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The Alien Autopsy Film (1995; Santilli & Melaris)

Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien
Marc Horne

THE creator of Max Headroom, a 1980s television cyber-presenter, has claimed he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film, the grainy black and white footage supposedly showing a dead alien being dissected by American government scientists after a UFO crash.
Alien Autopsy, a movie about the footage, is currently on release across Britain. It stars real-life television presenters Ant and Dec.

John Humphreys, a sculptor and consultant on Alien Autopsy who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, said it was he who made the models for the alien dissected in the original fake footage.

His confession, 11 years after the Roswell footage was first shown, will raise questions about the role of Channel 4, which unleashed Max Headroom on the world in the 1980s and bought the UK rights to screen the Roswell footage in Britain.

The footage was first exposed as a fake by The Sunday Times, but an estimated billion people still watched it around the world.

Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.

Philip Mantle, a UFO researcher and author who has been investigating the Roswell hoax for 10 years, said Humphreys had been a prime suspect but had never before admitted involvement.

Mantle, who next month will deliver a lecture at Glasgow University on the Roswell story, said: “I didn’t think it would take so long, but I am delighted this hoax has finally been exposed and the mystery has been solved.”

Humphreys, who is based in Manchester, says he also appeared in the Roswell film as the chief surgeon. The bug-eyed alien models were filled with sheep brains, chicken entrails and knuckle joints bought from Smithfield meat market. After filming, the dummies were cut up and dumped in bins across London.

For a few short weeks the world held its breath after the 91-minute silent film was unveiled by Ray Santilli, a London-based video distributor. He claimed to have bought the footage, shot on 14 reels, from a retired American military cameramen.

Humphreys said the Roswell film was shot by himself, Santilli and three others. He said he spent four weeks fashioning the models from latex using clay sculptures.

Humphreys, a graduate of the Royal Academy who has also created special effects for the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp, says he only told his wife about the hoax when he was hired to work on Alien Autopsy.

“It was a very, very strange feeling to know that I had played a key part in it,” he said.

Santilli, who is played by Declan Donnelly in Alien Autopsy, insists he was trying to “re-create” a real Roswell incident. He claims he bought genuine footage that was badly damaged when it was exposed to the air after 48 years in a can. “John was given very precise images to work with and what he did was sheer genius,” he said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 17,00.html
So that wraps that one up...

..or does it? :?
 
Did Ray Santilli enjoy any celebrity BEFORE the Autopsy Video - and if so, for what?
 
Ray Santilli has had some success in similar fields:

His IMDB listing is HERE - I think my favourite fact is that he produced 'The Tweets' and their hit song 'The Birdy Song' which terrorised the charts briefly in the 80's.
 
Forgive my ignorance, as all my knowledge of this comes from the original 1995 story, plus FT and the recent Alien Autopsy film....

It seems to be a recent claim that the original (not "remade") footage was of an alien carcass on a stretcher with generals examining it with trucks running around in the background. So, if it was a "remake", where does the autopsy scene fit in with the original footage?

And didn't Santilli say that he brought many cans of footage back to the UK with him (I think it was 22)? So why are we now being told it was just one? And does 1947 Kodak safety film really disintegrate after time and exposure to heat and humidity?
 
DrPLee said:
"And does 1947 Kodak safety film really disintegrate after time and exposure to heat and humidity?"

There still exists within my family some 16 mm silent black and white cartoons and short films mastered onto late 1940s Kodak safety film stock. When I last examined this film, no more than a decade ago, there was considerable sprocket damage (due to overuse in the mid-through late 1950s) but very little if any damage to the film stock itself.
 
From a LiveScience article: http://www.livescience.com/othernews/06 ... topsy.html

The most elaborate Roswell hoax, however, and the one that probably reached the largest audience was the "Alien Autopsy" film. It will be remembered as a classic of the genre. The truth about "the Roswell incident"—that the crash device was merely a secret U.S. spy balloon, part of Project Mogul, which attempted to monitor emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests—continues to be obscured by hoaxers, conspiracy cranks, and hustlers.

The truth, huh? I'm no supporter of the alien theory but there is plenty of oddness surrounding Roswell, the author of that article needs to read Nick Redferns 'Body Snatchers in the Desert'.
 
Alien Autopsy - Resurrected!

