Red Flags
People familiar with postmortems pronounced the film a hoax almost immediately. They were bothered that although a wall clock suggests a two-hour procedure, the film runs just seventeen minutes. If the footage were genuine, what was going on during the other 103 minutes? Only two walls are visible, which suggests a set rather than a genuine room. A Bunsen burner is included among the equipment—why? The monochrome film became another puzzlement. Although the grainy black-and-white stock suggests the past to modern viewers, its use doesn’t jibe with Army practice. In 1947, standard film stock for official Army films was 16mm color. (Although Technicolor had to be filmed with proprietary, very heavy 35mm cameras, other stocks were available in 1947; Ansco Color stock, for instance, was manufactured in 16mm as well as 35mm.) Further, standard 1947 Army filming guidelines for medical-procedures specified two cameras, both fixed: one above the autopsy table and the other adjacent. Santilli’s alien autopsy, contrarily, was recorded by a single handheld camera, making for focus problems and grossly inadequate “coverage.”
Personnel in the autopsy room would have included a still photographer, but no such person is present, either as a figure or in the form of periodic illumination from flashbulbs. (Color Kodachrome film stock was at its peak in 1947, and would have given remarkable still images of the body.) The autopsy takes place on a plain wooden table overlaid with a sheet, not a proper autopsy table. Examples of the latter are fitted with gutters that manage runoff of blood and other fluids. The pathologists’ body language is exaggerated, as if to compensate for the lack of audio. One participant makes a show of using a palpation hammer, which tests reflex reactions. The hammer would have no use during an autopsy. Livescience.com writer Joe Nickell observed, “[T]he person performing the autopsy held the scissors like a tailor rather than a pathologist (who is trained to place his middle or ring finger in the bottom of the scissors hole and use his forefinger to steady the blades).” The injuries sustained by the alien are inconsistent with the sort of physical trauma (crushing avulsion) expected from an air crash. Except for the right thigh, the body exhibits no visible injuries. Further, the corpse does not suggest the expected “dead weight,” but instead seems slight and insubstantial.
American military coding visible on the seventeen-minute print shown at the Museum of London does not match any 1947 codes used by the U.S. Army.
When Kodak offered to analyze frames from the film, copyright holder Ray Santilli declined (though he did provide blank “leader” stock that, according to Kodak, could have dated from around 1947). Post-London versions of the autopsy film do not have the coding.
When Santilli displayed the round cans that held the film stock, sharp observers noted a Department of Defense seal. But Santilli claimed that the footage had never reached the U.S. military. How, then, does the DoD seal fit in?
Santelli endured the doubters for some time, explaining that he had culled the footage from a much longer film. Pressed, he finally identified the cameraman as Jack Barnett. Only two cameramen filmed the Alamogordo A-bomb, however, and neither one was named Jack Barnett.
Everything fell to pieces in 2006, when Santilli produced a comic feature film called Alien Autopsy. He continued to insist that an alien autopsy film existed, but that it had physically degraded so badly that he “reconstructed” the autopsy with new footage, retaining original frames where possible. After a while, he gave up that defense altogether, and admitted that the whole enterprise had been a hoax, perpetrated with a simple set and a pair of specially commissioned dummy corpses. If Santilli’s admission was difficult for him, he probably felt better while thinking about the money those seventeen minutes brought him: outside estimates suggest $6 million to $10 million.
Lay defenses of the autopsy footage carry on to this day, ranging from reasonable analysis to unhelpful certitude. One defender, posting on YouTube in 2015, wrote, in part, “This is a real autopsie [sic] of an alien. I don’t give a shit what people say. . . . F___k no way could anyone in those days do a dummy like that”—as if the footage must necessarily have been filmed in 1947!
Another YouTube poster blames the whole thing on Chuck Norris.