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The year is 1995, and UFO culture - belief & interest in UFOs - is at its peak. People are protesting the government to disclose UFO files; The X-Files is one of the biggest shows on TV; VHS tapes and TV specials about aliens are all over the place. For a time, normally reputable magazines like Time are looking a lot more like the Weekly World News. Once-fringe topics like Roswell, Area 51, alien abductions, and the men in black are household names.

The time is ripe to post cringe.

Our host steps out of the shadows...

“If what you are about to see is real, it’s the most startling filmed footage in history. Although we remain skeptical, some experts believe this is authentic footage of an alien lifeform. Real or not, we must warn you, this appears to be an actual autopsy, and some of the footage you’ll see in the next hour is very gruesome. Stay with us as we put the question to you…”

Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction)? - aired August 28th, 1995, on Fox

Mulder: According to the magazine ad I answered, it's an alien autopsy. Guaranteed authentic. Scully: You spent money for this? Mulder: $29.95... plus shipping. Scully: Mulder, this is even hokier than the one they aired on the Fox network, you can't even see what they're operating on!

- The X-Files, Season 3E09, aired November 24th, 1995, on Fox

Something that needs to be noted upfront is that the Alien Autopsy wasn't created - er, discovered - by Fox, but produced by British independent filmmakers and sold to them. It apparently aired in Britain on Channel Four earlier in 1995, though I can't find that broadcast, but it would become famous when America's Fox Network built a special around it a few months later.

It sits up there with Geraldo Rivera exploring Al Capone's Vault as one of the most mocked moments in television history. Even UFO types made fun of it as an obvious fraud (with another group of true believers & another group that weirdly believed it was real, but not from Roswell), and over the years the filmmakers would just...come out and admit it. Several times. And also try to sell it as an NFT

Despite this mockery, it was huge. Fox aired three different versions of it with extra footage included (I, uh, didn't watch those ones) and it was a bestseller on video.

The world of the reality show, especially on Fox, from the mid-90s to mid-2000s was one of the sleaziest, most wild times in TV history; a web of exploitation and self-parody that gave us the masked magician, live Egyptological digs, and specials about how the earlier specials were dumb - with networks making WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK specials and then parodying them with WHEN CARS ATTACK, a special about how cars are evil and sentient

Jonathan Frakes appears at the Roswell Air Force base - “the men and women who lived and worked here were used to keeping secrets. But in the summer of ‘47, something definitely crashed just outside of town - and 48 years later, it remains a mystery…”

Buckle up. We're not gonna be hitting the alien autopsy for a while, 'cause this is Fox and we need to get three commercial breaks in before you can see the thing you came to see!

We have the requisite extensive recap of Roswell, complete with replicas of the supposed alien alloys with odd script on them...in the cut I watched, in other cuts (there's at least three) they show stacks of debris without a disclaimer

Let's take this seriously for a moment because this special does a couple tricks.

One is that it relies on replicas and second-hand testimony from people who knew...someone who saw aliens crash at Roswell, and then conflates that with actual witness testimony. The second is faux-skepticism; it raises several possible objections, disproves them, then doesn't acknowledge others. Through deceptive editing, it made their interview subjects appear to endorse it when they actually said it was a hoax.

Notably, the special doesn't show us the entire alien autopsy footage, only select bits. The most convincing bits? This is important because, well, it's not actually a half-bad special effect. If you put it in a movie and only showed it from good angles, it would be convincing enough. But when you can view it from the bad angles...the most "uncut" version of this special only shows thirteen minutes of autopsy footage, and much of that is repeated shots.

“If there was any doubt a flying saucer had crashed, Frankie Rowe’s father had seen the most convincing proof of all – living proof.”

“Daddy came in so excited,” Rowe said, “and he said: what they saw was not from this world. There were two bodies, that were laying on the ground outside this craft, and there was one - what he called - little person. And he said there was one little person walking around, and he was still alive...he said the other two were dead, and this one that was alive was very sad.”

We also meet Kevin Randle, who wrote the book on Roswell. Literally. He was one of several interviewees to claim deceptive editing, since the special left out how he believed that while Roswell was real, the autopsy was a hoax.

“The people of Roswell kept quiet about what they saw,” said Frakes, “...the debris was flown to Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio. The bodies were thought to have been flown somewhere else. The government wanted this story to die, and for decades the cover-up was successful. But what may be the most convincing evidence, somehow escaped detection…”

We’re going to watch the alien autopsy - BUT FIRST! We’ll meet the cameraman who filmed it. After these ads!

