Alien Autopsy - Santilli's Admission

Santilli's Admission

In 2006, the events surrounding the release of the footage were adapted as a feature film, Alien Autopsy, a British comedy directed by Jonny Campbell and written by William Davies. The film gave a humorous reconstruction of the making of the Santilli film based on Santilli's statements, without commenting on the veracity of his claims.

On April 4, 2006, two days before the release of the film, Sky broadcast a documentary, Eamonn Investigates: Alien Autopsy, presented by Eamonn Holmes. In this program, Ray Santilli and fellow producer Gary Shoefield admitted that their film was actually a "reconstruction" containing only, in their words, "a few frames" from the original twenty-two rolls of film (each averaging four minutes in length), that Santilli had viewed in 1992. They explained that, by the time they had raised enough money to purchase the original, only a few frames were still intact, the rest having been degraded beyond the point of usability by heat and humidity.

In the documentary, Eamonn Holmes repeatedly refers to the film as a "fake," while Santilli patiently insists it is a "restoration," maintaining it is a "reconstruction" of an actual alien autopsy film he viewed in the early 1990s, that subsequently deteriorated.

Santilli and Shoefield stated that they had "restored" the damaged footage by filming a simulated autopsy on a fabricated alien, based upon what Santilli saw in 1992, and then adding in a few frames of the original film that had not degraded. They have not identified which frames are from the original. According to Santilli, a set was constructed in the living room of an empty flat in Rochester Square, Camden Town, London. John Humphreys, an artist and sculptor, was employed to construct two dummy alien bodies over a period of three weeks, using casts containing sheep brains set in raspberry jam, chicken entrails and knuckle joints obtained from S.C. Crosby Wholesale Butchers Smithfield meat market, London. Humphreys also played the role of the chief examiner, in order to allow him to control the effects being filmed. There were two separate attempts at making the footage. After filming, the team disposed of the "bodies" by cutting them into small pieces and placing them in rubbish bins across London.

Alien artifacts, supposedly items recovered from the crash site, were depicted in the footage. These included alien symbols and six-finger control panels, which Santilli describes in the Sky documentary as being the result of artistic license on his part. These artifacts were also created by Humphreys. The footage also showed a man reading a statement "verifying" his identity as the original cameraman and the source of the footage. Santilli and Shoefield admitted in the documentary that they had found an unidentified homeless man on the streets of Los Angeles, persuaded him to play the role of the cameraman, and filmed him in a motel.