Magritte's mermaid

I have been familiar with this great 1935 painting "Collective Invention" (1st image) by Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967) since my college days, when it was featured on the back cover of a book I still have in the permanent collection. (It is just one of the works by Magritte that make me chuckle.) British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker is apparently as much of a packrat as I am, but had a very different experience with the image. He saw it as a teenager attached to a story from a tabloid magazine (2nd image). Though he knew it was fake, he found it intriguing and added the clipping to the scrapbook he was keeping, and from there it ended up in the files he has to this day. It wasn't until the 1990s that Shuker traced the image to the paintbrush of Magritte. It wouldn't be the 1st mermaid hoax to be perpetrated on the public...