An article on the "Santilli Alien Autopsy" - Part 2
by Ed Gehrman
Bob Shell plays a very important part in this unfolding drama. With
that in mind, here╣s excerpts from a Shell interview, I think his
latest, published in Nov-Dec. 1995, in Photo Shopper Magazine.
PHOTO SHOPPER: Cutting directly to the chase - you've seen a lot of
the original film and analyzed it, so what do you think? Is it
authentic?
BOB SHELL: Well, the film is certainly authentic in the sense that the
film stock is 1947-vintage Kodak 16mm Super XX Pan chromatic high
speed safety film. Which is correct film for the time scale that we're
talking about. It was used by the military for a number of different
types of photography, so there's really no anachronism involved in the
type of film, or the date of manufacture of the film itself.
PS: How did you determine the date of manufacture?
SHELL: Well, Kodak uses an edge code of geometric symbols on their
16mm films to indicate a date of manufacture. Until the sixties they
repeated those edge codes every 20 years. The edge code on this
particular film is a square followed by a triangle. Which would
indicate 1927, '47, or '67. Because of contextual things within the
film, no one has seriously suggested it could have been made in 1927.
A wall clock, a telephone, and other things are visible in the film
that were not available in '27. Besides, Super XX film wasn't
available then, either. So we really didn't consider 1927 worth being
concerned with. So we then looked at the possibility of the film
being made in 1967. That was equally unlikely. In 1957 Kodak made a
major change in their 16mm films. They adopted a new, high
temperature, more caustic chemical process. When they did this, they
discontinued all of their films and issued either revised versions of
those films or new films to replace them. Super XX was discontinued
during that change-over. If Super XX was not made after 1957, this
stock could not have been made in '67.
PS: What if some insider counterfeited the edge-code on some other
film made after 1957?
SHELL: They would have to match the type of film base material, as
well. After the '50s, Kodak used triacetate, basically the same stuff
they use today. But in 1947 they were using an earlier form of acetate
called acetatepropionate. This decomposes with age. It shrinks in
physical dimensions, and after it's aged for a while it has a very
characteristic, acidic odor. Based on the odor and the shrinkage
characteristics, we've said that this film is the older form of
acetate. Therefore it would be 1947 film.
PS: What prevented someone from having acquired a bunch of 1947 film
and shooting it in 1985 or '90 or '95?
SHELL: Nothing prevents anyone from doing that. But the finished film
would have noticeable levels of fog caused by background atmospheric
radiation and cosmic rays. It was a high speed film, meaning that it
would fog fairly rapidly. And this film shows no measurable levels of
fog whatsoever. This would indicate to me that it was exposed and
processed while it was still quite fresh. So I would say that probably
the film was exposed and processed within a couple years of its
manufacture in 1947.
PS: I've heard that this particular film had a really short shelf-life
as well.
SHELL: A two year shelf-life was what Kodak put on the packaging. That
is,the "use by" date was two years from the date of manufacturing.
PS: All right, so it seems that if this were a fraudulent undertaking,
it was undertaken in 1947.
SHELL: Yes, if it's a fraud it was done in 1947. Which creates very
large questions of its own, as to why someone would have faked such a
film in 1947 and who would have done it, and who would have had the
budget to do something like this?
PS: Who would have?
SHELL: No one except for the U.S. government.
PS: And why would they have done it?
SHELL: I have no earthly idea, really. The only suggestion that I've
heard of a hoax by the U.S. government that makes even a little bit of
sense is this film was to be intentionally leaked to the Soviets, to
scare Stalin into thinking we had inherited alien technology and could
whip the socks off him if he bothered us. But that's a suggestion that
really doesn't to me seem very logical. If we really wanted to scare
Stalin, I think we would use something besides dead aliens.
PS: Like live bombers.
SHELL: Right.
PS: When you appraise the film, I assume that you pretty much restrict
your comments to its physical condition and its physical properties.
Are there any other elements involved with it that give you an opinion
one way or the other?
SHELL: Professionally, I'm commenting only on the physical aspects of
the film itself, because I haven't really wanted to step outside of
the range of expertise that brought me into the case. But my original
training was in zoology, and I have attended autopsies and done
dissections myself. I did all the photographs for a college-level
laboratory manual on anatomy and physiology. So I'm quite aware of
what an autopsy looks like and what the insides of people and animals
look like, and how a body behaves when it's being cut into and
manipulated by surgeons. The impression I have from looking at the
film is that this is a real body, being operated on by the doctors,
surgeons, pathologists, whatever they may be. And that what's inside
this body is not human organs. In other words,it's a real, non-human
body being dissected.
