Jay Leno. I wanted it signed by both. It got returned without a signature. I don’t know why. [laughter] That would have been great wouldn’t it have.

Blake: Well Bill doesn’t like being reminded, so…

[laughter]

Tye: I never thought about that. That must be it.

Blake: Did you ever get complaints from any other real life people? I mean, obviously Hillary didn’t complain…

Tye: No. Not to us, anyway. Complaints from any real life people. Well, that lady I told you about who didn’t agree with her photo. That kind of thing would happen from time to time, but famous folks? The Weekly World News didn’t use famous folks in that regard; I can’t remember stories involving famous individuals…

Blake: No, people who were so famous they were in the public domain basically, right?

Tye: Yeah, not that I can recall. All the stories were just urban myths kind of thing or aliens or angels and something of that nature. Now, I’m sorry, they did use politicians quite a bit. Bush was always in there, bin Laden was always in there, Saddam Hussein, Clinton, Hillary, obviously, and, no, that I can recall, we never got any flak from the political side of famous folks, but, I think, you know, that would have been the least of their worries. No one would have really put stock into that kind of thing. I would think, but you know, that’s just me.

Karen: Do you have any…are there any favorite or especially outlandish or memorable storylines involving lake monsters or Big Foot that were covered?

Tye: Oh, sure, there were tons. One of my favorite is, I actually have the mug, ‘cause there were some great little things like t-shirts or what have you, that I would keep just as mementos and one of them is when they actually found photos, real photos, of the Loch Monster. I think we were one of the first to uncover real photos of the Loch Ness Monster. That one stood in my mind just because there was so much response to that, I mean, people were calling quite a bit for those photos…um…they weren’t real photos. [laughter]

Ben: But you had people who believed they were real photos and contacted you and wanted to see them.

Tye: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. They looked good! [laughter]

Blake: …too good.

Tye: Too good to be true. Um, Big Foot…Big Foot prostitutes was a popular story, as I recall…

Karen: What?

Tye: …that were being frequented by politicians. Yeah, Big Foot prostitutes. [laughter] That’s just one the sticks out in my mind, I’m sorry. [laughter] Many stories about people encountering Big Foot, where Big Foot was living, people domesticating Big Foots, things of that nature. It was popular subject. Big Foot was in the magazine at least, you know, four or five times a month, I would think. And, when I was coming up with leads, I’d always use Big Foot…Big Foot aliens, vampires…you can’t go wrong with those kinds of stories. And some of them were reported on as true and most of them were made up.

Ben: I was just going to ask, why do you think that Big Foot was so popular? Was it just because you were writing good stories or just that Big Foot is inherently interesting?

Tye: I think Big Foot…who hasn’t seen the Leonard Nimoy In Search of… Big Foot, you know, remember that one, In Search of…, that show? I was intrigued as a child, I was always intrigued by Big Foot. I think Big Foot is one of those urban myths that people would like to believe in or at least it’s fun to listen to and I think we played of that. Big Foot was definitely one of the more popular ones, Bat Boy was one of the more popular ones, and I enjoyed talking to folks on the phones who said that they were a lover of Big Foot or that they had seen Big Foot. And I would take down their story as best I could and pass it on…some folks are really…either they’re very good liars or that they absolutely believe that they saw or encountered a Big Foot. I mean, it’s one of the stories that has play in it and continues to. Since my coming to Weekly World News, I’ve seen other Big Foot stories in other places other than the Weekly World News, so Big Foot is one of those stories, as is the Loch Ness Monster that some people claim to be true. I have come across at my time at the Weekly World News, you know, not only would we talk to folks who said they saw it, but we would talk to folks who were trying to debunk these things. And so I’ve seen plenty of evidence, like for instance, I think everyone by this point the evidence of, you know, those Big Foot footprints and the individuals who used to run through the woods with these big feet on leaving Big Foot imprints all over the place. Another one would be crop circles. There is the side of this story that says crop circles are absolutely real and they will give you compelling evidence as to why crop circles are some kind of evidence of extraterrestrial visitation on Earth. And there are other individuals who, and I’ve seen videos of how they make these crop circles and so then I can see how it is fake. By the same token, however, there’s a part of me, even me, and I’m as skeptical as the next guy, if not more so, who kind of still wonders, you know? I still watch the thing. Another compelling one that we had done a few stories on would be the chariot of the gods, that we are descendant of some kind of alien intervention way back when. There are some compelling finds that would make one have to ask – ancient batteries, for instance, when you’re up in the sky and you look down on, you know what I’m talking about…

Blake: The Plains of Nazca…

Tye: Exactly. Those kinds of things…I mean I’m hard pressed to see how an ancient people could have done something like that.

