Ex-astronaut decks moon landing doubter
09/10/02 — A wire story released this week said police are investigating allegations that 72-year-old former astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched 37-year-old conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel in the face after Sibrel asked him to swear on a Bible that he really did land on the moon.

The two were hardly strangers to one another. Sibrel produced the so-called documentary "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon," which purported to prove that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing manned by Aldrin and Neil Armstrong was a hoax, faked from beginning to end by NASA. The film has plenty of critics besides Aldrin, though none can match his economy of expression.

Poll: Were the Apollo moon landings real or faked?

The continuing saga of J. Lo's butt
09/10/02 — I don't know how I overlooked it earlier this year while researching allegations that Jennifer Lopez insured her hindquarters for a billion dollars, but in any case I just found an item in the Weekly World News quoting a Swiss scientist who claims that the pop star's "hefty heinie" is the result of an alien implant "most likely inserted during a UFO abduction."

I'll wager it was the work of the same little green plastic surgeons responsible for Michael Jackson's face.

Pravda: 'A hitchhiking stranger is sometimes not a human being'
09/09/02 — Pravda, once the stodgy official organ of the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R., now aspires to become the Russian equivalent of the Weekly World News. Not long ago the paper ran a story about a haunted toilet in St. Petersburg; last week it published a rambling article entitled "Ghosts Like Hitchhiking," essentially a compilation of vanishing hitchhiker tales, variants of which have circulated forever. Did you know that Bigfoot's footprints have been found in the republic of Kyrgyzia? Gone are the days of uplifting the superstitious masses!

Pravda outdid even the Weekly World News when its editors encountered an email hoax alleging that U.S President G.W. Bush has a lower I.Q. than the average American citizen. Without a whiff of irony, they immediately published it as hard news. That was over a year ago, with no retraction in sight.