The Alien Autopsy Film

The alien autopsy film is 17 minutes of grainy black-and-white footage, presented in 1995 by London video entrepreneur Ray Santilli as 1947 military film of a Roswell-recovered being under dissection. Broadcast worldwide (Fox's "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?" drew enormous ratings), it became perhaps the most viewed piece of alleged UFO evidence in history.

Santilli said he bought the reels from an elderly American military cameraman. No cameraman was ever produced for verification, and film stock samples provided for dating never included verifiable autopsy frames. In 2006, promoting a British comedy about the affair, Santilli and partner Gary Shoefield admitted the footage was a "restoration": they claimed genuine film they had once seen had degraded, so they rebuilt it, staging the autopsy in a London flat with sculptor John Humphreys, who confirmed making the bodies (filled with sheep organs and other materials) and playing a surgeon. The "few surviving original frames" they still asserted have never been substantiated.

A small, pot-bellied, six-fingered humanoid dissected by gowned figures, with period-dressed staging and deliberately poor camerawork.

A confessed fabrication in all its viewable content. Special-effects professionals had identified the staging within months in 1995; pathologists had catalogued anatomical absurdities; Kodak was never permitted proper stock verification. The 2006 confession closed the question, with the "restoration of a real original" caveat treated by researchers as face-saving.

The film shaped 1990s UFO culture and injured serious Roswell research by association, a damage ufologists themselves documented. It remains the reference case for provenance discipline: an artifact with no checkable chain of custody, however compelling, is theater. The Nazca mummies coverage regularly cites it as precedent.

None required beyond the record above; residual believers in a "real original film" hold a claim with zero evidence, kept alive by the confessors' own marketing instincts.