The Roswell Autopsy Film
09.26.05
 Note- I must first say that I believe that there was a real autopsy of an alien body done in 1947. However the film we all saw back in 1995 was nothing more than an intentional fake produced to be used as a disinformation tool. The autopsy was making a lot of news, and how better to snuff it than to produce a video that is obviously fake, and will easily be deemed that by debunkers and believers alike.
Now everyone knows it's a fake and does not talk about it anymore. Problem solved. If there is a real video out there, it doesn't matter now because if they showed it, everyone would simply say it's "just another Roswell fake autopsy" Genius disinformation if you ask me. Below is a history of the film we know...
History of the "Alien Autopsy Film"
Ray Santilli is the head of a British-based video production company called the Merlin Group. For a number of years their stock in trade were "Tin Tin" cartoons, some Disney merchandise, music oriented videos, "rockumentaries," and the like. According to his own account, in 1992 Ray Santilli was in Cleveland, Ohio, searching for the earliest known film footage shot of Elvis Presley. There he met the cameraman who allegedly had the Elvis film, an octogenarian American named Jack Barnett. After negotiating for the Elvis film, Barnett told Santilli he had some other film the British producer might be interested in. He then supposedly showed Santilli 22 canisters of 16 mm black-and-white film (at other times the count of film cans has been given as 14, 15, or 29) which were outtakes, as it were, from a top secret film Barnett shot in 1947 for the U.S. Army. The subject of the film: recovery of an extraterrestrial craft and the autopsies of dead aliens!
Santilli was intrigued by Barnett's claims, but was only persuaded of the truth of the old man's story when Barnett showed him papers and photos proving he had indeed been a cameraman for the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1952. Little else has been disclosed about Barnett's past; because he was revealing government secrets he desired anonymity to forestall prosecution. In a statement posted on Usenet in August 1995, Barnett says that his father was in the movie business, and he (the younger Barnett) had polio as a child. Despite this handicap he joined the army in 1942 and became a combat cameraman. In 1944 Barnett claims he was assigned to "Intelligence" under the "Assistant Chief of Air Staff." He also claims to have filmed the atomic tests at Trinity Site (July 1945), but a search of personnel records of the Manhattan Project reveals no "Jack Barnett" was present.
In 1947, according to Barnett's statement, he was summoned to White Sands, New Mexico, and on June 1 went to Washington, D.C. on orders from Major General Clements M. McMullen, deputy chief of the Strategic Air Command. From D.C. Barnett and sixteen others ("mostly medical" personnel) were sent back to New Mexico to a crash site southwest of Socorro. Roswell is 163 miles from Socorro. Barnett's orders were to film the removal of debris from the crash site. He had clearance to all areas, which at that time he was told was the scene of a Soviet spy plane crash.
When Barnett got to the crash site the area was sealed off by the military. It was obvious upon arrival that the device in the desert was no Russian warplane. It was a "large disc," a flying saucer, lying upside down. (One wonders how Barnett could tell if the disk were right side or wrong side up, disks usually being described as symmetrical).
The soldiers could not approach the wreckage for some time, as it was radiating a lot of heat. Even more extraordinary were the four beings lying beside the crashed saucer. Barnett's account sensitively refers to these beings as "Freaks." The "Freaks" were screaming and clutching small boxes close to their chests. Barnett apparently arrived while it was still dark, since he says the army could not move in on the downed saucer and the "Freaks" until six A.M. The "Freaks" screamed louder as the GIs approached, and refused to give up their mysterious boxes. One soldier hit a "Freak" with the butt of his rifle and thereby persuaded the creature to part with its apparatus.
 Three of the beings were taken away still alive. The fourth was dead (killed by the blow of an M1 butt?). The medical team was reluctant to treat the strange beings for their injuries, but they overcame their fear and rendered assistance. Barnett went on to film the wreckage. His statement describes the broken-up debris as being from exterior struts that supported a smaller disk on the underside (now up?) of the large saucer. The corpse of the dead "Freak" was packed in ice.
The loose wreckage was catalogued and hauled away in trucks. Three days later more experts arrived from Washington, and an effort was made to remove the main craft. None of the men could stand being inside the disk for long--the atmosphere inside was "very heavy" and breathing it made the men sick. The whole craft was loaded onto a "flattop" (?) and driven away to Wright-Patterson air base in Ohio for detailed analysis. Barnett went there too.
