The first showing of the film took place at 1 P.M. in a small auditorium in the Museum of London before an audience of 100. Everyone was physically searched for cameras before being allowed into the auditorium. There was no speaker or announcement to introduce the film. Before the film footage began, a few short statements appeared on the screen stating that the film had been acquired from the cameraman who originally shot the footage and that the copyright belonged to Merlin Communications, a company owned by Ray Santilli, a documentary film producer in London. The black-and-white footage then started. The scene was apparently a small autopsy facility with simple bright walls and a desk with a bizarre body. Two figures in white anticontamination suits, rectangular glass faceplates were standing in the room next to the table. Another person could be seen peering through a window into the room.He was not recognizable due to a mask covering his face. The two doctors circled the operating table while the cameraman moved about in the room. He failed to get any really good shots of the body, and the film was not always in focus.

The alien shown in the film had a large head, and the open eyes were black orbs. The ears were low on the head. The nose was small and the mouth was small and open. The body was approximately four feet tall. It had a large, protruding stomach and stocky limbs. There was no hair on the body whatsoever. There were no external genitalia or secondary sexual organs. The feet had six toes, and the hands had six fingers. The forearms were longer than the upper arms.There was a large wound on one thigh, as well as a wound beneath the right armpit. The right hand was almost completely severed at the wrist.

The table on which the body rested was an operating table, rather than an autopsy table, which has channels to drain body fluids. A tray of instruments could be seen in the film laid out on a utility table. There was an old-style handsaw used for removing the cranial cap.Also included was a palpation hammer, which is used to check reflexes. A smaller table covered with a white cloth held a Bunsen burner underneath a flask, five test tubes in a test-tube stand, and a large beaker containing a dark fluid.

The area near the leg wound was inspected and the knee joint was manipulated with great care. One of the doctor’s made a long, straight incision from the sternum to the pelvis. There was another incision from the lower part of the ear down the neck to the collar bone. The doctors removed the black lenses from the eyes in a matter of seconds. The skin on the skull was peeled back, and the cranium was opened. The chest and stomach were also opened. The doctors lifted organs clear of the body and dropped them into steel bowls. The entire film lasted about 20 minutes.According to the clock on the wall of the operating room, the two doctors completed the autopsy in about two hours. In addition to the hospital autopsy, the film had footage of a preliminary autopsy in a tent, shots of debris from the crash, and pictures of the spacecraft wreckage as it was lifted onto a flatbed truck. The film footage of the tent autopsy was so dark and poorly reproduced that little could be seen ex cept the two shapes of doctors, a shape on a table, and a lantern hanging from the tent pole. No one took the stage when the film was over to publicly answer questions.

After this initial viewing the film, or parts of it, were made available to various UFO researchers. UFO experts have viewed this film again and again, analyzing it in great detail. Ray Santilli claimed to have come across the film when he was in the United States searching for rare early footage of Elvis Presley. A U.S. Army cameraman allegedly had kept certain outtakes of the Roswell film. Santilli is said to have bought the film for about $100,000.

The hospital autopsy shown in the film is alleged to have occurred at Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth, Texas, the month following the flying-saucer crash. The doctors performing the autopsy in the film were identified as Detlev Bronk and Lloyd Berkner, both long since deceased. Although some have enthusiastically embraced the film as being authentic, others declare it to be a fraud. One of the immediate questions about the film is why did it not surface until nearly 50 years after it was made. The cameraman, who has never made a public appearance to authenticate the film, is alleged to have had it in a box in his home for all that time.

There are other questions about the autopsy procedure itself. The two doctors were performing an autopsy on a life-form unknown to them, yet they made no attempt to map the internal structure of the alien being; neither was a still photographer on hand to record each step precisely. The clock on the wall in the film showed that the autopsy took about two hours, despite the fact that it was conducted on a life-form they had never seen before and would probably never see again. Supporters of the film have suggested that perhaps the autopsy took 14 or 26 hours rather than two, but at no time in the film was the hour hand of the clock seen outside of those two hours.

When the security coding on the film was challenged as being more appropriate to Hollywood than the U.S.Army, the security codes disappeared from the film. That in itself suggests that the film was a hoax. Kodak officials offered to analyze a small segment of the film to determine when the film was made-something that would aid in authenticating the film. However, Santilli did not make a film segment available to Kodak. Another series of questions about the film’s authenticity have to do with the setting of the film. Only two walls of the operating room appear in the film, leading one to believe that it was photographed in a two-walled set rather than an actual room. With the cameraman free to move around in an actual room, one would expect to see all four walls. A Bunsen burner can be seen in the film, although this apparatus is more appropriate to a chemistry laboratory than an operating or autopsy room. It has been suggested that the burner could have been used to burn the fat off surgical scalpels, but this action was not seen on the film. Moreover, if that was the function of the Bunsen burner, surely the flask would not have been in position over it.A palpation hammer, clearly seen on the instrument tray in the film, is used to test reflexes of the living and is not part of autopsy or surgical equipment.

The film was examined by a group of military photographers who found several significant discrepancies. First of all, a photographer would never be able to keep a portion of any top-secret military film because every frame of every reel must be accounted for. Second, the photographers said that in 1947 16mm color film was used for all important medical procedures as well as very special or important projects. It would not have been filmed in black and white. Furthermore, medical procedures were always filmed using two cameras in fixed positions, one looking down from the ceiling onto the operating table, the other elevated adjacent to the operating table. Third, a motionpicture cameraman would almost always be accompanied by a still photographer, and the two would work together as a team.The still photographer would invariably be visible at times in the motion picture. The experts in military photography also stated that the film was deliberately blurred so that no subject is visible in detail. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the alien autopsy film is a hoax.

In 1995, a one-hour video presentation entitled Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? aired as part of the TV series Sightings. The video version carries the full autopsy film, purportedly unedited and uninterrupted, at the end of the presentation. This video can be rented at most video-rental outlets in the United States.