You will, no doubt, be familiar with the 1995 footage of a supposed alien autopsy. Since its yikes-inducing TV debut, the jittery black-and-white film is estimated to have been viewed by a billion people. Still, for better or worse, here it is again: a scrum of faceless hazmat suits hover over the corpse of a pot-bellied humanoid. Its forehead? Bulbous. Its expression? Pensioner outraged at price of bark chippings in local branch of Wickes. Over the next 18 minutes the suits proceed to dissect this appalled sod, slicing it open to reveal what appear to be various organs, condiments and splodgy, flopping \u2026 things.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose were lambs\u2019 brains,\u201d chuckles Trevor the butcher as The Alien Autopsy Scandal zooms in on a quivering hillock of the aforementioned horrors. Trevor was one of the individuals involved in the titular film, its production taking place not, as initially claimed, in a US military facility in 1947, but a Camden living room in 1995. Trevor had been approached by a sculptor to supply \u201cguts\u201d with which to stuff the \u201calien\u201d mould that would, the latter had explained, be appearing in \u201ca film\u201d. Hmm. Nevertheless, guts \u2013 in the form of knees, hearts and miscellaneous entrails \u2013 were duly supplied. Anything else? \u201cPig eyes, \u2019cos they look like human eyes,\u201d guffaws Trevor, before taking a hacksaw to the remains of a decapitated pig. Disgusting? Yes. But fascinating, too. And certainly no stranger than anything else in John Dower\u2019s exquisitely directed documentary; a thing of great playfulness and eccentricity that, over three increasingly extraordinary episodes, unknots the tale behind the notorious film. Or at least does its best to do so. But the truth proves slippery and its gatekeepers are \u2026 well. Enter Ray Santilli (tinted glasses; deep shiftiness) and Gary Shoefield (tracksuit; air of one comfortable with the phrase \u201cit is what it is\u201d).<\/p>\n
Close encounter \u2026 director John Dower. Photograph: Ryan McNamara\/Sky UK Ltd<\/p>\n
The London-based \u201cmusic entrepreneurs\u201d claim they bought a film in 1993 from a retired US military cameraman that captured the alien-strewn aftermath of the infamous 1947 \u201cUFO\u201d crash in Roswell, New Mexico.<\/p>\n
On returning home, however, they discovered that the film had oxidised. Uh-oh. Not least because the friends had promised the footage to a US TV producer. What to do? Simple. Santilli and Shoefield would make their own version and pass it off as the original. Cue geysers of cash, jubilation from the-truth-is-out-there faithful and headlines of the \u201cET WE KNOW YOU\u2019RE THERE!\u201d variety. \u201cA lot of people would call it a fraud,\u201d says Santilli with an uneasy grin. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo us,\u201d says Shoefield, \u201cit was a restoration of an existing work.\u201d Sure, Gary. Anyway: media scepticism grew, the magnifying glass turned to the subject of government cover-ups and the retired US military cameraman became The Cameraman, a figure of near-mythical elusiveness and the only Earthly being who could confirm Santilli and Shoefield\u2019s story. Who was this elderly chimera? Santilli\u2019s still not telling.<\/p>\n
The plot \u2013 and cast \u2013 thickens. There are incredulous ufologists, sweet-natured believers, still-furious-at-being-conned TV producers and a magician who refuses to appear on camera and is thus portrayed by a lip-syncing actor in a trilby.<\/p>\n
There is an air of farce to proceedings, as Scooby-Doo baddies Santilli and Shoefield are pursued by the truth across the same endlessly looped stretch of cobblers and counter-cobblers. And yet. Several former US military personnel claim, with startling matter-of-factness, that there is indeed classified footage of aliens at Roswell. What\u2019s more, they say, they saw this footage for themselves in the late 1970s. So, what really happened? And, in these darkening days of up-is-down-ism, does anyone really care? \u201cPeople want to believe,\u201d says one contributor, and I find myself pining for a time when a rubber dummy stuffed with sausages was greeted as a glimpse of heaven itself.<\/p>\n
The Alien Autopsy Scandal aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You will, no doubt, be familiar with the 1995 footage of a supposed alien autopsy. Since its yikes-inducing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-733354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}