Barnett stayed at Wright-Patterson for three weeks filming the study of the wreckage. He was next ordered to Fort Worth, Texas, to film the autopsy of a dead "Freak." Fearing contamination, the pathologists and Barnett were required to wear protective suits. This made camera work difficult, according to Barnett. Contrary to orders, he removed the suit to facilitate filming. Apparently other aliens died in the interim since their capture, because he filmed two different autopsies in July 1947.
Hundreds of reels of film were exposed, and Barnett culled out a few that needed special processing (his account claims he did his own film processing). He sent the processed film to Washington in batches, but incredibly, no one bothered to pick up the last shipment of problem canisters. Barnett says he notified his superiors about the leftover film, but got no response. Despite all the high level attention and strict secrecy, no one at the Pentagon could be bothered to collect Barnett's last rolls of film! So Barnett put them away, sat on them for thirty-five years, until Ray Santilli showed up searching for lost footage of Elvis Presley.
Santilli offered to buy the problem reels, especially (he said) after he saw footage of President Harry Truman observing one of the proceedings. Santilli later amended this claim, saying instead that he only saw a can labeled "Truman." Barnett didn't want to sell at first, so Santilli pressed him, calling him so frequently Barnett's wife refused to take his calls. When he finally agreed to sell, Barnett put a stiff price on the film -- either 100,000 pounds ($150,000, roughly) or 100,000 dollars -- reputedly so that he could pay for his granddaughter's wedding. Santilli didn't have that kind of money lying around, so he enlisted the help of an investor, a shadowy German named Volker Spielberg.
Now the actual date of Santilli's purchase of the film is in dispute, but the commonest version says he bought the footage in June 1993. During that same period, May-June 1993, Santilli talked with Philip Mantle about the possibility of doing a UFO documentary. Mantle is Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA). Santilli and Mantle happened to meet at a press conference in London for the Travis Walton UFO abduction movie Fire in the Sky, and Santilli apparently mentioned the autopsy film, which he was as yet unwilling to show to Mantle. In the fall of 1993 UFO researcher and writer Jenny Randles began to hear rumors of an autopsy film. Mantle tried to get Santilli to show him the footage, but Santilli evaded Mantle's requests, making appointments with Mantle, then bowing out later. Mantle naturally assumed his leg was being pulled.
In an effort to smoke out the autopsy film, Carl Nagaitis, Philip Mantle's press agent, floated a rumor in the U.K. that linked the unseen autopsy footage to a new big-budget project by Steven Spielberg. According to gossip pieces published by British tabloids in December 1993, Spielberg was planning a new movie called Project X, based on the Roswell Incident and the Majestic-12 papers. Steven Spielberg's production company, Amblin Entertainment, issued a press release denying the maker of ET and Jurassic Park was doing anything connected with Roswell.
By now the rumor mill in British UFO circles was humming. The first outsider to see the autopsy film appears to have been Reg Presley, who in the Sixties had been the lead singer of the rock band The Troggs. Presley was well known for his interest in UFO and crop circle phenomena, and perhaps stimulated by news stories about the spurious Spielberg feature, managed to convince Santilli to let him see the autopsy film in late '93 or early '94. Presley mentioned seeing the autopsy film while on the BBC-TV show "Good Morning with Anne and Nick" in early 1995. On March 17, 1995, Philip Mantle and his wife Sue went to the London offices of the Merlin Group and were given a short sequence of the film, said to be "on-site examination footage".
The film segment was of pretty poor visual quality, but a few salient details were discernible. The camera seemed fixed in one position, facing the corner of a room. Lying on a table was a body, apparently not human, partially covered by a sheet. Two men in white coats took tissue samples from the corpse while a third figure in dark clothing stood in the foreground with his back to the camera. The thing on the examination table was not a diminutive "Gray" so common in UFO lore. It was moderately sized, and the most striking feature Mantle could make out were large, dark eyes.