At approximately 5-20p.m. on Monday 3rd July, 2006, Ray Santilli and his co-conspirator Gary Shoefield featured on the Richard & Judy Show (Channel 4 T.V., U.K.) to talk about the Alien Autopsy film.
During the interview both Santilli and Shoefield maintained that, in their opinion, the original Alien Autopsy Film, which Santilli claims he bought from a cameraman in the U.S.A., was genuine. They also claimed that they had simply restored the damaged film to that which Santilli had originally seen.
A sound file of most of the interview is avaiable at:

http://www.thewhyfiles.net/autopsy.htm

Geoff Richardson
www.thewhyfiles.net

P.S. It might be wise to note that the DVD of The Alien Autopsy comedy film was released today!
 
I heard them speaking to James Whale on Talk Sport radio about this. I was very surprised to hear what had transpired from both of them. I thought that this alien autopsy footage (original) would never serve any more significance in Ufology.

However, I simply don't trust them in the least.

It appears to be more of a publicity stunt.
 
That's a shocking, wicked thing to suggest. I'm deeply disappointed in you.
 
I never believed for a second that the autopsy film was genuine. But there remain many unanswered problems with it. Why did whistle blowers confirm its genuiness? Not only one of Nick REDFERN's "informants" from Body Snatchers in the Desert. But Captain James Mc ANDREWS too told to Bob SHELL not only that the film was genuine, but that he had watched it whole. Mc ANDREWS was the redactor of the "Roswell Report: Case Closed" from 1997... an other enigma is, how could a producer like Ray SANTILLI be turned into such a master of worldwide commercial manipulation? He had the perfect moves at the right moments. But he came with a ridiculous story about a dead cameraman who had sold him the footage (suggesting he was fed it?). It seems that he was a puppet in the hands of Völker SPIELBERG. Part of the problem revolves around this question: who is this german producer? It is strange that no one gave a satisfactory answer.
 
The first time I saw Alien Autopsy on the Fox television Network, I believe on its American premiere night, the friend with whom I viewed it asked me what I thought of its authenticity.

"It's going to be eventually proved a fraud," I said. "Things like this always turn out to be fakes."

But I probably said it a little wistfully.

There were two things that impressed me about the presentation - the first was the inclusion of an autopsy tray not used after circa 1949 (a really nice touch), the second was Dr. Cyril Wecht's opinion that the men in the film were "definitely surgeons."

My first working theory (as I've said here before) was that the film was a fraud correctly enough....but a fraud dating from 1947. In other words, I theorized that the film had been produced by the United States Government, but as nothing more than a part of an eleborate space-war game or think-tank scenario.

That suspicion was heightened by photometric examinations which attempted to prove that one of the two "surgeons" in the film was the great scientist and physician Dr. Detlov Bronk. What a wonderful choice, I thought, for this particular war game!

So now you know why they don't let me play with scizzors.
 
It is true that some stories of films showing alien bodies on display are supposed to date back to this era. According to Leonard STRINGFIELD, an anecdote took place in 1953 at the base of Fort Monmouth (New Jersey). A gathering of military officers had been showed a very poor quality movie, featuring a crashed saucer and the bodies of its occupants. The witness reported that a few days later, his superiors explained that it was a fake, and they should forget it. Was it a wargame, included in a Cold War disinformation scheme? Or a test? Or a figment of the witness' imagination? Whatever, there were indeed some rumors of autopsy films prior to the 1995 hit. There is no proof that such material existed, faked or not. But these tellings added more confusion, deliberate or not.
 
Alas, one of the problems here is that educated, reliable, moral and ethical people oftentimes "remember" viewing films and presentations which they never actually saw.

Thus many people in the not-too-distant-past "remembered" seeing a late 1920s silent movie newsreel which showed Admiral Richard E. Byrd discovering lush jungles in Antarctica! Neither the jungles nor the newsreel seem to have actually existed.

And then there's our own Ivan Sanderson's famous (infamous) "thunderbird" photograph, which hundreds (or possibly thousands) of Forteans and Paranormalists "remember" seeing. I "remember" it myself and can DESCRIBE it for you. Even so, it almost certainly never existed.
 
MJ-12

And then there's the MJ-12 Documents.

