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Koi Alien Photo 64

Koi Alien Photo 64 appears on various websites and appears to show an alien in handcuffs being put into a car.  The photo usually is not accompanied by any text. One popular UFO website shows the photo with the title "Handcuffed Alien Getting into Feds Car" and states "This alien Picture has been dubbed fake from many sources around the globe but Since it could be a real picture we through it up for everyone to see. In our opinion the head looks fake, but then again we've never been up close and personal with an extraterrestrial so who are we to say",

In fact, this photo was one of a series of an "alien" published in the Weekly World News, a satirical newspaper, on 30 October 1990.  Numerous other articles later appeared in that publication purporting to show aliens, including Koi Alien Photo 19 ("alien" with President Bush), Koi Alien Photo 24 ("alien" with President Clinton) and Koi Alien Photo 57 (alien baby).

Other editions of the "Weekly World News" had front page stories about Abraham Lincoln being revived and another story suggesting that JFK was alive and had just been reunited with Jackie...

Greg Sandow, a UFO researcher that participates in discussion on the UFO UpDates email discussion list, wrote the following in a post on that list on 22 May 1997:

"“I do know a thing or two about the Weekly World News. I wrote a feature on it, got to know the editors, and even worked there for a week. … I went through the photo files one day, and found the outtakes from the alien/president photo shoots. What a pathetic alien -- you could see, in half the shots, flagrant cracks in the papier mache. Similarly, I doubt that intelligence agencies influence the paper's content. They'd hardly have to; as I've said, on a good day, the staff has an uproarious time thinking these things up.”

 

 

Sections below:

1. The relevant image

2. Stories and claims relating to this image

3. The real background to this image

4. Relevant online forum discussions

5. Further references and resources

6. Other material

 

 

1. The relevant image

 

 

 

2. Stories and claims relating to this image

Koi Alien Photo 64 appears on various websites and usually is not accompanied by any text. One popular UFO website shows the photo with the title "Handcuffed Alien Getting into Feds Car" and states "This alien Picture has been dubbed fake from many sources around the globe but since it could be a real picture we through it up for everyone to see. In our opinion the head looks fake, but then again we've never been up close and personal with an extraterrestrial so who are we to say",

 

 

3. The real background to this image

Koi Alien Photo 64 was one of a series of an "alien" published in the Weekly World News, a satirical newspaper.   Other editions of the "Weekly World News" had front page stories about Abraham Lincoln being revived and another story suggesting that JFK was alive and had just been reunited with Jackie...

Koi Alien Photo 64 was published on the front cover of the issue dated 30 October 1990.

 

 

The relevant article included numerous further photos of the "alien". That article is shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a later edition, dated 20 November 1990, the Weekly World News published a further article regarding this "alien" under the headline "Space Alien Escapes!".

 

 

The relevant article about this alleged escape is shown below.

 

 

For other photos of "aliens" which actually originated in the Weekly World News, see Koi Alien Photo 19 ("alien" with President Bush), Koi Alien Photo 24 ("alien" with President Clinton) and Koi Alien Photo 57 (alien baby).

Greg Sandow, a UFO researcher that participates in discussion on the UFO UpDates email discussion list, had some knowledge of the relevant "alien", which he wrote about in a post on that list on 22 May 1997:

"“I do know a thing or two about the Weekly World News. I wrote a feature on it, got to know the editors, and even worked there for a week. … I went through the photo files one day, and found the outtakes from the alien/president photo shoots. What a pathetic alien -- you could see, in half the shots, flagrant cracks in the papier mache. Similarly, I doubt that intelligence agencies influence the paper's content. They'd hardly have to; as I've said, on a good day, the staff has an uproarious time thinking these things up.”

 

During 2010, I emailed Greg Sandow to seek further details. He kindly took the time to provide the further comments (below, email to Isaac Koi dated 23 December 2010) which included stating that

"It's amusing to be reminded of all this. And amusing, too, to think of people citing these photos on the web, as if (I gather from your email) they could be real.

