This article is about the original footage. For the 2006 feature film based on events surrounding it, seeAlien Autopsy (2006 film).
VHS cover ofAlien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction
Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction is a 1995pseudo-documentary containing grainy black and white footage of ahoaxed alienautopsy.[1][2] In 1995, film purporting to show an alien autopsy conducted shortly after theRoswell incident was released by British entrepreneurRay Santilli.[3] The footage aired on television networks around the world.[4][3]Fox television broadcast the purported autopsy, hosted byJonathan Frakes, on August 28, 1995, under the titleAlien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, and re-broadcast it twice, each time to higher ratings.[5] The footage was also broadcast on UK'sChannel 4,[6] and repackaged for the home video market. The program was an overnight sensation,[7] withTime magazine declaring that the film had sparked a debate "with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since theZapruder film".[8]
The program was thoroughly debunked; the footage was shot on an inexpensive set constructed in a London living room. Its alien bodies were hollow plaster casts filled withoffal, sheep brains, and raspberry jam.[9] Multiple participants inAlien Autopsy stated that misleading editing had removed their opinions that the footage was a hoax.[8][7] Santilli admitted in 2006 that the film was a fake, though he continued to claim it was inspired by genuine, but lost footage.[7]
On April 4, 2006, days before the release of the British feature film,Alien Autopsy,Sky broadcast a documentary,Eamonn Investigates: Alien Autopsy, presented byEamonn Holmes.[10] In this program, Ray Santilli and fellow producer Gary Shoefield admitted that they had created the 1995 footage.[11]
Shoefield and Santilli had filmed a simulated autopsy on a fabricated alien, based upon what Santilli claimed to have seen in 1992. According to Santilli, a set was constructed in the living room of an empty flat in Rochester Square, Camden Town, London. John Humphreys, an artist and sculptor, was employed to construct two dummy alien bodies over three weeks. He filled plaster cast sculptures of alien bodies with raspberry jam, sheep brains, chicken entrails, and knuckle joints obtained from a butcher to serve as organs. Humphreys also played the role of the chief examiner, to allow him to control the effects being filmed. There were two separate attempts at making the footage. After filming, the team disposed of the "bodies" by cutting them into small pieces and placing them in rubbish bins across London.[11]
Alien artifacts, supposedly items recovered from the crash site, were depicted in the footage. These included alien symbols and six-finger control panels, which Santilli describes as being the result of artistic license on his part. These artifacts were also created by Humphreys. The footage also showed a man reading a statement "verifying" his identity as the original cameraman and the source of the footage. Santilli and Shoefield admitted in the 2006 documentary that they had found an unidentified homeless man on the streets of Los Angeles, persuaded him to play the role of the cameraman, and filmed him in a motel.[11]
Alien Autopsy was derided in the media, and was the subject of numerousparodies. In 1995,The X-Files featured alien autopsy footage that the skeptical Agent Scully decries as "evenhokier than the one they aired on the Fox network".[12] It was satirized again in the 1996X-Files episode "Jose Chung'sFrom Outer Space".[7][13] In 1998, Fox aired a new special,The World's Greatest Hoaxes and Secrets Revealed!, which debunked the 1995 footage.[14] A fictionalized version of the creation of the footage and its release was retold in the comedy filmAlien Autopsy (2006).[15][16]
