Alien Autopsy: History's Greatest Hoaxes
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In 1995, a short black and white film was shown to a specially selected audience in a private cinema in London.

He claimed to show an authentic autopsy on the body of an extraterrestrial being that had been recovered from a flying disc which had crashed near Roswell, New Mexico on June 2nd, 1947. The audience was astonished. But where did the footage come from and was it real? This looked potentially real. This could have been scientists in the United States cutting up dead aliens.

All we did was enhance the film, restore the film and we marketed it. The film deserved to be released although there wasn't enough of it anymore. There were a few frames left.

Alien autopsy? Roswell? They've actually, this time, they've really found the alien beings? I had seen all the Ministry of Defense UFO files. I had never seen anything like this before. Where I had seen it, of course, is in sci-fi movies. When I first heard about the alien autopsy, I thought, "Oh, maybe, maybe."

This extraterrestrial body lying on a dissecting table, I thought, "Wow, what a great image." In this episode, we talk to the team behind some of the most controversial and talked-about footage ever filmed to hear in their own words how and why the film was made. I filmed it. I developed it. I edited it. This had to last forever. This had to be scrutinized to death and real.

no idea the amount of stuff we had to go through to make it work. We had some chicken guts, leg of lamb bones and a few sorted bits. It convinced a lot of people simply because it was so completely unique and different. I could pat myself on the back and say, "Oh, John, you did a great job there." But it's because there was something there for me to work with.

Certainly something happened in '47, certainly there was an autopsy. What it is, was, we don't know. The so-called "alien autopsy" film footage created a huge stir, not only with the television executives at the screening, but also with the public at large. The film clearly shows what appears to be the body of an alien creature being examined by a number of personnel in laboratory coats.

It was claimed that it was filmed after the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947 and that it showed an authentic autopsy. I don't believe in aliens, yet when you watch it, it makes you think again because you think, "Wow, it does look really quite convincing." So if aliens had crashed, that's what it would look like if an autopsy was carried out. The bit where they take the brain out is, "Ugh," you know, and it looks really convincing.

But I'm a skeptic and therefore there's a major part of me which goes, I know this must be a hoax because I don't believe in aliens. But there is a little bit in that film that looks good enough to make you think, hmm, you know, maybe, just maybe, it could be just a scintilla of truth to me.

This basically looks like a human mannequin that someone's just thought, "Okay, well, they're going to be smarter, so let's make a bigger head." And, "Oh, I know, let's add an extra finger, because that's a really kind of otherworldly concept." I don't know. Maybe that's what aliens really look like. I'm guessing different atmospheres, different evolution would probably mean that they look significantly more different than us. We have no idea. So you look at it and you go, "Well, why not?"

As one watched the documentary further, one saw that as they worked with the corpse of the alien, it seemed rather, shall we say, rubbery. Response was not the kind of solid way a corpse would move. The internal organs looked like meat scraps or something. It didn't look like an autopsy procedure.

I think one of the big problems behind the alien autopsy footage is that the figures are very humanoid, which suggests convergent evolution across some people will say just space, but also some people think that these people may have been Tempornauts, travelled across time. They do look suspiciously humanoid and they do seem to conform a little bit too exactly to the kind of Dan Dare 1940s image of the alien.

In the 1990s, the British Ministry of Defense operated a UFO reports desk. It was run by Nick Pope and it was the nearest thing to a real-life X-Files department. Pope was at that first screening and saw the footage.

I was of course intrigued to hear about this and interested when I got the invitation. I went along with no particular expectations. I turned up at the Museum of London to find that there were no other government people there so far as I could tell. And with no preamble, we were just shown this rather grainy, occasionally out of focus piece of footage.

The pitch here is this is 1947. Well, wait a minute, the first thing is the thing's in black and white. We had color footage, for example, during the Second World War, and we don't, when we get to those important moments, suddenly notice that it all goes out of focus at the critical point. Firstly, if this is really Roswell in '47, why have we kind of gone three steps back when it comes to the technology?

I was interested, amused. I think some people were a little bit shocked and surprised. Some people in the audience clearly believed it. I did not. I suspect that I was invited not to endorse this because I never would have endorsed it, but to maybe behind the scenes add a little bit of credibility unofficially.