According to reports the American FBI spent two years investigating these papers. After that time, two-thirds of the members of the investigative team had reached the conclusion that the materials were nothing more than a hoax.

But that means that fully one-third remained convinced of their authentitity!

This makes me fairly certain of one thing - the MJ-12 Documents were clearly not faked by a gaggle of UFO pranksters sitting around somebody's kitchen table.

So my best guess is that the papers are the remains of an elaborate early 1950s governmental War Game.
 
The following appears in "The Hierophant," FORTEAN TIMES, No. 120, April, 1999, page 61:

"[T]he Fox network of satellite and cable stations is promising to look deeper at the [Santilli] film in a show tellingly titled The World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Revealed. Presented by Lance Henriksen - Frank Black from Fox's Millennium - the show promises interviews with an actor claiming to have been involved in creating the film...." [emphasis added]

I never saw the television program mentioned above and am not absolutely certain that it was even broadcast. But if anyone's seen it, can you tell me how this 1999 "confession" gels (or not) with Santelli's own 2006 "confession"?
 
I seem to recall seeing it - sci fi channel?? V.American and pseudo glossy. If memory serves, it gave a plausable account, but nothing in depth (I think I said that already...freaky) :lol:
 
GadaffiDuck said:
V.American....

"Be kind to our web-footed friends,
for a Duck may be somebody's mo-ther!"

American grade school lyrics to Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."
 
:lol:

You know what I mean - just a josh and shorthand critique.

Surely, a web footed friend would be somebody from the very deep south? :lol:
 
Sound dodgy, if he thinks he's been ripped off why wait 12 years?
And if he'd decide to blow the story open whay not do it last year when the film came out and it was likely to get some publicity instead of at a UFO conference where it's just going to sink into obscurity unless it's a really slow news day.

Seems to have pissed off the Magic Circle in the past.
 
It's an odd claim. If Santilli brazenly broke his side of the bargain, why did Melaris think he was still obliged to stay silent?

I suspect that these new claims will be met with universal indifference. The whole alien autopsy issue ended up being a huge embarrassment to Ufology, and I think most people would rather just pretend it never happened.
 
Alien Autopsy - Game Over
The devil is in the detail – The Spyros Melaris story
by Philip Mantle:

Philip Mantle, one the U.K.'s most long standing and industrious UFO researchers, is the acknowledged expert on the controversial "Alien Autopsy Footage". In this article Philip presents the truth behind the myth, who was involved, why and when.

See:
thewhyfiles.net/autopsy2.htm
Link id dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121045105/http://www.thewhyfiles.net/autopsy2.htm


Geoff Richardson
www.thewhyfiles.net
 
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Sheep organs, a London flat and a Doctor Who sculptor: The truth behind the 1995 alien autopsy film Sheep organs, a London flat and a Doctor Who sculptor: The truth behind the 1995 alien autopsy film
The link is dead. No archived version found.
 
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Very old news surely?

I recall being at one of the press showings and sensing instantly that what I was watching was not film at all but 'field-dropped' video; a cheap effect. I wasn't the only broadcast technician to voice that opinion either as I recall!

I also happen to have 'cornered' Bob Shell - Ray Santilli's cited expert - on a Compuserve forum round abut the time it was shown on British TV; wherein I ripped his 'forensic' analysis of the 'film' apart as being no-such thing. Those with a technical background will understand the difficulty in transferring film to PAL video, transcoding that to NTSC and then attempting to make any kind of forensic analysis of the original film from that! - Yet this is just exactly what Bob Shell had done! - In fact, it emerged poor Bob was unaware of the technical issues!

Oddly enough, after my ripping the 'persistence' out of him in public he graciously sent me a delightful Christmas card that year along with warm wishes for to the family. - A few years later he was banged up for killing a young girl in a bizarre fetish-photography scenario... He's probably still in jail AFAIK. - Truly a man of strange contrasts!

Ray Santilli - the real face behind it all - is a nice bloke... bit of a cheekie chappie, little bit wee, little bit woo, hard to pin down etc. T'was all a great jolly jape IMHO. 'Specially when they got Ant and Dec involved! - But really, that was it!

This horse is dead and surely beyond any and all flogging now though?
 
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Very old news surely?

I recall being at one of the press showings and sensing instantly that what I was watching was not film at all but 'field-dropped' video; a cheap effect. I wasn't the only broadcast technician to voice that opinion either as I recall!

