Ancient Aliens in Mass Media

Okay, this is an easy one.  Everyone knows that the Weekly World News is as fake as professional wrestling, but it has contributed a lot to ancient astronaut theory in popular culture over the years.  No longer the stand alone tabloid it was from 1979-2007, the Weekly World News is still alive as an insert in the Sun tabloid and maintains a website dedicated to its fictional and often humorous “news.”  As a teenager, I read the Weekly World News on my lunch breaks at my after school job.  I would laugh out loud (in a time before LOL) like a crazy person at the bizarre stories.  It was fun and a cheap laugh at $1.25 an issue or whatever the cost was back then.  I had a two year collection of this tabloid, but stopped reading it because I noticed that they would reprint old stories as new ones or make slight changes to story details like names and locations.  I guess they didn’t expect anyone to read it as seriously as I did?

However, I am glad that the tabloid still exists in some fashion,  the paranormal ideas illustrated in the Weekly World News cater to believers and non-believers alike.  It doesn’t really matter how far-fetched an article may seem to one reader, if there is at least one person that believes it to any degree.  These ideas are out there in various forms of media and the Weekly World News is just one of them.   Below is a link to the results page of my search request for “ancient astronaut theory.”  Most of the alien related posts are by some one named “Erik Von Datiken” or a person photographed in an alien mask named “Mygar”… that’s already a little funny.

http://weeklyworldnews.com/tag/ancient-astronaut-theory/

My favorite story from looking around the site is MARS TRADED WITH ANCIENT EGYPT. Here the Weekly World News links the cultural practices of ancient Egypt to Mars without explanation, cites misinterpreted tomb objects, somehow connects the myth of Atlantis to all of this and employs a lot of creativity to present this piece of “news.”  These stories are entertaining, but not informative even in the realm of pseudoscience.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved October 22, 2009)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_World_News

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_%28supermarket_tabloid%29

http://weeklyworldnews.com/tag/ancient-astronaut-theory/

http://weeklyworldnews.com/alien-alert/8218/mars-traded-with-ancient-egypt/