Blake: I will send you a book. [laughter]

Tye: [laughter] But by the same token, I don’t believe it, you know? But I’d like to.

Blake: Inspired by the wonder, yeah, yeah.

Tye: The Sumerians, apparently, if you…no one really talks about the Sumerians and I didn’t really have a class on Sumerian culture in college and I was a philosophy undergrad major, so we went into some heavy stuff. No one ever talked about the Sumerians, but because of my time at the Weekly World News and because of other individuals or things I’ve come across, apparently in the Sumerian religion and culture there are references, quite abundant, to alien forefathers. I don’t how that would be the case, and I don’t know…that sounds quite compelling to me, you know, that they would just come up that, these ancient and some ways ignorant people, and when I say ignorant I don’t mean they were stupid, but of course I just mean they didn’t know what we know, to come up with alien forefathers. Native American cultures, you know, believed that there were sky people.

Blake: But wait, how do you know the Sumerians weren’t running their own version of the Weekly World News?

Tye: [laughter] I love it…like on stone tablets, right, like Fred Flintstone, like I love it. You’re right. They might very well could have been, there could have been a guy just like me who was just copying away…

Blake: We’re doing a real news story. Just make one up! OK! We’re from outer space, guys.

Tye: If it wasn’t for the Weekly World News, I don’t see why it wouldn’t have worked for them as well. [laughter]

Ben: They showed Moses meeting aliens or something.

Tye: That’s a great story, you see? [laughter] They probably would have picked that one up, you know?

Blake: Let me ask you this question, when you see the success of on-line satirical papers like The Onion, do you think Weekly World News was ahead of its time?

Tye: Wow…ahead of its time?

Blake: I mean, if it was selling a million copies a week, maybe it wasn’t ahead of its time. [laughter]

Tye: At a million copies a week, it was very successful and it lasted a long, long time. That paper made some money. Ahead of its time or was it just satisfying an appetite that was out there for that kind of stuff that I would tell you that still exists. The Onion is a lot of fun though. I enjoy The Onion. I think they are a little bit like Weekly News and I think they are a lot like themselves. I think that Dick Kulpa had a lot to do with creating a name brand that was successful. You know, he knew how to do…he knew publishing, he knew satire and, you know, he married the two and, well, he and of course...I forget the gentleman’s name…the guy who owns American Media Incorporated, you know, between them and whoever else was working with them at the time, they created a paper that worked. Ahead of its time? You know, I don’t know…I don’t know. I don’t know if I can answer that. It was fun. A lot of people loved the paper, but I don’t know if it was ahead of its time. By the same token, we were just entertainment. After a while, I was there a little less than three years I think, you know, it was a lot of fun. The thing I loved most about it was it was very creative and I was on the newsroom floor, the place is full of buzz and news is on at every…they had TVs and intermittent columns there was always some TV running some different news channel and it was just exciting and people were hustling and bustling and you saw the newspaper, all the newspapers a week or so before they came out. And you would see important people, you know, Sylvester Stillone was apparently friends and I saw him walk through once…and some weird stuff happened there, too, and it was a really fun place. I spoke to many folks who would call up and just want to come in to the Weekly World News for a tour and I loved doing that, too. I just loved doing that and I really good at it, too, just for nothing, for no other reason than folks just loved being there. So I think they were fans, you know, real fans of the magazine like anyone would be a fan of some kind of entertainment. I’m a huge Trekkie, you know, so whenever I’ve gotten a chance to meet some of those celebrities, I’m kind of star-struck by it. I’ve met individuals who came to visit the Weekly World News who thought they were the luckiest people on Earth for being allowed to visit the hallowed halls of the Weekly World News.

Karen: What happened to the Weekly World News in the end?

Tye: I think they no longer had a million readers a week, by the time I left, if they broke a hundred thousand it was a good week. And around the middle of my stay is when you started hearing the rumors and those were tough. From the perspective of just working for American Media Incorporated, while it was a lot of fun, it was tough sometimes because there was be these…we’d call them, the one I remember was Black Thursday and that’s just when you’d come in and find out that forty people lost their job. I’m trying to remember his name, I can’t remember the CEO’s name, but they would make those kinds of drastic cuts sometimes and it was ugly and they would just do it and they were known for doing that. And, as I understand it, that happened one day at the Weekly World News, but this was when the Weekly World News was in New York is when it happened. The Star moved from Boca, from Florida to New York, if you remember, when The Star used to be just regular newsprint and then it went to being very glossy that’s when they moved from Florida to New York. Likewise, the Weekly World News went to that same office and they were just never able to bring their numbers back up. So I guess readers stopped believing it or it just wasn’t the phenomena it once was and numbers, in my opinion, were the ax that fell on the Weekly World News. They just didn’t have good numbers anymore and it was probably just too expensive to keep it up.