I also happen to have 'cornered' Bob Shell - Ray Santilli's cited expert - on a Compuserve forum round abut the time it was shown on British TV; wherein I ripped his 'forensic' analysis of the 'film' apart as being no-such thing. Those with a technical background will understand the difficulty in transferring film to PAL video, transcoding that to NTSC and then attempting to make any kind of forensic analysis of the original film from that! - Yet this is just exactly what Bob Shell had done! - In fact, it emerged poor Bob was unaware of the technical issues!

Oddly enough, after my ripping the 'persistence' out of him in public he graciously sent me a delightful Christmas card that year along with warm wishes for to the family. - A few years later he was banged up for killing a young girl in a bizarre fetish-photography scenario... He's probably still in jail AFAIK. - Truly a man of strange contrasts!

Ray Santilli - the real face behind it all - is a nice bloke... bit of a cheekie chappie, little bit wee, little bit woo, hard to pin down etc. T'was all a great jolly jape IMHO. 'Specially when they got Ant and Dec involved! - But really, that was it!

This horse is dead and surely beyond any and all flogging now though?
Jesus Christ Old Master Q, your life's events are even weirder than mine ! .. please continue posting Sir, that's an anecdote and a half ..
 
Jesus Christ Old Master Q, your life's events are even weirder than mine ! .. please continue posting Sir, that's an anecdote and a half ..

Is it?? I happen to work in TV, that's all. What can I say? Plumbers find strange things in drains. :) No big deal. I was reading in a post earlier about a Signalman who's phone started levitating - now that's weird!
 
Is it?? I happen to work in TV, that's all. What can I say? Plumbers find strange things in drains. :) No big deal. I was reading in a post earlier about a Signalman who's phone started levitating - now that's weird!
I can count the perverts I've met on one hand .. no bad taste 'wanking' joke intended btw ..

The kid I went to school with who went to prison for paying to download child porn .. all communications severed.

Someone else I went to school with who years later pretended he didn't realise until the last moment that he was getting sucked off by an underage girl in India .. again, all communications severed.

The bogus doctor we were warned about back when I worked for the NHS on wards .. I caught him .. he was arrested.

The Nonce who tried to abduct a kid on my watch at the school I worked at on a Sunday (with help from a co worker) .. got rid of him.

None of these stories are fun ... there are indeed a lot of sick bastards about.
 
I really enjoyed the Ant and Dec film, although I seemed to be part of a tiny victimised minority ;) Hopefully it will eventually earn some kind of cult status, like Withnail & I - which I think received a lukewarm reception on its initial release.
 
I really enjoyed the Ant and Dec film, although I seemed to be part of a tiny victimised minority ;) Hopefully it will eventually earn some kind of cult status, like Withnail & I - which I think received a lukewarm reception on its initial release.

I enjoyed the film too... It kind of 'sits' in a particular place in the history of the caper; but I think that was Santilli dropping what, thanks to Shell's antics, could have become a very hot potato. I really think that had to be the Swansong. And what was a jolly jape is forever pretty tainted by its association with Shell.

I can count the perverts I've met on one hand

They're about sadly, and in depressing numbers. :-( My original training is in news, and I've had the misfortune to encounter quite a few very nasty ones in my time. - Shell though; I don't think anyone - least of all Santilli - had a clue back in '94 what would or might unravel a decade later. Shell's books are of a technical/geek nature... He was mainly known as the editor of a small American magazine called "Shutterbug"; obscure outside the U.S. I never actually met him, but spoke to him on the phone a couple of times and communicated by email; he gave me the impression he was a landscape photographer!

Bear in mind that Shell was a man of 56 when Marion Franklin died... She was just 19; and when you read of her background and upbringing it's difficult to see how that 'relationship' could have been anything other than utterly abusive.

In some ways Santilli played a blinder when he got Shell to provide the analysis of the 'film'. ...He was never a motion picture expert; but a stills technician. And clearly clueless when it came to video technology, but had a 'name' that would stand up to the then superficial scrutiny that would have been applied at the time. Enough of a background to act as a credible bluff in other words. - I bet though, if Ray had known what he was really like, he'd have had the office chair he sat on sprayed down with DDT and burned.
 
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