We know that when people talk about things, they feel realer. Does this look kosher? Well actually, if you look at the clothes they were wearing, even apparently the film made sense from the era it was taken, it seems to, you know, possibly be real. After the screening in London, the producers took offers from broadcasters across the world to screen it. The largest deal was reportedly done with the Fox network.

This thing explodes into the public spotlight and into the public consciousness. It gets sold to Fox and there's a TV special. Then clips get licensed and little extracts and stills get shown by almost every major news media outlet on the face of the planet.

Fox Television broadcast the footage in the United States on August 28, 1995, under the title "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?" attracting an estimated audience of nearly 12 million people. The program caused a sensation. I think people watched the alien autopsy out of intrigue. Perhaps, though, on another level, we watched it out of fear.

If there is something else out there, in the same way that the caveman feared the big bad dinosaurs, is there a part of us that thinks, well, are we safe? Do we need to watch this just to make sure that we know everything? Are we living in states that are so protective of us that there is a danger that we don't know about? Well, I think part of the people watching it watched it out of intrigue. I wonder if part of it was as well this notion of,

If this is true, what does it mean for me as an individual in my safety? Extraterrestrials have a built-in plausibility unlike maybe Bigfoot and Nessie because yes, you know, there's this enormous universe out there and statistically, sure. How could extraterrestrial life not exist somewhere in these billions, trillions of stars?

Have they visited us? That's where they would disagree. But it's not an implausible idea in the same way that Nessie or Bigfoot are implausible ideas. When this story broke, I did not get a call saying, "Nick, what's going on? Why have the Americans disclosed this, maybe through some circuitous route? Why has this leaked out?"

And the fact that I didn't get that call is indicative in and of itself of the fact that no one asked because everyone knew, or certainly everyone in government knew, come on, it's just a fake. It's a piece of hoax footage cleverly constructed to play into pop culture memes about aliens and cover-ups.

But far from seeing the autopsy footage as a joke, many viewers were actually convinced that what they were watching was real. Not only that, but the experts who appeared in the Fox special to comment on what they were seeing were largely misleading intentionally.

When the autopsy footage was screened on Fox, Fox got on hand a panel of experts who knew about special effects, including Stan Winston, big name. And when he sees that the knife cutting in and the gore or blood oozing out, Winston is looking at this and going, this is a really good job. I can't just knock this off quickly. Someone has spent a lot of time and money on this if they are faking it.

He estimated that whoever put this film together had spent $300,000. As we'll see, that was a somewhat overinflated figure, but it was enough for someone like Winston to go, "Look, that is just not some knock-up fake in some kid's bedroom. That is done by proper movie people who know what they're doing." It looks real to Winston. How are the likes of the rest of us supposed to take it? If it's good enough for him, then what do I think?

When I first saw the alien autopsy film, my antennae were already up. "Oh really?" I said. "Alien autopsy? Roswell? They've actually, this time, they've really found the alien beings?" One of the first things that came to my mind was that, "Isn't it interesting that the aliens look just like

Our culture has imagined in an evolutionary way, imagined that they would look. What an amazing coincidence that this has happened because we've imagined all sorts of blobs,

robotic forms, monstrous, cyclopean mothman and so forth. It is time, Earthman. And then in 1961, we get the little big-eyed, big-headed humanoid type, a sort of cute version, a futuristic version of us.

The Alien Autopsy film has been huge news for two decades. It's got this wonderful appeal that seems to just go on and on and on. Yes, you get the skeptics such as myself who just go, "It's a hoax, it's junk, that's the end of it."

But there are so many ufologists, alien obsessives out there who still look at this film and go, "You know what? This is true." And actually there's a conspiracy there to try and make it look as though it's a hoax, but actually it's real. And this is the absolute real McCoy. And the people behind the footage are absolutely masterful at keeping it running.

The man who owned the autopsy footage, hosted the screening in London and then sold the clips to Fox and other broadcasters around the world is a man called Ray Santilli, a music and record producer based in London.

The commercial exercise was to put it out there and let people make up their own minds. We gave it to the broadcasters and said, "Look, you investigate it." They spent millions of pounds investigating the film, making their documentaries and programs, including Fox in America, all of which were very successful. But we really didn't care whether they came back and said that the film was real or not. The whole idea really was to put it out there and let people make up their own mind.

