My 1994 Appearance in the Weekly World News
So this story is 100% true as my memory will permit.
When I was a kid, I had an uncle who worked for the Weekly World News. His name was Dick Kulpa, and he was employed as their art director or managing editor for more than a decade.
Sadly, he died in 2021.
He was a bit of an eccentric dude who is probably most famous for inventing Bat Boy.
I was born in raised in the Rockford, Illinois, area. The Weekly World News was based somewhere in Florida. Naturally, I didn't see much of my uncle growing up. We never were particularly close, which is a shame because we ended up working similar careers and sharing similar creative aspirations.
My uncle was a bit of a ghost story among my family ("The Successful One"). He'd come back every so often for holidays and weddings and funerals, but we mostly never saw him. One of my most vivid memories is the time he raced the number zero car — drawn as a donut on both doors and on the roof — at the Rockford Speedway. As I recall, he won a feature heat and finished second in the demolition derby to close out the night. I might have that backwards.
The guy drove race cars in demo derbies. He was as close to a hero as I had as a 10-year-old kid.
Around Christmas or Easter in 1993 or 1994, my uncle tells the family that he's pitched a story to the News about a game of hide-and-seek gone bad. He wants to use photos of my siblings, cousins, and me as the kids in the story. Everyone agrees that this is the greatest idea of all time.
In case you didn't know, all the stories in the Weekly World News are made up. Unless you believe Men in Black.
The issue hit the stands in the fall of 1994. One cousin ended up getting cut from the feature. I texted him tonight to get his memories about the story and he admitted to crying when he found out he was cut. To be fair, he was seven.
So that's the story of how I ended up in the Weekly World News as a missing 10 year old named Ole Lykke. I've attached the image of the story to this post. And here's another link to the Google Books search result, which lets you zoom in pretty far.
Happy reading.