For inquiring minds that really want to know, a few untold stories you missed at the supermarket

Standing in supermarket lines I am fascinated by the headlines on those newspapers that one sees only in supermarket lines.

They seem to reveal a world of phenomena that lie beyond the reach and resources of our regular daily newspapers.

It is like that warning on ancient maps--”Here there be dragons!”

Now and then I buy one to check out the astonishing promise of some headline, only to find, on reading the story inside, that it is unattributed, or patently untrue.

But these papers prosper. Who are they for? They are for those who have a very low threshold of skepticism. They believe in witchcraft, in the devil, in fortunetellers, in reincarnation, in extraterrestrial visitors, in every theory of conspiracy; and they believe in miracles.

The other day I bought three of them, and, after reading them, I feel that there is an other world that I am not acquainted with.

Near Salerno, Italy, for example, doctors and nurses were astounded to hear an unborn baby singing the Toreador song from the opera “Carmen.”

Dr. Ettore Malatesta of the Ospedale Maternita said the singing fetus defied all scientific explanation. Most of the stories in these newspapers defy all scientific explanation.

In this case, the mother said that when she was only six months pregnant she heard her child singing “La donna e mobile” from “Rigoletto.” At seven months, it could reel off arias from seven operas. It had picked them up, evidently, from its father and mother, who enjoyed singing their favorites around the house.

Hardly less interesting to expectant mothers, many of whom stand in supermarket lines, is the story of a young woman who gave birth to a half-chimpanzee. What happened, we read, is that some blundering assistant, supposedly delivering human sperm to a fertility clinic in West Germany, accidentally delivered chimpanzee sperm from a sperm bank for zoos, and it was implanted in a 19-year-old married woman who carried the fetus full term and delivered the infant half-man, half-chimp. Remarkable as it was, however, it could not, evidently, sing opera. Perhaps fortunately, the baby died two days later.

Both witchcraft and the devil surface in the story of Sara Webb, a seamstress member of a witch’s coven on London’s west side. She and some of her friends were meeting at her apartment when Sara decided to invite Satan to the party. She began chanting some ancient rituals and tearing off her clothes and shouting “Take me, take me!” Soon all the guests were doing the same and the party degenerated into a sexual orgy. An hour later Sara was seen talking to a stranger on the balcony. Then she began screaming and the stranger disappeared. She claimed that it was Satan, and he had blinded her. In a London hospital a doctor is said to have said, “The retinas in her eyeballs were burned horribly, either by a very intense bright light or by a flame.”

A story that is reported as fact, without attribution, states that “thousands of people who have disappeared from the Bermuda Triangle have been kidnapped by space aliens and are being held in prison in space.”

This giant space station is maintained by aliens at a height of more than 125 miles above Earth, but it has been spotted by a recent unmanned space probe. These aliens are from a far-off galaxy and have a body chemistry based on methane gas, which makes them smell bad. They would have invaded Earth already, but they want to overcome their smell first, so they can pass as human.

Another Page 1 headline says “Life After Death Shocker!” and tells the story of a mother and daughter, killed in a tragic accident, who returned to life three hours later to provide doctors with evidence of life after death!

“In separate interviews with the women, doctors discovered that the two shared an incredible journey into the beyond and brought back amazingly vivid recollections of the afterlife.

“What we have found,” said Dr. Antonio Mora, chief of medicine at University Hospital in Madrid, Spain, “is nothing less than irrefutable proof that life after death does in fact exist.”

During their three hours on the other side, the mother and daughter met dead relatives in a lush green meadow, including the husband and father, Esteban, who had died of cancer in 1981. “Esteban stepped forward, kissed his wife and daughter, then told them, ‘You do not belong here. It is not your time.’ ”

“I Am Hitler’s Son,” says a “world exclusive” in another paper. In his exclusive interview, however, David Lewis states that the “mild-mannered businessman” he interviewed in a Munich cafe merely “claims” to be the illegitimate son of Hitler and Eva Braun. “It was largely because of my sister and I that he married Eva Braun in the very last days of his life,” the unidentified man declared.

Of course Hitler and Eva could have had a daughter and a son and farmed them out to foster parents; it is easier to believe that than that an Italian child could sing “La donna e mobile” in the womb, that aliens are holding prisoners from the Bermuda Triangle in orbit, and that two Spanish women visited their late husband and father on the other side, only to return.

The amazing thing is that the kind of people who buy these newspapers are the kind of people who say they don’t believe anything they read in their daily newspapers, most of which are trying to tell the truth.

I’ll bet they don’t even believe me.