Santilli has since admitted that the Alien autopsy film was actually a reconstruction containing only, in his words, "a few frames" from the original 22 rolls of film which he says he bought from a retired military cameraman back in 1992. We took a gamble at the beginning because we didn't want to go out there and say, "Look, this film is 100% genuine."

we knew that we'd restored certain parts of it. So our idea at the time was to give the film to broadcasters and say to them, "Look, you investigate it. Whatever you decide, you can make a documentary about it and you can say it's rubbish or you can say it's real. We actually don't care, but we would like to have the rights to the documentary you make." They went ahead, they all made their programmes. Most of them, in fact, all of them said that the footage was real.

We took those programs and we had video rights to those programs, which is how we made our money. Ray Santilli is, you know, a pretty complicated figure. His background is in media production. He's not the likely source or a conduit for an alien autopsy film. But, you know, he creates this very compelling story that he's been in touch with this old US Army Air Force cameraman who had filmed the autopsy and the crash landing.

And it was through him that he gets hold of this footage. Like all hoaxes, the person putting the hoax out is always saying that this has come from somewhere else. Just like the Hitler Diaries, the man who sold it wasn't the man who originated it. The film deserved to be released, although there wasn't enough of it anymore. There were a few frames left.

What we did was, and the way I see it is no different from, you know, you look at many of the great works of art hanging in the galleries out there that have been restored so many times that, you know, they bear no resemblance to really what the original artists had done at the time. All we did was enhance the film, restore the film. We were not able to examine the authenticity of the content itself because we weren't there in 1947. All we have is the image.

What we were able to check was the background of the photographer. We were able to verify his story in terms of his career and the reasons that he sold the film to us, because he was in quite desperate straits at the time. All of that was genuine. So, you know, it was a common-sense call, actually, on our part.

Santilli admits that only a few frames of the original footage, less than one second's worth, shot back in 1947, was actually used in the final autopsy film, and that the majority of what we see is just a clever reconstruction. The producer, I think rather brilliantly, said, "Well, the original stock rotted. What I've made is a faithful reconstruction of what I saw."

and a tiny little bit of it, six frames I think he claimed, which is about a quarter of a second, is real. That's enough. That's easily enough of a hook. It's a masterstroke that. It's really, really clever. You only have to keep a tiny little scrap of doubt in people's minds and go, "Well, yeah, a lot of it was fake. Had to be. Had to be." You know, the exposure to the alien stuff rotted the tape stock.

but this little bit we managed to preserve because the truth is really important to us. A great deal of expertise went into making sure that everything matched the original film. If you looked at it, the medical instrumentation was exactly the same. Sockets in the wall and the screw fixings, they were all as they would have been on the original film.

The camera was exactly the same camera that was used in 1947 in terms of model. The film stock as well was carefully selected. The whole purpose was to match the original film and then knit them together. Give him some marks for nerve. This is a good quality in a hoaxer, in a forger, and so forth. You need to have nerve because most of us would shy away from the boldness that it might take.

But he attempted to get the filmmaking experts, Kodak, to authenticate the film. Oh, that's a bold mark, isn't it?

What he tried to do was bring in a little piece of leader film from, you know, this is secret, highly secret film of this alien autopsy. We can't bring that in and so forth. But we just want you to authenticate that this is actual 16 millimeter leader film that would have been used in 1947 and so forth. Well, of course, Kodak, I'm sure, could have done that, but they were too smart to buy that. Because if we're going to authenticate something, we want to have all of it.

This is validating what the skeptics have said all along. Somebody made a model and they shot a modern film made to look like a kind of 1940s film. But...

Of course, the door was left open. You're doing the admission that it was a fake, which itself gets some fresh media coverage, but for all the believers and the conspiracy theorists, you just give them that last little bit of hope. Well, don't worry, there are five genuine frames in there somewhere. So if the alien autopsy footage had been recreated, how was that done? Where? And by whom?

Well, unbelievably, the set for the autopsy film was constructed in the living room of an empty apartment in Camden Town, London. John Humphreys, a special effects artist and sculptor, was contracted for four weeks to construct two dummy alien bodies. He claims that Ray Santilli showed him excerpts from the original autopsy footage filmed in 1947. When I saw the footage,

It was quite badly degraded, but there were glimpses of information that enabled me to scope from. I mean, I sometimes work on films and be asked to make a Greek god from a picture the size of a postage stamp. It's something I can do. Based on what he said he'd seen in the original autopsy footage, Humphreys began recreating the alien body in his workshop down in Sussex.

