Aliens are very fashionable right now. Steven Spielberg recently announced that they are real and have been visiting us since for ever – but then he does have a poorly reviewed new movie to push. Trump’s White House, meanwhile, has been busily trolling us with hints that it knows more about the subject than it has hitherto let on. I personally think it’s all bollocks – or, if you believe Project Blue Beam, worse than bollocks. But whichever camp you fit into, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy the three-part documentary series The Alien Autopsy Scandal.
It has the feel of one of those old-fashioned capers where an unlikely band of English eccentrics with specialist skills – butchery, model-making monsters for Dr Who, magic tricks, scamming mug punters – gather to pull off an impossible hoax: to persuade all the world’s experts that their elaborately staged alien autopsy is none other than actual footage from the 1947 Roswell Incident.
Amazingly (unlike in the movies where these escapades always end in failure), they pulled it off and at least two of them seem to have got very rich indeed off the back of their bogus product which has been viewed – allegedly: I’ve never seen it; have you? – by more than a billion people. ‘A lot of people would call it fraud. But it wasn’t,’ says one of them, former music-industry entrepreneur Ray Santilli, protesting perhaps a little too much.
Still, when you hear their story, you can’t really blame them. In the 1990s, Santilli and his partner-in-not-an-actual-crime Gary Shoefield were in the US on the hunt for unreleased Elvis footage when they were approached by an elderly American. A former army cameraman, he claimed to have been given top-secret security clearance in 1947 to film the aftermath of a flying saucer crash in New Mexico. He offered to sell them the footage for $100,000.
Backed by a German financier (surnamed Spielberg, oddly enough) they bought the footage for considerably less. But when they reopened the canisters, the celluloid – which had been still OK when they’d viewed the contents two years earlier – had oxidised and the film was almost unusable, with only a few frames uncorrupted.
So, rather than lose their investment, they decided to recreate the autopsy based on the limited surviving footage, and film it with the same camera model as the original using 1940s stock. Everything had to be just right: the surgical techniques and period equipment; the sheen of an alien’s freshly excavated brain and the quantity of goo released as it’s being sawed free. But the effort paid off, for everyone was taken in, from the ufologists to the Hollywood special-effects team that did Alien.
How, though, can we be sure that the story of the army cameraman wasn’t some figment devised to give the fake film some credibility? (I gather this is addressed, up to a point, in the third and final part of the documentary, which I’ve not yet seen.) And yet, if it is all a con, how does one explain those numerous sightings over the years by pilots, and all those personal testimonies by seemingly level-headed and sincere whistleblowers from the secret establishment? Don’t know; don’t care: just so long as I never get a rude awakening where they suck me up into their saucer with one of their tractor beams and subject me to one of their infamous anal probes.
I can never resist mentioning the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm because for me, even five seasons in, it remains the best drama on TV bar none. They’re all professional actors playing versions of themselves, obviously, from Kaleb, who now earns more than a million a season (rather more than he’d get as a jobbing farm manager), to Gerald who in real life converses fluently in the King’s English. But think of the horrendous tedium they must endure to give this farrago of fakery a degree of verisimilitude.
Every now and again, Clarkson breaks the fourth wall and shows us how big his film crew is: there must be at least a dozen of them. It swells still further in scenes like the one where Clarkson and Kaleb decide to build a ‘large, leaky wooden dam’, supposedly in order to trouser a £764.42-per-dam government grant. Amazon’s health and safety rules, we are told, require a life saver in full frogman kit to be on hand, lest Clarkson or Kaleb tumble and drown into the foot-high stream water.
Imagine how hard it must be having to pretend there’s just the two of you, in a field, enjoying your bantering rivalry, and then having to repeat the same once-genuine ad libs over and over again until the director’s satisfied. Imagine how tiresome it is for Lisa when she buys a huge load of breeding snails and Jeremy has to pretend to know nothing about them until they’re revealed to him on camera. And Lisa, in turn, must pretend to be shocked when Jeremy filches all the snail’s eggs to feed them to people at his pub on ‘Dare Night’. All staged so he can promote some nanny-state bollocks about how we need to eat more squirrel, pig’s uterus and sheep brains to save the planet from climate change or something.
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