&Quot;Weekly World News&Quot;

Did a passenger flight disappear in 1955 after taking off from New York, only to resurface "37 years later," as a reel on Facebook claimed? No, that's not true: This claim appears to be based on a 1985 hoax published by the U.S. tabloid Weekly World News, which wrote that an "airline charter flight that left New York in 1955…

Did a Kentucky man who threw a boomerang that hit himself in the head sue himself for $300,000 and win the lawsuit? No, that's not true: The story was first published in 1996 in a tabloid known for publishing made-up stories. There is no evidence the lawsuit ever happened and later iterations of the claim published elsewhere did not mention…

Did NASA's Hubble Telescope take the Weekly World News' "Photo of Heaven" as part of hundreds of photos beamed back from space to the Goddard Space Flight Center in December 1993? No, that's not true: NASA told Lead Stories that it is "not a real Hubble image," but artwork. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has provided stunning images…

Did Russia publicly confirm the existence of a secret civilization under Antarctica? No, that's not true: The claim originated from a satirical fictional story labeled as such. The Russian government has never publicly revealed anything that would back up the existence of the purported "organism 46B" living under Antarctica. Many of the posts and articles implying the opposite in the…

Did Josephine Myrtle Corbin have four legs, raise a family and die at 60? Yes, most of these facts about her in a post are fairly accurate -- she was a real person who lived from 1868 to 1928 and she died just a week before her 60th birthday of an infection -- but the photos paired with the caption…

Were several world leaders photographed in meetings with aliens? No, that's not true: This collection of edited photos do not all come from the same source, but all have clear clues that they are fabricated and that none of the scenes are real. The collection of photos appears in a Facebook post on December 16, 2021. It was captioned: Extraterrestrial…

The well known fake news website The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense strikes again, this time with a hoax article titled: "BREAKING: Federal Court Bans CNN From White House Press Room". The fake story opens: In the interest of truth and democracy, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously to remove CNN's status as "free press" and…

TMZWorldNews (not TMZ.com!) has recently published a trending story claiming an alien was found hibernating in the Great Pyramid of Giza. We strongly suspect this story is a hoax because TMZWorldNews is known more for publishing made up stories to drive click traffic than for its expertise on ancient Egyptian archaeology and xenobiology. The story starts: In the March 2000…