Here's what I know. Like many people in the US in the 80s and 90s, I read the Weekly World News with a lot of enjoyment, not believing a word of what they wrote. In the '90s, when I worked for Entertainment Weekly magazine, I did a feature article on the WWN, which — given that EW is a major national magazine — will show you how prominent the WWN had gotten.

By doing the feature, I got friendly with the editors of the WWN, and they invited me to come down to Florida, where their office was, and work for them for a week. So I did it. I think they hoped I'd come to work for them permanently, but I wasn't thinking of that. Just thought I'd have some fun.

Which I did. Almost all the stories are made up. The exceptions were stories about peculiar items of human interest that had been reported in the US press — a man, let's say, with 15 wives. The paper might run that story, and might even do original reporting on it. There was an easy way to tell which stories in the paper were real and which were faked. The real ones had bylines from actual staff members (whose names could be seen on the paper's masthead). The fake ones were written by names you wouldn't find on the paper's stafff list, and which were completely made up. The photos that might run alongside those names were photos, often, of friends of WWN staff members, who contributed their photos for a small fee. When I did my week=long stint on the staff, I was asked to make up a name to use.

The editors of the paper would make up headlines. Hubble Space Telescope Photographs Heaven. Werewolf Captured by the FBI. Dinosaur Seen on California Highway. Woman Eaten by Her Own Fur Coat. And then staff writers (such as myself, that week) would be assigned to write the stories. We also made up small items on our own. My big triumph, during my week, was having the editors like one of my small items so much that they wanted it expanded into a full-length article. It was about a girl who could read two books at the same time, because she had two brains. Typically, we made this happen in Bulgaria. That's because in the story I made up, I quoted an imaginary scientist.

The rule at the WWN was that such people couldn't live in the English-speaking world, in case someone tried to contact them to verify the story. Similarly, when we wrote a story that took place in the US, and quoted imaginary Americans, we had to make sure the names of these people (which we'd made up) weren't listed in the telephone directory for the city where the people supposedly lived. Again, that was to make it impossible for anyone to find these people and check on the story.

I don't know anything about how the stories about the political alien were concocted, apart from what I wrote online about what I saw in the photo file. But I did watch a photo being concocted about the dinosaur on the California highway. I joined a group standing around a computer terminal, watching as two staff membered debated exactly where the phony dinosaur should be Photoshopped (as we'd say now) into the photo of the highway.

I could write a lot more about this, but I think you get the idea. These stories and photos are entirely imaginary, and even when they were quoted in the press, the editors of the WWN barely tried to pretend that they were real."

The article about "a girl who could read two books at the same time, because she had two brains" mentioned by Greg Sandow appeared in the 21 January 1997 edition of the Weekly World News (at page 6) and a copy appears below to illustrate the points made by Greg Sandow (labelled "koi_ap_19o").

 

 

 

 

4. Relevant online forum discussions

 

5. Further references and resources

There is a rapid turnover of UFO material on the Internet. Many links to material on UFO websites quickly become out of date. Therefore, instead of giving many links to specific webpages I have instead included below a search box which can be used to search various leading UFO websites at the same time. You can then click on tabs at the top of the search results to list only results from forums, only results from websites I have labelled as "skeptical" etc. I have included tabs for a couple of specific websites that I find particularly useful, including the valuable archives of the UFO UpDates email discussion List. The relevant websites are all listed in the discussion of the "UFO Searchillion" search engine in Section 2.4 of the "Free UFO Researcher Starter Pack" and continues to evolve...

 

The relevant search box is one of the two main tools on this website which are intended to help reduce the amount of reinvention of the wheel within UFOlogy. The other main tool is the collection of tables of references to discussion of UFO incidents, personalities and other matters in various books. Those tables can be sorted by author, length and date. I hope these tools are useful.

 

 

 

6. Other Material

Please use the comments section below to share references to any particularly interesting relevant articles.