Alien autopsy

The alien autopsy was a hoaxed medical examination and dissection of a dummy depicted in a 17-minute black and white film released in 1995 by London-based entrepreneur Ray Santilli. He presented it as an authentic autopsy on the body of an extraterrestrial being recovered from the 1947 crash of a "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico. The film footage was allegedly supplied to him by a retired military cameraman who wished to remain anonymous.

In 2006 Santilli admitted the film was not authentic but rather a staged reconstruction of footage he claimed to have viewed in 1992, which had deteriorated and become unusable by the time he made his film. He claimed that a few frames from the original were embedded in his film, but he never specified which ones. In 1995, before being exposed as a hoax, the film was sold to television networks and broadcast in more than 33 countries.

Fox television broadcast the footage in the United States on August 28, 1995 under the title Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction. The program caused a sensation, with Time magazine declaring that the film had sparked a debate "with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruder film". Fox re-broadcast the program twice, each time to higher ratings, with the November 1995 broadcast winning its time slot again with 11.7 million viewers and a 14% share. Although in the broadcast version some parts of the autopsy were pixelized or edited out because of their supposed "graphic nature", the earlier versions contained, Santilli claimed, the complete and unedited film, in addition to the previously unreleased footage of the wreckage which was presented as the remains of the alien craft reported to have crashed in Roswell.

The Fox program features numerous well-known figures both in front of and behind the camera. Interviews with experts on the authenticity of the film include Oscar-winning special effects make-up artist Stan Winston, cinematographer Allen Daviau, and noted forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who considered the autopsy procedures in the film to be authentic but stopped short of declaring the being an alien.

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Wikipedia