The film purportedly shows the autopsy of an alien that crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but is a single frame of 16mm film worth a million dollars? That’s the opening offer for a black-and-white film negative frame from 1947, purportedly showing an alien corpse on a coroner’s table.
The chart comes from an infamous and highly implausible “alien autopsy” said to have been captured on film in 1947, following reports of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Lore surrounding the crash claimed that the creature made for a movie was aboard the UFO and was killed in the crash; it was then secretly dissected by the US government, the story goes, according to a statement about the auction.
In the autopsy images, a lifeless humanoid figure lies on a table; an open wound can be seen on his right leg. It has a rounded trunk and belly, dark, bulbous eyes, and a hairless head that is much larger than the average human skull. Figures dressed from head to toe in white protective suits surround the “corpse” and perform a methodical dissection.
Where did this movie come from? Rumors of a Roswell UFO began circulating in 1947, after a US Army public information officer issued a press release describing a crashed Roswell “flying saucer” now in the possession of the military. . In 1995, a documentary that aired on Fox Television under the title “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” presented viewers with footage of this purported autopsy of the UFO’s “alien” occupant, Live Science previously reported.
Ray Santilli, a British film and record producer, owned the footage. Santilli said he acquired the film in 1992 from a retired US military cameraman during a search for archival footage for a documentary about Elvis Presley, according to the auction statement.
Although Santilli argued that the film was genuine, skeptics disagreed. His suspicions were apparently validated in 2006, when a sculptor and special effects designer named John Humphreys claimed that he had not only created the alien in the autopsy footage, but had also appeared in the film as one of the pathologists, Live reported. Science.
Another self-identified participant in the hoax came forward in 2017; Filmmaker Spyros Melaris said he had shot the footage in his London apartment, using a model filled with animal organs, Australian news site News Corp Australia Network reported.
But this strange story had one more twist: in 2019, a 2001 memo from the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a now-defunct private organization for researching the paranormal and UFOs, was “leaked.” Allegedly written by NIDS physicist Eric Davis, the memo said a former CIA scientist named Kit Green evaluated evidence from “the Roswell incident alien autopsy” and said the footage was real, The Sun reported in 2019 (The Sun is a British). tabloid, known for tabloid stories).
The memo reports that Green determined that “the Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien corpse is real,” according to The Sun.
With such a complicated history, it’s perhaps not surprising that the movie’s auction also saw an unexpected turn of events. On May 27, Rarible, an online marketplace specializing in NFTs, was bidding on the autopsy film frame NFT, when the auction was derailed by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a flood of Internet traffic overwhelming a site. The listing collapsed minutes before the scheduled end, an auction representative told WordsSideKick.com in an email. A new price already exists and the tender will continue until May 30, the representative said.
