Dr. Franklin Ruehl, cable television legend, Tabloid Baby friend and contributor, and the current hardest-working man in the television business with credits ranging from Sunset Tan to Without Prejudice, ais also one of the most diligent contributors to tabloid newspapers,writing not about celebrity but about the anomalies and bizarritudes of life on Earth and beyond.
Here, he adds his eulogy to the closing of the
Weekly World News:
My Unusual Association with the Weekly World News
I owe a debt of gratitude to the Weekly World News, the controversial tabloid that is folding. I had been publishing articles in various UFO publications, such as the Canadian UFO Report (CUFOR) which was a serious chronicle devoted to this intriguing subject.
Whenever I did get an article published,I would send off copies to various members of the media trying to generate publicity for myself for my lecture and TV program that I was endeavoring to launch. I always sent a copy to an editor at the National Enquirer (I simply picked a name at random from the masthead).
To my surprise, I received a call from a reporter at the Enquirer who wanted to interview me on my latest article in the Canadian UFO Report on the scientific evidence for life existing in the Venusian atmosphere. But he worked for a different editor than the one I sent the article to. It turned out that CUFOR editor John Magor,without telling me, had sent a copy to another editor who was interested.
But when I received word that my interview had been published, i was surprised to learn that it was not in the Enquirer, but rather in the 6th issue (September 27,1979) of the Weekly World News, a publication I had not even heard of!
I learned that the the publication had been launched only a few weeks earlier as a result of the Enquirer, which had been black-and-white, switching over to color presses. But, since they still owned their own black-and-white presses, they decided to put them to use by launching the WWN, filling it with stories which did not make the cut for the Enquirer.
However, this small bit of success opened the door to me at the Enquirer, where I began to be regularly interviewed on space and other scientific matters. And, I rapidly made the transition from interviewee to interviewer, submitting story leads and transmogrifying them into articles that were being published, all on a free-lance basis. I branched out, covering medical, pop psychological, historical, and human interest stories as well as those from the realms of ufology, parapsychology, and cryptozoology.
So there will most assuredly be a vacant spot in my heart when I no longer see the WWN on newsstands announcing the latest alien contact!
May the Power of the Cosmos be with You!
Dr. Franklin Ruehl, Ph.D.
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