Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 28, 1995 TAG: 9508280133
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It sounds like a story from the headlines of a supermarket tabloid: Film producer goes looking for Elvis, finds an alien instead.
But a Radford photography expert has been asked to judge the authenticity of what some are calling proof that we are not alone.
While researching a documentary about early rock 'n' roll, a London producer claims he met a former U.S. Air Force photographer who sold him apparent footage of a 1947 autopsy of an alien recovered from a spaceship crash in New Mexico.
Shutterbug magazine editor Bob Shell of Radford heard about the film and offered to authenticate it for the producer. He served as photographic consultant for the hour-long Fox Broadcasting special about the film, "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction," which airs tonight at 8 p.m. on WJPR/WFXR (Fox 21/27).
Hosted by actor Jonathan Frakes (Cmdr. Will Riker from ``Star Trek: The Next Generation''), the show will air footage from the controversial film for the first time. Fox reportedly has 18 minutes of film that also show wreckage from the spaceship and medical workers dressing the wounds of an injured alien.
Referred to as "The Santilli Film," after Ray Santilli, the producer who owns it, the movie has been the main topic of conversation recently on the Internet among UFO buffs, government-conspiracy theorists and skeptics who are awaiting the show.
UFO doubters dismiss the film as an obvious hoax and the creature as a mannequin. Believers are electrified, hoping it will validate their claims of a cover-up of the existence of extraterrestrial life.
The film depicts a slightly built creature reminiscent of the child-like aliens from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Lying on its back on a stark, metal operating table, the humanoid is naked and hairless with large black eyes and six fingers and six toes. The creature has a deep gash or burn on its right thigh.
A black membrane-like material over its eyes is removed to show an eyeball with an elongated pupil, according to those familiar with the film.
A forensic-pathology lecturer at the University of Sheffield in England who saw the film a couple of months ago has said that though the chest revealed organs like a heart and lungs, the creature's brain did not appear to be human.
Bob Shell is the only photographic expert who's been authorized to study the film, and he says, "Through my physical and historical research on the film, I have established a 95-percent probability ... that the film was shot in 1947 as the cameraman claims."
Shell's credentials lend weight to his opinion. He's the author of 12 photography manuals, and Shutterbug has the third-largest circulation of any photography magazine in the world.
Santilli has given him a three-frame sample of the film to study that shows the empty autopsy room before the alien is brought in.
Shell said markings on the edge of the film that denote the year it was manufactured support the claim that it was made in 1947, as does the type of film, which was only manufactured from the early 1940s until 1957.
He also says the film and the type of camera it was shot with were both the same type that military photographers used in the 1940s. Among his arguments for the film's authenticity: for many years, Eastman Kodak printed geometric symbols on the edge of its film to denote the year in which it was manufactured. The alien film has a square followed by a triangle, Shell said.
That symbol was used three times in Kodak's history, in 1927, 1947 and 1967. And the type of film used for the alien movie, 16mm Super XX, was introduced in the early 1940s and discontinued in 1957.
So, "Super XX with the square and triangle could only have come from 1947," Shell said.
As for the possibility of someone using film manufactured in 1947 to shoot an image today, Shell says the film would have spoiled after sitting so long. The clarity of the image suggests that it was shot and processed while it was still fresh, he said.
Because of broadcast agreements with Fox, no scientists will be allowed to test the film further until after "Alien Autopsy'' airs tonight. This restraint has fueled some skeptics' belief that the film can't be genuine.
Shell will not be interviewed on camera in the Fox special, he says, because he is waiting for a follow-up show that will announce the results of chemical-dating tests to be done by Kodak in a few weeks.
Whether or not the film turns out to be a hoax, the tale of its origins reads like the script for another popular Fox show - "The X-Files."
Shell says some copies of the film that were sent to him from London mysteriously disappeared and reappeared while in the possession of a courier company. The company could give no explanation for the delays, he said.
"We can only guess somebody wanted copies of it," he said. "I have a friend who's a retired intelligence officer, and he said if the government didn't want this out, the cameraman and Santilli would have been dead a while ago.
"He thinks it's a controlled release," Shell said, adding that the government may be preparing the public for the existence of aliens.
Ray Santilli says he was researching a music documentary of early rock 'n' roll when he traveled to Cleveland in 1993 looking for lost film footage of Elvis Presley.
He found a retired news photographer who had a short film of The King that was for sale. The elderly photographer, who wished to remain anonymous, said he might have something else that would interest the producer.
The man said he had been a photographer for the Air Force from 1942-1952, and he had shot top-secret films for the military, including the aftermath of a 1947 spaceship crash near Roswell, N.M. He made a copy of the film, but he was tired of hiding it from the world and needed cash. Did Santilli want to buy it?
"At this time, I had no knowledge whatsoever of the Roswell event," Santilli wrote in a letter posted recently on the Internet. "But when someone tells you they have real footage of an alien autopsy, of course it's of interest."
The story of a 1947 spaceship crash in New Mexico is probably the most famous story in UFO lore. A rancher near Roswell, N.M., found the wreckage of something after it crashed in the desert. Air Force officials went to the site and an officer made a press release that the military had recovered a flying disc.
But a day later, the officer recanted and said it was a weather balloon that crashed. Still, witnesses claimed the military recovered the remains of a spaceship and its occupants.
The photographer from whom Santilli claims he got the film tells a slightly different story. He says the crash he saw took place a month earlier at a different site from the one the rancher described.
Santilli says the photographer told him that the craft's four occupants were alive after the crash. One was killed at the scene by soldiers who hit it in the head with a rifle, and the other three were captured.
Two died after a couple weeks, the old photographer said, and the remaining alien lived for two years in government custody before it also died.
The photographer reportedly sold Santilli 22 reels of film, most of which are in poor condition. One segment, which Santilli says couldn't be transferred to video for fear of destroying the film, shows President Harry Truman touring the crash scene.
Some who have read descriptions of the film are critical of the fact that whenever the photographer comes in for a close-up of internal organs the focus is fuzzy.
But Shell says that's because the photographer and medical staff were dressed in heavy surgical gear and gloves to protect them from possible contamination from the alien body. The gloves made it impossible for the photographer to alter his focus, so he had to estimate and keep the camera at that focus length, Shell said.
But Philip J. Klass, the nation's leading UFO debunker, offers a different reason for the fuzzy close-ups: "When the final truth comes out, it will be a manufactured dummy," he said. "This one was probably custom-made for this video."
Klass, publisher of Skeptics UFO Newsletter and a former editor of Aviation Week magazine, criticizes Fox and Santilli for broadcasting the film before Kodak performs chemical tests to determine when the film was manufactured and shot.
"If it is authentic, it is the most extraordinary, most newsworthy thing to be put on film since the camera was invented," he said. "Isn't that worthy of some more study?"
But the main reason the film can't be real, he said, is because there was no spaceship crash.
"My opinion, based on hard, hard, once-top-secret evidence, is there was no crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle in Roswell in 1947 or in any other place at any other time."
Klass said he has obtained documents from the government through the Freedom of Information Act that show that President Truman was asking what flying saucers were in 1948 and that his best military advisors believed them to be Soviet spy craft. The National Security Council, one of the most secret government agencies, also never had anything on its agenda about aliens or recovered spaceships, Klass said.
"If a flying saucer crashed and was recovered in the New Mexico desert in 1947," Klass said, "somebody forgot to inform the president and all the high-ranking Air Force officers and intelligence officers."
Klass warns viewers Monday to be skeptical. "Ninety-nine percent of what appears on TV promotes belief in flying saucers and government cover-ups because viewers like to see extraordinary claims."
by CNB