“An alien autopsy is always going to be the subject of ridicule. Who’s going to believe an alien autopsy is an alien autopsy? It’s a ridiculous subject.”

Meet Ray Santilli, a producer of musician documentaries, who did...not film the special. So who did? He claims that he was buying 1950s rock-and-roll footage when he was shown...this. The cameraman says he filmed several autopsies and kept this one due to a processing error; when he fixed it, he offered it to the government and they...said no and let him keep it? Every aspect of this special is declaring that the government threatened to kill every witness for speaking out, but just keeping the footage is fine I suppose. Why bother

Santilli denies that this a new The Hitler Diaries (a 1980s hoax involving the forgery of journals claimed to be by...well, guess) and he's simply putting it in the public domain.

So who filmed it? A man named Spyros Melaris, who like everyone else involved has talked about the film and how it was done repeatedly over the years, notably in a 2006 documentary released before a British comedy film about the hoax's creation. It was filmed on a set in a empty flat in London, using animal parts from a butcher's shop in a sculpture. It is important to say this upfront because while just about everyone knew it was a hoax in '95, it's unique that we know so much about how it was made now. And it was...exactly how you thought it'd be made.

How do we know Melaris made it? Well, uh. He uploaded the uncut whole autopsy to his Youtube channel.

It should also be noted that Santilli maintains that while his film was fake, it was a remake of real alien autopsy footage he was shown in 1992.

Fox hires a private investigator to track the old man (real) down; let's check in on his progress later!

Frakes: “This film we’re about to show you is either the first documentary evidence an alien being visited our planet, or it’s one of the most ambitious and fantastic frauds ever put on film…”

Finally, finally we get to see the alien autopsy.

Let's just appreciate that they blurred out this alien's, uh, rubber johnny. We may be lying to everyone and showing a lot of blood, but this is still a FAMILY network!

“You are watching the autopsy of what some say is an alien from out of space. Though silent, the 17 minute film is as dramatic as any science fiction thriller to come out of Hollywood. But this may not be a filmmaker’s fantasy. This very well could be real…”

I don't...I don't think it is, Mr. Frakes.

We're told the alien's story again, as according to Frankie Rowe: “The cameraman writes that he photographed three strange beings. Each was crying, and clutching a box close to their chest. They cried louder as we approached, he writes...one of the officers managed to pry loose the box by hitting the being with the butt of his rifle.” ...but...before two of the aliens were dead and one was sad. What's going on?

The above angle is one of the aspects of selective editing singled out by Skeptical Inquirer in 1995; it is impressive, but we don't see a full dissection, leaving it possible this was just a trick knife designed to add theatrical blood to the model - something routinely done in film and TV! We also see the intact body, and the cut-open torso, but not the steps in between. And they never examine the back of the alien, as far as we can tell.

Meanwhile, the verisimilitude falls apart completely when they start taking out organs. The fact that they're lumpy undifferentiated parts can be justified by saying it's an alien and we don't know their anatomy, but the organs are also...intact. No viscera comes off with them and it's never hard to disentangle their bits. Between that and the way we never see them open the chest (because presumably they had to switch models) it makes you go "oh, this isn't real"...if you hadn't already done that at seeing two seconds of this.

(Meanwhile, someone sent a hoax prop head to Fortean Times to try to expose this hoax as a hoax with a hoax)

Frakes says they’ve verified the wall clock and wall phone seen in footage as real models from the 1930s & 1940s; a Kodak expert - did I say expert? I meant Kodak sales rep with no experience in authentication (see Skeptical Inquirer) - is asked if the film itself is old. The film stock has a code saying it’s from either 1947 or 1967, but then again, you can buy old film stock and vintage clocks. But they never actually submitted the film for chemical analysis. According to Joe Nickell, Kodak said analysis would be impossible without seeing the film itself.

Paolo Cherchi Usai is surprisingly a real person and real film academic who really was curator of moving pictures at Eastman House. His appearance here is by far the most embarrassing because he goes to bat for its authenticity hard, and I'm unable to find a story claiming he was misleadingly edited.

“You cannot fake a motion picture that easily. It would require an amount of technical know-how, of sophistication that would make the operation not worthwhile," he says, Italianishly. "Every fake I’ve seen, the impression of fake comes up immediately. Let’s put ourselves in the position of someone who wants to make a fake – why, in the world, would someone invest such an amount of money, effort, of mis-en-scene to put together a 23 minute film of this kind? It defies reason.”