PS: What are the telltale attributes of a real body as opposed to some
kind of faked body?
SHELL: Well, we have to look at that in two different contexts.
Certainly,we can fake a body that would have all or most of the
attributes that this one does, today, with a big enough budget and
time and a reason to do it. But if we assume that I am correct in my
film dating, then we have to assume this was done in 1947. And in
1947, special effects technology was not particularly advanced and the
only materials available to make such a body were fairly limited:
latex and plaster and that sort of thing. And there are certain things
about the way the body moves when, say, the hand is lifted and the
fingers are flexed by the surgeon, or when the skin is cut and pulled
back, that I don't think could be done with latex. It doesn't look
like latex to me, it looks like real skin and the finger flexing looks
like real joints being moved. The organs inside look like real organs
with connective tissue holding everything together...They're just
shaped differently than any organs I've seen.
PS: Now I understand that there's some controversy about the identity
or even the authenticity of the cameraman.
SHELL: Well, at the moment no one, except for Ray Santilli, the
British producer who bought and released the footage, has actually met
the cameraman face to face. So we're taking it on Ray's word that
there is a cameraman...Another British producer by the name of John
Purdy, who produced a program about the autopsy film, has talked to
the cameraman on the telephone, in a call set-up by Ray. He said that
the man he talked to was obviously an American. And he thought the man
had a Brooklyn accent.
PS: Who is this guy alleged to be, and what about these rumors we're
hearing that he disappeared?
SHELL: The fellow is in his mid-eighties (now). He was a military
cameraman for 10 years, from 1942 to 1952 as I recall. He was assigned
to military intelligence, and filmed quite a number of top secret
projects during his time as a cameraman. This would have been the most
secret project he was ever involved in. His version of the story is,
(that) he's now older, and not in the best of health, and he wanted to
come forward with the film and get some money for it, and he gave the
money to his granddaughter. That's the story as I understand it. As
far as verifying that the man really exists, I have not been able to
do that myself yet...I've been promised that I will have a face to
face interview with him at some time.
PS: O.K.,when skeptics look at this footage, what conclusive evidence
do they point at to call it a fraud?
SHELL: So far, I've seen nothing from any of the skeptics that really
holds any water. You know, there have been lots of people on television
and in articles saying "Well, it's obviously a fake because there are
no aliens. "You can't really argue that way. You have to find something
wrong with the film if you want to demonstrate it's a fraud. The
first thing that came out was someone saying, "Obviously, it's not
true because in 1947 they didn't have coiled phone cords like we see
in the film, or wall telephones." Well, we researched that with the
Bell Telephone Museum and found that these phones definitely were
available in 1947. Someone else said the wall clock was not made in
1947. We went to General Electric and verified that this wall clock
was introduced in the '30's. Other people have said the Shure
microphone visible in the film, that the surgeon is speaking into
periodically during the autopsy, is the wrong vintage. I talked to a
technical specialist from the Shure corporation, and he said it is the
right vintage. Some people have attacked the film because it goes out
of focus when the camera moves in close. That's just because the
camera he used, a Bell and Howell Film 70, doesn't focus very close,
and if you move in closer than a certain distance, the pictures do get
blurred. That's just a characteristic of the camera. So, so far all of
the things hauled out by the skeptics to use to debunk the film
haven't really proved anything.
PS: I have to assume that in a top-secret operation like this, the
cameraman would have had top-secret clearances, and might have been
under observation himself. How many rolls of film were there?
SHELL: Twenty-two rolls. One hundred foot rolls.
PS: Twenty-two one hundred foot rolls. So how is it that he had these
in his possession? How was he able to get them past his own superiors?
SHELL: His story is that these 22 rolls were rolls he held back for
special processing because they had problems of one sort or another.
They needed push processing, the camera had jammed and they had torn
sprockets, or for whatever reason these were all rolls he wanted to
hand process. So he processed all of the films that didn't have
problems and sent them on through to Washington. He kept the remaining
rolls back, processed them a few days later, called Washington and
said they were ready, and his story is that no one ever came for them.
PS: There were 2200 feet of top-secret motion pictures floating
around, and no one came for them?
SHELL: It doesn't sound likely to most people, but it actually isn't
that unlikely. At the time this event occurred, the U.S. Army Air
Force was being split off into a separate agency and made into the
U.S. Air Force. And there was considerable confusion in terms of who
was in charge of what...lots of things slipped through the
cracks...Now that's one possible interpretation. Another possibility
is the cameraman intentionally kept the films.
PS: Is there anything about the films that you've seen that would
support the fact that they did need special care?
