Danny and Derek speak with David Halperin, retired professor of Jewish studies at UNC Chapel Hill, about his book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. The group looks at the phenomenon of UFO encounters as part of a longer tradition of mythology, examining their relationship to the historical epochs in which they occur, their place in politics and culture, and what ultimately the search for aliens says about our own views of humanity.
Wasn’t all this stuff just “content” for the Weekly Wold News? I grew up in the ‘70’s/‘80’s and my UFO knowledge is definitely grounded in the headlines I saw on the grocery store tabloid headlines. Grocery store tabloids go away, alien abductions suddenly disappear from our imagination, no?
OK…last comment…seriously, how do you have this conversation without even mentioning the supermarket tabloid headlines and the fact that we were a truly captured audience standing on line at the grocery store with the pre-digital chunky old cash registers and people painstakingly writing their checks or having their credit card numbers called-in or checked against the old credit card books for verification? Waiting at the grocery store checkout line was a truly time consuming activity spent staring at these headlines and grainy pictures (at least for us kids). They kept the stories in the zeitgeist week after week after week. I can still hear my friend Eric opining that the Weekly World News was “real news, man”.
I’m just to the part where he’s talking about The NY Times and it seems to me they are simply stealing the old business model from the tabloids. I’ll be proven right when the Times starts writing about Bat Boy.
this was wonderful. thank you.
"I hope I get an A in this class"
Great episode. Would be interesting to hear an episode on posadism. I feel like it's as likely to lead to communism as dengism
It doesn’t work on the internet because the grainy photo was an important element.
Wasn’t all this stuff just “content” for the Weekly Wold News? I grew up in the ‘70’s/‘80’s and my UFO knowledge is definitely grounded in the headlines I saw on the grocery store tabloid headlines. Grocery store tabloids go away, alien abductions suddenly disappear from our imagination, no?
Judd Hirsch is watching us
This is also done by African Americans. Maybe the group "Drexciya" is a good example.
OK…last comment…seriously, how do you have this conversation without even mentioning the supermarket tabloid headlines and the fact that we were a truly captured audience standing on line at the grocery store with the pre-digital chunky old cash registers and people painstakingly writing their checks or having their credit card numbers called-in or checked against the old credit card books for verification? Waiting at the grocery store checkout line was a truly time consuming activity spent staring at these headlines and grainy pictures (at least for us kids). They kept the stories in the zeitgeist week after week after week. I can still hear my friend Eric opining that the Weekly World News was “real news, man”.
I’m just to the part where he’s talking about The NY Times and it seems to me they are simply stealing the old business model from the tabloids. I’ll be proven right when the Times starts writing about Bat Boy.
Three words…circulation, circulation, circulation
If I were so inclined, I’d do a study of ‘80’s tabloid stories vs current NY Times stories. Do you think there’d be a strong correlation?
The more I think about it…I wonder if the reason we’ll never see Grusch’s “evidence” is because it’s all just archives of the old Weekly World Newses.