Topic: I know better than to trust the Weekly World Report, however...

[nasagirl]

Good Morning SGU Fans =D I have an older coworker who is taken in by all these silly claims of aliens coming to earth, the Nibiru is colliding with earth in July and etc, etc. He just sent me two links, one, the Nibiru claim, was easy to debunk as it stated NASA as the source and so I went to the source and found they had their own rebuttal, however, the only thing I can find on the internet regarding the Gootans and their attack this year is from WWN... So, I was wondering, do any of you have a good website that I can link to this poor man to ease his worries about the impending "Gootan Attack?" 

Thanks!!
~Ekko

[Karyn]

One of our fellow forum members, Parrot, did a great series of podcasts/posts on this.  I find myself referring to it often.

Link is to the first one in the series, spend the rest of your week perusing the rest of his stuff.  Very entertaining

http://www.dumbassguide.info/blog.php?bid=92

Welcome to the forums

[Halleyscomet/Wakefield]

http://skeptophilia.blogspot.com/2012/05/googling-gootans.html

So, I started doing some digging, to see if I could figure out where it all started.  And in an eerie repetition of a previous attempt to find the origin of a weird news story (this one in Pravda, regarding an alien mass burial in Uganda -- read my post about it here), I found out that the whole Gootan and Zeeba thing began four years ago in...

... wait for it...

... The Weekly World News.

And I'm thinking: does every ridiculous story in the world start with these people?  It's like they're the living embodiment of "All Roads Lead To Rome," except that it's "All Bullshit Leads To The Weekly World News."  (Yesterday's headline:  "Bat Boy to be Romney's VP")  And as I commented about the whole Ugandan alien thing, what never fails to get me is how using the wonderful cut-and-paste ability computers have, stories get lifted in toto and posted elsewhere, and depending on where the posts end up, a ridiculous claim can end up garnering unwarranted credibility simply by virtue of moving around the internet for long enough.

Of course, we as skeptics cry "Citation needed"

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/47108/aliens-fire-on-california-and-nevada/

http://weeklyworldnews.com/tag/gootan/

http://weeklyworldnews.com/tag/planet-gootan/

http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/08/the-korea-times-gets-taken-for-an-intergalactic-ride/

Well, there it is.

[snakeman]

Good Morning SGU Fans =D I have an older coworker who is taken in by all these silly claims of aliens coming to earth, the Nibiru is colliding with earth in July and etc, etc. He just sent me two links, one, the Nibiru claim, was easy to debunk as it stated NASA as the source and so I went to the source and found they had their own rebuttal, however, the only thing I can find on the internet regarding the Gootans and their attack this year is from WWN... So, I was wondering, do any of you have a good website that I can link to this poor man to ease his worries about the impending "Gootan Attack?" 

Thanks!!
~Ekko

I'm going to sound cruel and uncaring, but here goes anyway.  If this person is stupid enough to actually think that Weekly World News is an actual journalistic source rather than an exercise in freshman creative fiction writing then there's probably no hope of helping in at all.  Seriously, they have been putting out "news" that's immediately and demonstrably fiction (that wouldn't even make the cut for the worst pulp magazine) since I was a boy.  Even as a child I knew that "Russians Drill to Hell" and "Batboy Escapes, Terrorizes Mexico" were laughably false on their face and thus anything that ran with those as headlines didn't have a true word to print anywhere in it.  If a kid (and a kid that was into "In Search Of" and other nonsense at the time too) could figure that out, I'd expect an adult to figure it out.   Maybe you can find him an article at The Onion or a Saturday Night Live news story that will take his mind off this and let him worry about something else.

If you don't want to dismiss him from your life with ridicule as I just did, the only respectful/polite course I could recommend is not to waste your time searching for citations to refute the claim.  Rather, challenge him to bring you evidence from sources other than WWN that prove the story.  If you're lucky, a Google search will show him the error of his ways quickly.  If you're less lucky he'll find nothing and claim it's all being hidden by a massive conspiracy that somehow didn't get the WWN.  If you're really unlucky, he'll come back with a lot of circular references of WWN, Coast to Coast, PrisonPlanet, and others and you'll have to run for the hills.