The Santilli hoax

Then in 1995 a businessman from England, Ray Santilli, announced to the world that while researching old film material for a music production, he had obtained military footage of an autopsy performed on one of the alien beings that had died in the crash at Roswell.

The film was incorporated into several documentaries broadcast on TV and sold on video. The footage, in grainy black and white, shows what appear to be two gloved and masked doctors doing an autopsy on an alien creature. The creature is similar in form to a human, but with six fingers and other minor anatomical differences. A third person can be seen observing the autopsy from behind a window.

The entire procedure is not on film, reportedly because not all the real films during the autopsy were obtained by Santilli. According to Santilli he was looking for old film of an Elvis concert when he came in contact with a cameraman who had served in the United States military. The cameraman, who wished to remain anonymous, told Santilli that he had been stationed in Washington D.C. in 1947 when suddenly he was ordered to fly to Roswell, New Mexico. While at Roswell he filmed the clean up of the crashed saucer and later recorded the autopsies of several aliens. Due to an administrative oversite, not all of the autopsy film was collected from him. He had kept a few reels secret for almost fifty years and offered to sell these to Santilli for $100,000.

Santilli released two versions of the autopsy, one taking place in a tent, and the other, more familiar one, taking place in an operating room of some sort.

Despite many errors and inconsistencies with the footage not compatible, a lot of people came to believe that the story really happened until a technician from Hollywood publicly admitted to have designed the alien subject.

Another set of photos was published last year in a Hong Kong newspaper and identified as coming from a UFO crash in 1977 in Guangzhou, China. They have been on the Internet for months. They are not the dummies from the Roswell museum, according to Steve Johnson who made the dummy for the Showtime movie, but are similar. The question is open as to exactly what they are, but there is no proof that these depict a real being.