The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [30]
One of the Mars face enthusiasts now announces:
Breakthru News of the Century
Censored by NASA
for fear of Religious upheavals and breakdowns.
The Discovery of ancient
ALIEN RUINS ON THE MOON
A ‘giant city, size of Los Angeles basin, covered by immense glass dome, abandoned millions of years ago, and shattered by meteors with gigantic tower 5 miles tall, with giant one mile square cube on top’ is breathlessly ‘CONFIRMED’ on the well-studied Moon. The evidence? Photos taken by NASA robotic and Apollo missions whose significance was suppressed by the government and overlooked by all those lunar scientists in many countries who don’t work for the ‘government’.
The 18 August 1992 issue of Weekly World News reports the discovery by ‘a secret NASA satellite’ of ‘thousands maybe even millions of voices’ emanating from the black hole at the centre of he galaxy M51, all singing ‘ “Glory, glory, glory to the Lord on ligh” over and over again’. In English. There is even a tabloid eport, fully although murkily illustrated, of a space probe that )hotographed God, or at least his eyes and the bridge of his nose, ip there in the Orion Nebula.
The 20 July 1993 WWN sports a banner headline, ‘Clinton tfeets with JFK!’ along with a faked photo of a plausibly aged, ;lumped-over John Kennedy, having secretly survived the assassi-lation attempt, in a wheelchair at Camp David. Many pages nside the tabloid, we are informed about another item of possible nterest. In ‘Doomsday Asteroids’, an alleged top-secret docu-nent quotes alleged ‘top’ scientists about an alleged asteroid ‘M-167’) that will allegedly hit the Earth on 11 November 1993 md ‘could mean the end of life on Earth’. President Clinton is described as being kept ‘constantly informed of the asteroid’s josition and speed’. Perhaps it was one of the items he discussed n his meeting with President Kennedy. Somehow, the fact that :he Earth escaped this catastrophe did not merit even a retrospec-:ive paragraph after 11 November 1993 uneventfully passed. At east the headline writer’s judgement not to burden the front page ivith the news of the end of the world was vindicated.
Some see this as just a kind of fun. However, we live in a time vhen a real long-term statistical threat of an impact of an asteroid ivith the Earth has been identified. (This real science is of course ihe inspiration, if that’s the word, of the WWN story.) Government agencies are studying what to do about it. Stories like this suffuse the subject with apocalyptic exaggeration and whimsy, make it difficult for the public to distinguish real perils from tabloid fiction, and conceivably can impede our ability to take precautionary steps to mitigate the danger.
The tabloids are often sued - sometimes by actors and actresses who stoutly deny they have performed loathsome acts - and large sums of money occasionally change hands. The tabloids must consider such suits as just one of the costs of doing a very profitable business. In their defence they often say that they are at the mercy of their writers and have no institutional responsibility to check out the truth of what they publish. Sal Ivone, the managing editor of Weekly World News, discussing the stories he publishes, says ‘For all I know, they could be the product of active imaginations. But because we’re a tabloid, we don’t have to question ourselves out of a story.’ Scepticism doesn’t sell newspapers. Writers who have defected from the tabloids describe ‘creative’ sessions in which writers and editors dream up stories and headlines out of whole cloth, the more outrageous the better.
Out of their immense readership, are there not many who take the stories at face value, who believe the tabloids