He...he did it to get the TV special you're being interviewed for, Paolo. He got? Money? For that??? You're out here dropping mis-en-scene on *THIS*? That's a ten-dollar word and this is a nickle store, at best

Absolutely NOT convinced is Allen Daviau - Oscar-nominated cinematographer for E.T. & The Color Purple and un-Oscar-nominated cinematographer for Congo & Van Helsing. He zeroes in on how the film constantly goes out of focus as if to hide something, and especially how when they saw open the skull - a difficult-to-fake effect! - the camera stays behind the surgeons, making it impossible to see.

As expected, the film instantly counters this really convincing point by bringing on Roderick Ryan, combat camerman, who says cameras of the time lacked a through-the-lens focus, so actually, it would be a sign it was fake if it stayed in focus. Now, Ryan was a real cameraman with experience in this style of shooting, but...I disagree. If you go and look at old WWII footage shot at this time, and take care to look for footage uploaded four years ago or more to avoid slop, they're much more stable. If people filming on D-Day, while actively being shot by Nazis, could line up clear, focused, stable shots consistently, I doubt a film of an autopsy in controlled conditions would be this blurry.

But, on the topic of faux-skepticism, there's moments that aren't questioned. The clock in the background showing that an autopsy of an actual alien only lasted two hours is brought up in passing and not addressed, but singled out by Time's report, and obvious even in the edited clips we see: why does it keep doing jump-cuts that return to the exact same action? Vlogging wasn't invented yet, you can't be doing that. Old film footage has jump-cuts because of short recording time, but you didn't see it jump to a new shot within one shot of someone doing a thing.

“Let’s say the film is from 1947...and it looks like an army photographer could have shot it. That doesn’t mean it’s not a hoax, but how far would someone have to go to stage it? Camera tricks are one thing, but how do you fake the flesh and blood body of an alien - especially one that’s about to be cut open?”

“Is this really an autopsy of an alien being? Or could it be something else? A dummy? A deformed human? An incredible hoax? To find out, we showed the film to two of the world’s leading pathologists…”

We note here that the alien matches our conception of what an alien looks like. Our being the conception of people in the 1990s; that was not the conception of people in the 1940s. Roswell was associated with "little green men", and then we quickly pivoted to "Nordics" - blonde-haired, blue-eyed white people from space - for the rest of the 1950s. "Gray" aliens wouldn't be a thing until the Betty and Barney Hill case, and not become the standard portrayal of aliens until Whitley Strieber's Communion...a progression depicted in skeptic Joe Nickell's timeline:

Notably, it did not match the description of the Roswell aliens, being too tall and having six fingers instead of four...hence the weird faction who held it was either disinformation around Roswell, or was from another alien at another crash. Having to judge the veracity of images by inspecting if they depict too many fingers, god I hope that doesn't catch on.

And it was too tall! Can you remember the tallest man you ever saw? Because he was taller than the little green men at Roswell were supposed to be

British pathologist C.M. Milroy (OBE) notes that the alien is female. American Cyril Wecht (also a JFK conspiracy theorist) points to the six fingers on the hands and feet, says the methods and tools are period appropriate, and speculates that it could be someone with Turner Syndrome or radioactive mutations before saying it's likely not human.

But let's interview a real expert.

Special effects legend Stan Winston takes stock of it with the boys from the shop. Their conclusion: It would take a lot of resources to fake.

“My hat’s off to the people who created it, or the poor alien that’s dead on that table.” Laugh!

According to Winston, he fully said it was a hoax and they edited around that - which is noticeable, given they're laughing and saying it would be hard to do, but not impossible. They also interviewed an entire other special effects expert, Steve Johnson (creator of Ghostbusters' Slimer & the alien for The Abyss), who was far more critical and cut out entirely. Skeptical Inquirer speculated that Winston had been asked to judge "could you have made this with the technology of the 1940s?" and not "is this a real corpse?", which would explain his reactions and seeming credulity.

Back to William Roll, who tracks down the mysterious cameraman - or someone who knows him - and talks to him in a Denny's. In reality, this was a unknown homeless man they hired off the street

Congressman Steven Schiff (R-New Mexico) talks about investigating Roswell...

Kent Jeffrey says “I think that eventually it will be shown to be a hoax, but by that time Santilli will have made...the majority of his sale of videos…” in what is both the most critical comment allowed in this entire special, and a watered-down version of his real comments, which fully committed to it being a hoax.