A few Q we've been A fairly F...

Not any more. We have seen the "complete" footage now, and these pages reflect what's seen in it. Of course, we've been told the video sold by original distributor is even more "complete". So if and when we see the complete complete footage maybe we'll add another update. (Maybe that's where all the amazing stuff is...)

Apparently they're fakes. (A hoax on a hoax!) The BUFORA Website has more details about that.

Nope.

Nope.

In our conversations with other FX artists, four of them mentioned someone they suspected as having created the alien. They all named the same person - however, there was always the possibility they were just repeating the same unfounded rumors.

Update - 10/12/95
A colleague of ours recently called the "suspect" - his response was that he was aware of the rumors about him, and he found it almost flattering that his peers thought he was capable of creating this alien.

That was before he saw the film, however. After he saw the film, he says, he wasn't so flattered after all!

12/26/95
Well, now we probably can go ahead and say the "suspect" was Gordon Smith, now that Time Magazine has spilled the beans.

For what it's worth, we only listed the autopsy page with the major search engines and posted one announcement in one USENET group - if we're doing this for self-promotion we're certainly not doing a very good job of it. The rest of the attention has been due to word of mouth, and links from pages whose owners seemed to think it was worth letting people know about.

And what exactly are we supposed to be promoting - the fact that we know how to do our job? The information here is hardly proprietary or unique to us, and therefore isn't at all impressive to anyone actually in the motion picture business.

That's our whole point - the techniques we describe here are common knowledge in our industry. Hundreds of artists who also possess this knowledge are out there, and any of them could have used it to create this alien. We just wrote it down and put it on the Web, that's all.

We never expected this little section of our Website would be so popular, but we're glad people are interested in this info. (And we don't mind a bit if you only look at the autopsy pages.)

12/26/95
And before you ask - we didn't get paid for our article in The Skeptical Inquirer, or for any other alien autopsy-related attention that's happened to come our way. (Which is fine by us - we already have jobs, after all!)

We're not trying to prove we can make an alien - we've got enough proof of that. We're offering our professional opinion about whether somebody else could have made an alien, and how they might have done it.

Besides, we'd rather do other things with our own time and money than make a bogus alien autopsy flick!

We wrote the article in the first person to show not just how, but why creatures are built the way they are, and how evidence of both can be seen in the finished film.

Hard to say. For example, a group of FX artists who had a well-stocked shop, some surplus materials and some free time could have done it for fun - and an out-of-pocket cost of nearly zero.

On the other hand, if this was a work-for-hire job then the price is whatever the artists charged the client. If they got a lot of money for it, hey - good for them!

10/23/95
Well, we're still being asked to name a dollar figure. So okay, here goes. Bear in mind this has little to do with what the film did cost - they might have spent more than it appears. (Did Waterworld look like it cost 175 million dollars?)

Anyway, some reasonable bids for an autopsy corpse as seen in the film would be:

1. Cost of materials (assuming everyone contributed their labor for free): $ 5000.00

2. Materials and labor:
   (3 FX technicians for 3 weeks) $ 30,000.00

3. To make the entire film
   - alien corpse, props, sets, costumes, shooting costs in 16mm black and white, salaries, and a comfortable safety margin:
   $ 50,000.
   The whole thing could be done with a crew of four or five - assuming the FX artists also played the on-screen roles (which we kinda suspect they did).

We're still hearing the figure of a million dollars or more being tossed around - hey, for a million we could do a feature-length autopsy and buy BMW's for the entire crew with the money left over. (Anyone offering? Didn't think so.)

We're not trying to. We're saying this alien in this film isn't real.

We seriously doubt it, for a variety of reasons. (These reasons are far more speculative than the contents of our main pages, which is why we haven't included them there.)

If you're at all interested in those reasons, we've jotted them down at the bottom of this page.

It certainly will. Let us know the minute that happens, okay?

It doesn't. It may look like the alien blinks, but it's actually just a flaw in the film.

No - and neither can anyone else. However, we do know what rubber dummies look like, and we think we're looking at one in this film.

Would we admit it if we were?