SHELL: Oh, yeah. Some of them have apparently been push-processed. I
base this on the contrast and grain structure; it looks like
push-processed film. Some of the film does have badly shredded areas
on the edges where the camera messed up and tore the sprocket holes.
Also, those rolls of film all show uneven processing, which is
characteristic of processing in a small
hand tank rather than in a processing machine.
PS: Over how many days of shooting did these 22 rolls get produced?
SHELL: Well, part of these rolls show the debris of the crashed craft
and the other part shows two separate autopsies. The crash occurred on
the last day of May in 1947. The official recovery operation started
on the first day of June, and lasted for three weeks. The autopsies
were done on the 12th and the 14th of July in Ft. Worth, Texas. So the
period from the 1st of June to about the 14th of July was when these
films were made. And he doesn't say precisely when they were
processed, but they were processed at some point after that.
PS: That's a month and a half for this creature to sit around and
putrefy.
SHELL: Not necessarily. What he says was that when he got to the
crashed craft site there were four creatures there. All four were
alive when he arrived on site.
PS: The cameraman himself saw this.
SHELL: Yes. Within hours of the time he arrived on site, one of them
died. Of the other three, two of them lived about a month, and the
other one lived for two years. It died in 1949 and a separate autopsy
was done at the time and filmed by the cameraman.
PS: So the two existing autopsy sequences, then, are of the first one
to die and the last one to die?
SHELL: No, the two we've got are the first and second ones to die. Or
maybe the second and third, out of the four. We don't know if the one
that died at the crash site is among those in the autopsy footage.
PS: So where is the footage of the last one?
SHELL: He, (the cameraman), kept none of that.
PS: So, how many rolls altogether does he claim he exposed?
SHELL: Over two hundred.
PS: So that means over 180 rolls of 16mm 100-foot lengths of film are
floating around someplace. That's about twice the running-time of
"Close Encounters."
SHELL: Right.
PS: But we have no idea where?
SHELL: Oh, we have a good idea where. Somewhere in the U.S.
government's possession in Washington DC. Most likely anyway.
PS: Who is Dr. Detlev Bronk?
SHELL: The cameraman says that the two surgeons in the room are a Dr.
Detlev Bronk and a Dr. Williams. Forensic pathologists who have
watched the film have said that it looks to them like the man doing
the work is not a pathologist, but a surgeon, based on the way he cuts
and the way he holds the instruments and the way he manipulates.
Apparently there's a difference in the way surgeons and pathologists
handle their implements. Which supports the cameraman's claim that he
was a surgeon. We do know that Dr. Detlev Bronk was a real person. At
the time of the autopsy, he was chief of Air Medicine, the United
States Army Air Force. Which would mean he would have been called in
at any unusual air crash or event like that. From 1952 onwards, he was
president of the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine, and they have his
personal papers. When I went to the Rockefeller Institute several
weeks ago to inquire about this, they said they had all of Dr. Bronk's
personal papers, including his personal diaries, his date books, his
correspondence, etc. When I said that I wanted to see this material
for 1947, I was told that all of Dr. Bronk's personal diaries are
missing and unaccounted for...
PS: When did the word first get around that this footage existed?
SHELL: Well, the first rumors that I heard got around at the beginning
of this year. The first showing of the film anywhere in the world was
in May,in London, for a small group of UFO investigators and
international press. Followed by showings in Italy and in France and
then later on in the U.S. The film was also shown to a U.S.
Congressional delegation sometime in June.
PS: Now, what is the content of this research? What are they looking
at,just the films or ...
SHELL: No, no, no ... They're looking at the physical artifacts of the
crash, like the boxes, which are shown in the film of the debris. The
boxes are metal looking objects with imprints for six-fingered hands,
with what look like buttons underneath parts of the fingers and palm.
The person I spoke to, who claims to have been involved in the
research, says they are computers and that the hand prints are the
input system for the computers. That after studying the computers for
all the many years we've had them in our possession, we've learned
very little about how they work.
PS: There seems to be a big abyss between investigators and authentic
records in some areas of this case, but here you are describing almost
a direct link, people who seem very specific with first-hand
descriptions.
SHELL: Well, of course, these people are speaking to me off the
record, and at risk to their positions if they were exposed through
talking about it.
PS: A great number of people would have been involved in finding this
crash in 1947, loading it, transporting it, cleaning up ...
SHELL: Certainly a reasonable number of people were involved. But how
much most of those people knew is probably quite minimal.
Interestingly enough, the crash occurred on the last day of May in
1947. It occurred 10 miles southwest of Socorro New Mexico and was
witnessed by local ranchers...
PS: They actually saw the crash?
