By Claudia Wallis

"Looking for a good story," aspiring Journalist Cynthia Dwyer, 49, borrowed $500 from her mother last April and caught a flight to Iran. Last week she returned with what she admits may be "the only exclusive I'll ever have." To get it, she endured nine months in a Tehran prison, a trial on espionage charges, conviction and finally deportation. Delighted to be back in Amherst, N.Y., with her husband and three children, the "53rd hostage" was saving most of her experiences for a book she plans to write. Dwyer did say that she had been duped into and subsequently arrested for agreeing to participate in a "plan" to free the hostages. "I think they wanted to grab somebody after [the rescue attempt in] Tabas," she explained. "I was a very convenient, naive person to grab." Dwyer was not under "heavy pressure" to confess. Said she: "I think they just wanted to say to their people they'd finally caught a spy."

The aim is the same as Phileas Fogg's, the means even less down to earth. In a gossamer-thin (.004 in.) polyurethane balloon rigged with a 14-ft. by 10-ft. unpressurized gondola, famed Aeronaut Maxie Anderson, 46, set out from Luxor, Egypt, last week, along with fellow Businessman and Adventurer Don Ida, 47. Their plan: to travel eastward around the world--south of Iran and the U.S.S.R. (hostile airspace), south of the Himalayas (deadly to balloons), over the Pacific and North America to an eastern Mediterranean landing spot--in less than ten days. To complete the high-speed journey, the eleven-story-high, helium-filled Jules Verne would fly 30,000 ft. high, where it would be propelled by 150-mile-an-hour jet streams. The two Americans would face average temperatures of -- 50DEG F.

and air pressure so low that even with oxygen masks, breathing may be difficult. Said Anderson, owner of an Albuquerque mineral firm: "If we can pull this off, I want to lead the first mining expedition into space. It just might be possible." Not so fast. At week's end, the pair was forced down near New Delhi, and it was not known whether the Jules Verne would rise again.

They graduated from high school together in 1930, and had not seen each other since.

He went off to college, eventually founding a Nebraska radio station. She married the local soda jerk, who eventually became Vice President. Then, in 1979, shortly after the death of his wife, Max Brown, 68, decided to write a letter to his former Huron (S. Dak.) High School classmate. Muriel Humphrey, Hubert's widow, also 68, quickly responded, and Max ventured to ask her out to lunch. Eighteen months later --and a week before Valentine's Day--the two were quietly married. Her four children and ten grandchildren and his two children and five grandchildren attended the ceremony at Humphrey's Tonka Bay, Minn., home. Said one family member: "There was not a dry eye among us."

Celebrated Animal Trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams, 44,

regularly cavorts with leopards, tigers and elephants, but this year he is really sticking his neck out. The latest addition to Williams' act at Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus: one-year-old Dickie, the Big Top's first trained giraffe since Edith retired in 1938. Dickie has been studying with Williams since infancy.

"Just ten minutes at a time," says Gunther, Dickie's attention span being inversely proportional to his neck size. So far, he has learned to strut out into the ring with a cadre of elephants -- "They've never seen anything like him," confides Williams -- and then mount a rotating drum with Gunther's ten-year-old son Buffy on his back. This, says Dickie's proud master, "is a big success for a giraffe.

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