Gazelle Talk

Well, said Acme Newspictures, it seems there was a grass-eating, 50 m.p.h. Gazelle Boy--and here's his picture to prove it. At the moment, he's standing still; but at full speed he'd just be a blur. Sure there was a Gazelle Boy, said the U.P.--and here's an eye-witness story by his captor, one Prince Fawaz el Shaalan. A lot of U.S. newspapers and magazines* printed the picture with goggle-eyed captions telling how a jeepload of hunters had cut him out of a herd of gazelles in the Syrian desert.

Last week, the A.P. got into the act with a dispatch from a Jerusalem staffer: "The story was told in Palestine and Trans-Jordan bars and found its way into print. . . . The Gazelle Boys now number five. . . . One, the wags say, is being trained by oil companies to do a 50 m.p.h. pipeline patrol. Another . . . is being taught English by professors . . . at Beirut, so they can learn what the gazelles talk about besides love."

* But not TIME (Sept. 9), which reported the story as a phony, pointing out that the captive was not even tanned all over.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.