SHELL: ...they saw the crash, yes. On June the 1st 1947, an abandoned
and played-out magnesium mine about a mile from the crash site was
reopened by the military. The Bureau of Mines records are still in
existence, and show that this mine was reopened, operated for several
months, but no mining of any sort was done. Then it was shut down
again. The mine itself has been visited recently by investigators.
It's a very large mine shaft supported by heavy metal 'I' beams. It's
not a primitive mine by any means, and quite a lot of material could
be put in there and hidden from public view. That to me is one of the
strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence substantiating that
something was going on there.
PS: A day after the crash? A mile from the crash site?
SHELL: We know within a mile or so exactly where it came down. We
don't know with pinpoint accuracy where it came in, because there's
nothing you can find today to tell you where the crash site was. The
military apparently did a very good cover up job. There's one area
where the crash easily could have happened, where about a 30-foot
diameter circular area of ground has been dug up at some time in the
past and replaced with soil taken from somewhere else.
PS: And this coincides with where witnesses say it came down?
SHELL: Right ... and the cameraman said it was so hot that it melted
the sand underneath it. So there would be reason to dig up what was
there and carry it off as well.
PS: Why Wright Patterson-why not some other facility?
SHELL: I have no idea. That's just where the cameraman says it was
taken. He also says that the crew who was on-site doing the clean-up
when he arrived had been there for a while. They were going through
this like it was something they had done before. Those were his words,
it was like something they had done before. They were going through a
procedure. He had the impression that they had gone through recovery
procedures on other crashes.
PS: UFO crashes?
SHELL: Right, that this was not the first one. He believes this was
not the first time they saw what they were seeing and handled what
they were handling, and they knew exactly how to deal with it.
PS: What's next in this series of investigations?
SHELL: Researchers at M.I.T. are using some new image-sharpening
algorithms to see if they can enhance the clarity of things in the
footage. For example, there's a sign on the wall near the phone; we'd
like to see what it says. And the nurse during the autopsy writes
notes on a pad. It would be interesting, and perhaps revealing, if we
could enhance and read what she wrote. Another thing is to take the
film testing itself a step further by getting Kodak to do some
specialized chemical destruct tests, which will be the 100%
verification of the dating of the film. I'm giving it a 95% based on
my own analysis. Kodak can give me the extra 5% because they keep a
very detailed record of qualities in all the chemicals they buy for
their manufacturing process. For that particular batch of film from
1947, they know exactly what they should get when they do a
spectroscopic analysis. So they will do this and compare it. There are
also some physical measurements they can do, because in 1960 they
changed the way the perforations are punched in 16mm film. New
machinery that worked differently was brought in. The variation in
spacing between perforations is very tiny, but if you have 50-frame
strip of film you can measure it. You can determine with 100% accuracy
whether it was punched before or after this change in equipment was
made. Kodak can do that for us.
PS: So that would again bring us back to further evidence that the
foot- age is authentic from the standpoint of time?
SHELL: Right. There's no way from the film itself we can ever settle
the argument of the validity of what's on the film. That's going to
have to be argued and argued and argued by other people.
Don Sutherland, 1995
Truly Dangerous Company
The Truly Dangerous Company debunking is funny and somewhat
entertaining. It was their insistence that Kodak hadn╣t been
contacted, and that this film couldn't have been shot in 1947 that
started the negative attitude so prevalent today in the press and
popular opinion. But they blew their whole case by issuing the
following disclaimer: "Many of the FX techniques explained here did
not exist until recently. So we should make it clear that our
assumption here is that the "alien autopsy" was not shot in 1947.
Despite the claims of some, the autopsy film has never been examined
by Kodak or any other reputable source." See how rumors start? The
film was examined by Kodak, and a person of considerable standing in
the photo industry (Bob Shell) has put his prestige on the line by
authenticating this footage. The Time Magazine and Skeptical Inquirer
hit pieces were all generated by the TDC miscalculations. This footage
could only have been shot in 1947 or 48. All the experts lambasting
Santilli based their doubts on modern FX techniques. They all had
their individual slants, but no one volunteered to duplicate this
effect.
What I find most interesting about this case is how the UFO community
has gone about, hand in hand, with their arch enemies the sci-cops to
debunk the only real evidence we╣ve ever had to prove our government╣s
systematic involvement with the whole UFO cover up. The Feds didn╣t
have to do a thing to cover their asses- we did it all for them, free
of charge.
"Once my tent had been set up I started filming immediately, first
the vehicle, then the site and debris. At around 06.00 it was deemed
safe to move in, again the freaks were still crying and when
approached screamed even louder. They were protective of their little
boxes but we managed to get one lose with a firm strike at the head of
a freak with the butt of a rifle." The Cameraman.
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