Ray Santilli
Ray Santilli (born 1958) is a British music producer and entrepreneur who distributed the 1995 alien autopsy film that was broadcast internationally on Fox Television on 28 August 1995, to an estimated audience of 1.5 billion viewers across 33 countries. Fox paid Santilli approximately US$250,000 for broadcast rights; the network added the subtitle "Fact or Fiction?" to protect itself from accusations of fraud by neither confirming nor denying the footage's legitimacy. Santilli acquired the footage from a retired US military cameraman who filmed the autopsy of a recovered entity in 1947 under the pseudonym "Jack Barnett." In 2006 he admitted the distributed footage was a reconstruction of film that had deteriorated before he could purchase it, while maintaining that the original footage had been genuine.
Acquisition of the footage
Santilli states that he first viewed the original autopsy footage in 1993 or 1994, when it still existed in viewable form. Before he could complete its purchase, the film stock had deteriorated almost completely, leaving only a few frames usable as reference. He and collaborator Gary Shoefield then commissioned a frame-by-frame reconstruction of the footage based on those surviving fragments, which became the version broadcast in 1995. Santilli sent portions of the film to Kodak laboratories to test for authenticity; Kodak reportedly stated that the portion they examined could have been manufactured in 1927, 1947, or 1967 — consistent with a wide range of production dates. Critics noted that photographs Santilli released in 1997 of the film canisters bore the label "Department of Defense" — an anachronism, since the Department of Defense did not exist by that name in 1947, when it was still the National Military Establishment.
2006 confession
Santilli did not characterize the distributed footage as a hoax. His position was that it was a restoration and reconstruction of authentic footage he had personally viewed, not an original fabrication. Special effects artist Spyros Melaris, who built the creature and sets used in the reconstruction, disputed this account: Melaris stated he had never seen any pre-existing tape and received no indication that he was recreating documented prior footage. Production details disclosed by Melaris included: the blood was jam, the intestines were from chickens, the brain from a sheep, and the set was constructed in the living room of an empty flat in Camden Town, London. Santilli's statement on the reconstruction was: "In 1993 or 1994 we saw the footage of the autopsy in its original form and brought it back to the UK. Within that year or so the footage had completely deteriorated. The only thing that was left was a few frames that we could use as reference. What we did was restore the original footage frame-by-frame over a very long period of time. We set about simply restoring what was a very damaged film."
Popular culture
A 2006 British comedy film, Alien Autopsy, starred Ant and Dec as fictionalized versions of Santilli and Shoefield and dramatized precisely the narrative Santilli described: the pair obtaining genuine footage, the footage deteriorating, and the reconstruction — released in the same month as Santilli's public admission.
Researcher Dan Burisch stated in a 2005 interview that he found the Santilli footage convincing on the basis of his own investigative work into crash retrieval cases, noting that specific anatomical details of the entity — including a flexible lens beneath the eyelid and the absence of an external ear protrusion — were consistent with beings he had independently investigated.