Ben: Where is Bat Boy now? Is his saga continuing? What’s he up to?

Tye: You know, he’s bad about keeping up with folks. He said he’d write, but I’ve not got a Christmas card from him or anything like that. But there was a book that was published fairly recently and it had Bat Boy on the cover and it chronicled a lot of his stories. I think Bat Boy: The Musical may still be out there in some form, but let me go back, I think the last time I actually…Bat Boy was IDW is an independent comic book and they did a mini-series, and this was just a few months ago, and Bat Boy was one of the featured monsters, so to speak. I think they went and took back all the favorites from Weekly World News and they satirized them. And there was a comic series as well. Unless they are doing some more Bat Boy stories in the Weekly World News, he may be on hiatus, you know, doing his things and no one is keeping tabs on him or reporting on him right now.

Blake: The question we ask all of our guests, or try to anyway, what’s your personal favorite monster?

Tye: Huh…zombies. I love zombies. I love a good zombie story. I came up with and uncovered a few very…zombie stories for the Weekly World News. There are folks who will tell you zombies are real, I don’t believe they are real, I think they’re just something that sprouted out of the mind of George Romero and others like him. From a horror perspective, I love zombies, I love The Walking Dead. I’m looking forward to its series premiere on Halloween night.

Blake: That’s in Georgia, right?

Tye: Yeah, they’re filming it in Georgia and it takes place in Atlanta and right outside and I had a buddy who was a stunt man who worked on it and he was real tight-lipped about it, but it looks absolutely phenomenal. But that’s my favorite kind of monster, but vampires are probably a close second. They were always quite popular at the Weekly World News, vampires. When I was there, I reported on, I mentioned the vampire wars, and apparently the second president Bush really had it out for them and he had some very secret government organizations doing their best to eradicate the vampire menace in the United States. I don’t know how successful they were. When I left…

Blake: [laughter]

Ben: Probably thought they were Muslims…

Blake: I’m sure it was some of his best work.

[laughter]

Tye: Potentially, potentially. But Big Foot was a lot of fun. I enjoyed Big Foot and, uh, Elvis was ever present. He’s not a monster, I know…

Karen: He became one.

Tye: In a way, isn’t that the truth, in a way he did kind of become one because there were always sightings of…I think the last time I saw a story on Elvis was he was eating peanut butter and bacon sandwiches in Hawaii and surfing, you know.

Karen: He’s still alive.

Tye: He’s still alive, yeah. There are people who will vehemently tell that he is still alive.

Karen: Because His middle name is misspelt on his tomb.

Tye: Is it really? [laughter] I didn’t know that. You would think I would have known that, right?

Blake: He maintains his youth by making love to Big Foot whores. [laughter]

Tye: Another very good story! [laughter]

Blake: A lot of people don’t know that.

Tye: No, no, you got me by surprise on that one, too, and it takes a lot to surprise me.

[laughter]

Tye: That’s a pretty good story. I like it. My favorite that I uncovered that is, if you go on the Weekly World News site you can buy postcards, it’s a greeting card rather, and it became a greeting card, was, you know, one of the aliens from Roswell. Well, it’s actually two stories. An old alien, after Roswell, he was working for the US government and he retired and he tried to collect Social Security benefits and they refused him. And that was one story. And then the other was the US gave reparations to the alien families of those who were mutilated and experimented on at Roswell.

Blake: [laughter] Nice.

Tye: Both of those leads were my exclusive.

Blake: Awesome.

Ben: Well done, sir. Well done.

Tye: Thank you, thank you. I dug deep on those; let me tell you, Deep Throat and all those kind of folks. It was really tough. I was a little scared when those came to light, but it worked out.

Blake: Follow the alien money.

[laughter]

Blake: Well, Tye, thank you for spending an hour with us today, I appreciate it.

Tye: Oh, it was a pleasure. And I hope that you and your readers will visit me on-line with my sci-fi cartoons, I’m a science fiction cartoonist and it’s The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi. I’m horrible marketer [laughter] forgive me. If people like that kind of stuff, they’ll like Sci-Fi.

Blake: We’ll link to it in the show notes.

Tye: I appreciate it. I had such a wonderful time with you guys. Thank you so much.

Karen, Blake: Thank you

Ben: Good thing.

[Voiceover: MonsterTalk!]

Blake: Today on Monstertalk we were talking to Tye Bourdony, formerly of the Weekly World News, about tabloid newspapers and the chronicles of Bat Boy. Monstertalk is hosted by Blake Smith, Ben Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, and Dr. Karen Stollznow, blogger, Skepchick, and paranormal researcher.

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