I've based the idea of the six fingers and toes from what I thought I could see in the original footage. The head on the sculpture is basically my interpretation of what I saw. I think most people, when they create an alien, they do everything over-exaggerated. But from what I could see, it was much more humanoid. And so I've tried to keep it as subtle as possible to reflect what I saw.

It is absolutely clear that a fantastic amount of organization and planning went into making this film just look just right. A lot of things looked the part. There's a telephone mounted on the wall with a curled flex. Initially, people studying the film looked and went, there were no telephones with curled flexes in 1947. But people did some digging and they found telephones with curled flexes in America in the 1930s.

The clock on the wall seemed to move properly with the time. The whole autopsy seemed to take about an hour and a half, and throughout the film, the clock is shown to have been moving correctly. The elements looked just right. It was very, very well put together. It was a really nice piece of production on what must have been a pretty limited budget. And so, therefore, to the untrained eye, and even to a lot of trained eyes, this looked potentially real. This could have been real.

scientists in the United States cutting up dead aliens. I don't know if it was a man or a woman. I couldn't tell from the genitalia area, so my interpretation was how I've done it. I believe we were visited at Roswell and the beings were very humanoid. They had eyes which were bigger than human eyes, but not ridiculously big. The black covering may have been some kind of protective type lens for our atmosphere.

The mouth on the alien was quite small. The head was big in comparison, but maybe they have a greater brain capacity than ourselves. What's going on with the belly? I think the beings had been decomposing for a short period of time and there was some swelling. Maybe if you're from another planet, you may decompose quicker in our atmosphere, who knows? The alien itself was, especially with hindsight, having been decomposing

a bit suckered in by it at the time, is a bit disappointing in as much as it conformed very closely with versions of aliens created in comic books and sci-fi and all the rest of it. My feeling is that if there is intelligent life outside of what we've experienced so far, it's unlikely to look anything like us.

According to Humphreys, the alien insides and brains were made using sheep innards set in raspberry jam, alongside chicken entrails and knuckle joints, which were bought from a butcher shop in Smithfield Meat Market in London. To do the effects on the original autopsy, we didn't have much time or much budget.

So I went down to Smithfield Market, to Cosby's, who supplied me with the items I required. We had some chicken guts, some leg of lamb bones and a few assorted bits. We used all these giblets, so to speak, to create the brain and the innards. As hoaxes go, it looked great. It played in very firmly to what I wanted to see from something like that.

It all looked, I don't want to say plausible, but I'm left with nothing else. It all looked plausible to me. I think to a large extent there's quite a simple reason as to why we want to believe these things are true. And I think part of it is because the belief that something so extraordinary could be true, A, takes us out of sort of the banality of day to day, but B, makes other things perhaps that we hope for possible as well.

So if something so amazing could happen, maybe my world isn't as set in this kind of grind of day-to-day understanding of the triviality of it. Maybe there's something bigger, more exciting out there. And I think because of that, we just generally want to believe. Lots of people who saw the footage, special effects guys, they all thought it was real.

And it convinced a lot of people simply because he was so completely unique and different. I could pat myself on the back and say, "Oh, John, you did a great job there." But it's because there was something there for me to work with. Like all great hoaxes, the Alien Autopsy film relies on an event a lot of people are obsessed with and has a sort of grain of truth to it.

It relies on the supposed crash reported by the US Air Force of a flying saucer in 1947 in Roswell. Then Air Force later changed their story to the fact that actually it was a weather balloon and it wasn't a flying saucer. But there's enough there for the ufologists to look at and go, "Ah, there must be a story there. It's been covered up." Because everyone thinks that the Americans are always covering up, every day, all the time.

That's what the Indian and Hopsi film builds on and so it piggybacks something that people believe and it adds to it. So therefore, the dovetailing therefore gives it more credibility. After filming, the team are supposed to have disposed of the bodies by cutting them into small pieces and placing them in trash cans across London.