(Even so, our page includes a link to somebody else's speculation of how it could have been done. We don't happen to agree with that speculation, but FX artist Harry Joyner's theory is fairly plausible - in fact it's similar to our own, except it omits the use of such modern materials as polyfoam.)

2. It simply doesn't make sense for a 1947-era hoax to have been created, and if there were such a thing then this doesn't look like one for a number of reasons. These are subjective opinions, of course, but since we're just speculating anyway...

Public interest in evidence concerning the "Roswell incident" is a modern phenomenon. Creating a Roswell-related hoax film now makes perfect sense, with the worldwide awareness of Roswell as the centerpiece of government UFO conspiracy theories, coupled with the existence of a worldwide distribution system with enormous profit and publicity potential for such a film.

None of these motives existed in 1947. Why would a hoaxer create a hoax for which there was no interest and no market? The average person wouldn't know what it was they were supposed to be looking at. And if it were a government "disinformation" effort as has been suggested, then why would they both actively suppress the spread of information (as is alleged) AND create a hoax to discredit the very information they were trying so hard to suppress?

3. As to the autopsy itself - if it were hoaxed in 1947, it wouldn't look the way it does. Not so much because it couldn't have been done - but because it wouldn't, for stylistic and cultural reasons. Basically, the film is far too realistic and graphic to have been created in 1947.
Consider the popular media of the time - anyone attempting to present something so grotesque would have been greeted with public outrage. Nudity? Closeups of surgical procedures? Entrails sliding around in steel pans? Such things were unthinkable in a film intended for public view until at least two decades later.

Nowadays we are culturally immune to shock at such things - we can even show them on national prime-time TV. But again, we're faced with justifying the creation of these images in 1947 - when no reputable theater would show them, and no newspaper would print them. What would be the point?

Also - the FX are too good. Look at the level of film FX at the time - they were "realistic" to audiences then but to our jaded, more sophisticated eyes, '40's era films are quaint, dated, and present a very stylized, non-realistic world. A 1940's hoax wouldn't attempt to meet standards of realism which would not exist for almost fifty years, nor could it. (How could we, today, create a hoax which would stand up to scrutiny fifty years from NOW? How would we even know what those standards would be?)

4. Finally, the alien itself looks just the way a '90's audience would expect an alien to look, thanks to the popular culture in which our entire world has been immersed. We've all seen Close Encounters, the covers of Whitley Streiber's books, and so on - and hey, whaddaya know - here's film of an alien that fits that description perfectly. Compare this with the '40's era conception of "aliens" - sci-fi magazine covers and so on. If it's a 1947 hoax, then where is the critter's bubble helmet, her antennae, her green skin, her huge pointy ears, her trusty laser rifle?

So here again, we have film of an alien corpse which looks the way WE assume one should look - not the alien a 40's audience would expect. What will popular culture expect aliens to look like in 2047? We can't know - and neither could a hoaxer fifty years in the past.

So - if it's a 1947 hoax, we have no clear motive for its creation, and no way to explain how it managed to be both culturally incorrect and technically advanced for its time. And this film also happened to be "discovered" in the '90's - at exactly the right moment when it was acceptable for public display and realistic enough to fool an as-yet unborn future audience and exactly what a modern audience would expect to see...and a great potential moneymaker for whoever created it.

So for all of the above reasons, we believe this hoax was created recently and released with a suitable cover story and a scrap of authentic film - in fact, the authentic film may have been located first, and the autopsy staged to match it - all specifically calculated to play directly upon the expectations of a modern audience. THAT scenario is plausible, sensible, understandable, and most definitely within human ability.

So what we have now are three alternative possibilities (raised from the two we suggest in our website)

1. The film is authentic. (A long shot, for a variety of reasons)

2. The film is a 1947 hoax. (A long shot, for reasons detailed above)

3. The film is a modern hoax. (Fits all the evidence neatly.)

Because we believe the universe tends to operate in a sensible manner, we still like option three. If by some amazing chance the footage of the alien itself IS ever authenticated by a reputable authority and certified as 1947 vintage, we'll be forced to rethink that opinion.

But we're not holding our breath.