Interested but unenlightened, Mantle asked Santilli if he would speak at the upcoming BUFORA conference, scheduled for August 19-20 in Sheffield. Santilli agreed. Not long after this Mantle happened to speak to a friend of his, David Clarke, and told him about Santilli and the alleged autopsy film. Clarke was once on BUFORA's council, but currently works as a reporter for the Sheffield Star. Sensing a good story, Clarke wrote a piece about the BUFORA conference, highlighting Santilli's appearance with the film. The item was picked up by the Whites Press Agency, who contacted Philip Mantle for confirmation. He did so, and in the ensuing days Mantle was bombarded with calls from radio, TV, and newspapers for more information on the alleged Roswell film. Mantle referred them to Ray Santilli. The cat, so to speak, was out of the bag for certain.
Mantle and his wife went back to the Merlin Group's office on April 28, and were shown an actual autopsy sequence, clearer than the "on-site examination footage." This was not the segment now known so widely from the Fox TV broadcast "Alien Autopsy -- Fact or Fiction?" Mantle does not say if the body in the April 28th screening was the same as the one he'd seen in the earlier fragment, but the image subsequently made famous on Fox -- big head, female genitalia, bloated abdomen, six fingers per hand and six toes per foot -- is the one he described seeing that day, with one major difference. In the April 28th footage the body on the table did not have the seriously damaged right leg the Fox TV segment alien does.
Eight days prior to the April 28th screening, Mantle put several proposals in writing and submitted them to Santilli, with copies going to John Spencer of BUFORA and Walt Andrus of MUFON. Mantle requested: 1) a copy of the film; 2) copies of all the documentation Santilli possessed; 3) serial numbers from the film canisters; and 4) one complete reel of the original film. Kodak UK and Hasan Shah Films agreed to undertake independent analysis of the film stock. Santilli reportedly agreed to the proposals, but did nothing about them, so the film stock was never analyzed.
Curiously, almost a month earlier, on March 26, 1995, Mantle told the press "We have already had the film checked out by Kodak, who confirm it is fifty years old .... Ray Santilli was making similar claims to BBC's Channel 4 on April 11: "The film stock has been tested and the opinion is that it is authentic". Why then, one wonders, would Mantle be asking Santilli to submit the film to testing nine days later, on April 20?
People were already muttering "hoax," including many firm proponents of the crashed UFO version of the Roswell Incident. Stanton Friedman was skeptical, and Kevin Randle was on record as saying "the circumstances still suggest that it is a hoax".
In order for a radical and startling document to be taken as factual, certain strict criteria must be met. The origin of the document must known and identified. Santilli refused to provide more information about Jack Barnett, claiming the U.S. government would retaliate against him for revealing their momentous secret. (This argument has a serious flaw; whistle blowers and tipsters always fare better by going fully public with their revelations. Just ask Daniel Ellsberg.)
Next, the age and physical characteristics of the document must be verified. Despite Santilli's and Mantle's claims, this had not yet been done, and has not been done to this day. Santilli's whole case for proving the age of the autopsy film rests on the "edge codes" Kodak puts on its film stock. The edge code on the autopsy film supposedly consists of a square and a triangle, which in Kodak's records indicates film stock made at twenty years intervals in 1927, 1947, or 1967. Santilli showed strips of clear leader film with this edge code to some people, along with frames of an empty (no alien visible) operating room. There is no direct link between these film fragments and the autopsy footage itself. Imagine trying to authenticate a controversial document--like the Hitler Diaries--based on a photocopy of one page. No paper analysis, no ink analysis, just some possibly forged handwriting. No sound decision could be made with such evidence.
The final method of authenticating a document is by outside references. Does the new find explain old questions? Does it fit with the evidence given by other witnesses? Hitler's surviving confidants were adamant the Nazi leader did not keep a personal diary. In the case of the Roswell Incident, the testimony of those who claim to have seen saucer wreckage and alien corpses does not tally with the images on Santilli's film. The Roswell witnesses said the dead ETs had four fingers on each hand, not six. They were little more than three feet tall, not over five feet. The Roswell aliens were spindly creatures without the robust build of the things photographed by the elusive Jack Barnett.
So what was going on here? The first public screening of the autopsy film was arranged for May 5, 1995, at the Museum of London. Only journalists and UFOlogists were invited to view it. Ray Santilli would be there to present the film, but the proprietary secrecy surrounding the screening was so heavy all attendees had to submit to the indignity of being frisked for cameras and recorders. More than truth was at stake now -- so was big money.
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