They filmed the autopsy, which takes a bit of time. They then had to get rid of a body. Now, that's not easy to do. I don't know how many bodies you've got rid of, but it's difficult. So they had to apparently split up the bits of the alien and deposit it in various bins around Camden.

The idea of one of them arriving at a public bin, "This is already full of meat. Look, there's long fingers poking out of this." It was no good. I thought this was my section. The story of how the film is put together, it almost feels comic. The fact that it wasn't filmed in Roswell in 1947, but it was actually filmed in a flat in Camden in North London, by some chances, we're basically having a laugh.

I love the way that they acquire this awful entrails from butchers. They're having to sort of smuggle alien body up the stairs into the flat. And then when it comes to the final dismemberment,

They're chucking the parts into bins all over London. It's almost like actually a real murder, a real sort of mafia hit, in which you're taking a leg and a foot and you're putting that in one bin and a bit of brain in the other bin. It is the stuff of great comedy. The Alien Autopsy television special also featured a man reading a statement verifying that he was the original cameraman and the source of the footage.

Santilli has since admitted that he had found an unidentified man living on the streets of Los Angeles, persuaded him to play the role of the cameraman, and then filmed him in a motel.

Like all great hoaxes, the people behind the alien autopsy film put in a lot of effort to make things look as credible as possible. Now, of course, the really weak link that they had was the fact that they had this cameraman who was supposed to have the footage and given them the footage, but the cameraman didn't want to appear, didn't want to be filmed, and people were saying, "Look, come on, we're just going to think you made it yourselves." But the whole truth about this extraordinary story had yet to emerge.

Now, the man who sourced the apartment, provided the film equipment, and claims to have actually filmed the fake autopsy, has some 24 years later come forward. His name is Spiros Milaris, and he's a retired professional cameraman and studio owner. I don't want to take the credit for the film on my own because my team made this happen. Yes, I did a lot of stuff in the film,

I designed the set, built the set, props. I filmed it. I developed it. I edited it. My goal and the only thing I could actually hope to achieve when we made this film is that I knew people would say, "It can't be real." I also knew some people would say, "It is real." But the ones that said it isn't real, I had to have them say, "But I don't know what it is." As long as they don't know what it is, it could be real.

Knowing the close scrutiny that they would come under, Spiros paid particular attention to the props that he bought. I'd had a number of convincers in the room. Tools, bowls, bits and pieces, there's a Bunsen burner in there. All of that had to be right for America for 1947. I wired the whole set 110 volts. The same as America. I bought the same Baker-like sockets, although they weren't seen. I think it might be a shot that you can see one.

Every detail was covered because I knew I couldn't stand still with the camera.

The part of you that wants to believe it is true is this idea that it kind of matches your perception of what it would be. So they're higher beings. They have these giant brains and they're able to telepathically communicate. So the idea that it's these like little people with giant heads kind of fits in with this notion that we have or we've been sort of fed over the years. I think that's the part you think, oh, okay, well that kind of, there's a box ticker.

But then you kind of think, really, truly, there's just like a couple of guys in white suits and this room doesn't look too kind of high tech. It just seems to me if there was, you know, a life form from another planet, there'd be a lot more precaution taken than a couple of guys in white suits cutting it up.

One interesting thing that I did notice is that the time on the clock, I believe, that you first see, as I recall, is 10 past 10. Now, if you buy an old clock from anywhere or if you buy a watch, they're very often set at 10 past 10 or 10 to 2. It gets a symmetrical smiley face. So if you went out to a props department and wanted to find an old clock,

clock from that era. Chances are the time would be preset to 10 past 10. It's just kind of playing to the UFO and the conspiracy theory community's expectations. It's showing people what they want to be shown, trying to get them to believe what in a sense they want to believe, and in many cases they already believe. So you're kind of playing to the gallery.

We structured how we were going to do it. We're going to cut the head, and we're going to cut the skull, and we're going to remove a brain. It's not in there. So we've got to do it in a way where we can cut it, hollow it out, put the brain in, and then look like we're cutting the head off again. Any cameraman will tell you the continuity is seriously important because a slight movement, it's going to show. So the camera shot had to be a moving camera shot that I dissolved.

because each reel in the camera was only 50 feet. I had to time it that it ran out at that time. No idea the amount of stuff we had to go through to make it work. This had to last forever. This had to be scrutinised to death and real. Unlike, say, The Hitler Diaries or Princess Diana tape, my films maintained its integrity for 15 years.

