IN 1993 Eddie Clontz ran his most unexpected story yet. “Elvis dead,” it read — “At 58”. Americans by then were so accustomed to tales of Elvis being alive and well — largely thanks to Clontz’s newspaper — that the story seemed to be a scoop, 16 years late and oddly feasible all at once.

The Weekly World News began in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1979 when the National Enquirer, America’s undisputed queen of supermarket tabloids, switched to colour. The publisher, Generoso Pope, was unhappy to leave his old monochrome press lying idle and so launched the new publication, filling it at first with the leftover celebrity gossip that would not fit into the Enquirer. Two years later he hired Clontz.

Harold Clontz, as he was really called, had little newspaper experience. He had dropped out of school in Charlotte, North Carolina, at 16, and had found work as a wire editor on the Evening Independent in Florida. No doubt his time spent assessing the suitability of stories for an introspective, conservative city paper gave him a yearning for all the more fascinating stories he had to ignore.

At the Weekly World News he progressed from desk editor to managing editor and then to Editor. Once in the chair he wasted little time in turning away from celebrity wife-beaters and snapshots of the First Lady on a bad hair day to concentrate on the unworldly and the barely believable.

Many of his “scoops” have earned an affectionate place in American folklore, such as the “bat boy” reportedly discovered in a cave in West Virginia, and a newly discovered hive of orphaned baby ghosts. The best of them, such as “World War II Bomber Found on Moon” were copied years later in Britain by the Sunday Sport before it turned exclusively to soft porn. His policy was one of extending complete credence, telling his staff to “let the source tell the story”. He urged them to resist the journalistic tendency to undo a good story by investigating it. “You have got to know when to stop asking questions,” he liked to say. Circulation rose steadily, peaking at 1.2 million with a 1988 edition that declared “Elvis is Alive — and living in Kalamazoo”.

His staff of 18 included exiles from Fleet Street, complete beginners and the one-hit Sixties pop star Bob Lind, and he famously kept them in line with a water-pistol that he kept in his desk drawer. But he paid salaries well above those of newspapers with bigger circulations and much more gravitas. “We have to pay them a lot,” Clontz once said. “We are, in effect, asking them to end their careers. We’re the French Foreign Legion of journalism.”

In 1992 he spelt out his philosophy to the Columbia Journalism Review: “Everybody else is trying to demystify. We’re trying to do the opposite . . . we’re in a constant struggle against medicine, science and religion. In religion they’re telling people more and more: ‘Miracles don’t really happen’. So I have to keep coming back with ‘Blind mom can see after baby gives her a hug’.”

Not all the stories Clontz sanctioned were so fluffy or innocuous. Many touched on sensitive issues where Americans were most willing to suspend credibility: “Cuba Launches Shark Attack on US — Castro’s Evil Plot to Terrorise our Beaches”, for instance, or “Al-Qaeda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes”. Recent tales told that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been brought back to life through voodoo to aid terrorism. If support for the war was flagging, then readers were told that Saddam Hussein had played chess with Colonel Gaddafi and Fidel Castro, using humans for pieces and executing them as the game progressed.

Many stories, too, had a resonance with right-wing religious fundamentalists and end-time believers. In one, Heaven is photographed by a Russian space probe. In November 2002, the Ten Commandments grew to thirteen when three more were discovered beneath Mount Sinai. Two of them, predictably enough, forbade drugs and homosexuality. “It’s a shame that these holy commandments were lost all those years ago. We might have been spared the Aids epidemic and much of the drug abuse that plagues society today,” one theologian was reported as saying.

Clontz’s editorial column, My America with Ed Anger, relied on the slippery expedient of expressing extreme views while relying on the fallback that it was all just a joke — an expedient which continued after Clontz left the paper three years ago. “Filthy, child-molesting vermin are being treated with kid gloves by our bleeding-heart criminal justice system,” one recent column announced. “This scum should be butchered like hogs.” There were certainly readers in America who took these views at face value and agreed — and probably more than the thousand or so who wrote in wanting to adopt a baby ghost.

In the 1997 science fiction film Men in Black, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are seen flicking through the Weekly World News to find out what’s “really” going on. And in the pantheon of American journalism — which by European standards is often pompous, grandiloquent and introspective — Clontz’s roundup of oddities from across the globe certainly offered a fresh approach.

With his resonant baritone voice, raucous laugh and tireless lust for fun, Clontz was a true showman and a fearsome speechmaker. But he was respected for more than just his buffoonery: he was a great reader and a fount of (genuine) knowledge on many subjects. He considered himself a staunch Confederate and believed very strongly that the South should return to self-determination.

Clontz, who did not, by his own reckoning, live quite as long as Elvis, is survived by his wife, Lenora, and by a son, Bryan.

Eddie Clontz, journalist, was born in 1948. He died of liver and kidney disease, and complications arising from diabetes, on January 26, 2004, aged 56.