Roswell Film Explained?

posted in: science fiction 0

Remember Roswell, New Mexico, where an alien spacecraft supposedly crashed in 1947, and the Air Force made off with the wreckage and hid it? (Of course you do.) Remember the movie Alien Autopsy that came out a while back, purporting to show grainy, black-and-white footage of government scientists dissecting the alien bodies found in the wreckage? (Sure you do—if you don’t, you haven’t been reading enough junk journalism.) I think I watched about five minutes of it once when it was airing on TV. Or maybe I saw five minutes of a show about the movie. Whatever. In any event, a report in The Times of London says:

“THE creator of Max Headroom, a 1980s television cyber-presenter, has claimed he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film…. John Humphreys, a sculptor and consultant on Alien Autopsy who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, said it was he who made the models for the alien dissected in the original fake footage…. He said he spent four weeks fashioning the models from latex using clay sculptures.

“Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.”

There’s something oddly appropriate about this coming from a guy who helped create Max Headroom, one of my favorite off-beat SF shows of the 1980s. Lending even greater synchronicity to this story is the fact that I just recently started watching the old Max shows from digitally archived VHS recordings. (It holds up quite nicely.)

Also funny, in an odd sort of way, is that according to an old report on eonline.com the Fox network, which first released the Alien Autopsy film in the U.S., later released another “documentary” which exposed the film as a fraud. What’s their byline—”Fair and Balanced”? Heh, heh. Yep.

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