No one was able to say, "This is a fake." Lots of people said, "Oh, I don't believe it." And lots of people said, "I do believe it." Nobody could say why it wasn't real. "Oh, I just have a hunch." That's not enough. But closer inspection of the actual medical procedures carried out in the so-called autopsy is the giveaway that it's not real.

As I talked to pathologists and as reports began to come in, I found that there was a lack of a block to raise the head and support the body so that the brain could be opened.

The person performing the autopsy was holding the scissors. Shouldn't he have been holding them the way a pathologist holds scissors? Which is not the way a tailor or a barber holds his scissors. It's a different way. They free up the forefinger, or sometimes two fingers, to steady the scissors to make very precise cuts. There were all kinds of mistakes. The pathological data was powerful.

In other words, if your first look was that it was abysmal, it didn't get any better. That's not to say this didn't have some merits. The alien was pretty well done. It's a skilled piece of work, but the rest of it, pretty amateurish stuff. It will go down as one of the greatest and most elaborate UFO and alien hoaxes of all time.

Somehow, a group of Londoners supposedly faked a US government top secret alien autopsy in a small apartment in London using a model and some meat from a butcher shop. Not only that, they then sold the film to the Fox network and many other broadcasters around the world where it smashed viewing figures and in the process made the producers very rich. And yet, even today, with all that's been revealed,

Ray Santilli still maintains that there was real autopsy footage which his own film was based on.

There was original alien autopsy footage. A lot of it had deteriorated by the time we got it back to London. Yes, we recreated scenes and we plugged apps, as I said earlier. I still have the original footage. And that original footage, you know, at some later stage, when we decide is the right time, will be made available to the public to see.

As far as I'm concerned, it is a historical document, which I think is important in itself. I think it has been restored and that restoration process was a work of art. I think that the people behind this, they were having a laugh. I think they were setting out to produce what is a great hoax. It's not criminal. They're having fun. I can make an alien autopsy film and tell you, and it's up to you if you want to believe it. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But I think that what must have surprised them

was the fact that it just ran and ran and ran. And it obviously became such a great source of revenue. No wonder you would keep quiet that it was a hoax for as long as they did, because they were earning money from credulous TV executives who were desperate to boost their ratings, desperate to get advertising revenue in. So in many ways, everybody's happy.

I think for the people who made the film, it must be a bit weird to imagine it's all gone this far and it's all taken this long. This ball has stayed in the air forever. I think if I made that film, I'd imagine that that might go a week, a week or two before you get caught and go, "Ah, it was good fun." This has been 20-something years, you know?

the brilliance behind those was that because it looked so good and so compelling, that those who were watching it with a sense of incredulity sort of then had doubts in their mind. And Santilli would give a very good account of how it came about. And so therefore, you know, if you leave these things a little bit open-ended,

It means that viewers are going to talk about it the next day. If it was case closed, it's a fake, that would have been the end of the conversation. But the fact is Fox kept it open, partly so they didn't look like fools, they knew it to be a hoax, but also because they knew it was going to be better for viewing figures.

This thing becomes part of pop culture. I mean, it's been referenced in the X-Files. There's been, of course, the Ant and Dec movie in 2006. It's firmly embedded now in our consciousness, in our memories.

I suspect that was the plan all along, but I wonder if even Ray Santilli was surprised and delighted at the coverage that it did end up getting. The showman always tries not to abandon the story, but tries to spin it in a different way. And I think exactly the same thing happens with the alien autopsy.

Ray Santilli tries not to abandon the story. Instead, he puts a new spin on it. He says, "Oh yeah, you know, there really was footage, but it was so bad that I had to restore it and hire actors and a special effects expert to create this body." The problem with Santilli's story is that there were so many people involved that yes, people start to talk. The edges of it start to crumble.

How credible is Sam Tilly's story that it's a restoration? Once you've admitted that, you know, kind of the game is up. One can see how other people might take it seriously because after all, everybody knows there could be life out there somewhere. It's easy to see how to the average person this could be put into a context of, well,

We're just hearing it now because it was hidden away. You know, there are conspiracies and things do come to light. It's not so obvious to the naive, but it was pretty obvious to the relatively sophisticated.