The Modesto Bee - Tuesday, October 3, 1995
Rusty Coats
PROPELLERHEADNet users love alien crash story
The truth is out there.Separating it from fiction is the real challenge.
Intenet citizens call it the signal-to-noise ratio. The signal is the truth, the facts, the meat of a usenet group, the good stuff. The noise is the blah-blah fat curd that bundles itself to each issue, topic, or discussion.
And when it comes to outer-space aliens, there is a lot of noise.
Our story begins June 2, 1947. On that date, UFO buffs believe a flying saucer crashed near Roswell, N.M. and that four gray-skinned aliens with big heads and female-like genitalia were thrown from the vessel, where they were found by U.S. Air Force Intelligence, taken into custody, and later given autopsies.
For almost 50 years, despite books by Whitley Streiber and others, the Air Force has pooh-poohed this story, calling it nothing more than wishful thinking, but never releasing the classified documents pertaining to that event. It recently caved in and released information on "Project Mogul" a top-secret balloon used for surveillance of Soviet nuclear testing. It crashed.
UFO believers were not amused by that story. Especially since they had a film of the autopsy of an alien.
Allegedly. And here is where "alleged" works in every sentence.
That's because of an alleged Air Force officer who allegedly shot "several hundred reels of film" of the alleged UFO crash, including footage of the alleged autopsy of the alleged alien.
That film - legendary in the UFO usenet groups, clubs, and mailing lists - first appeared for public viewing May 5, 1995 at the London Museum. [The cameraman] allegedly stole an 18-minute reel from the U.S. government and teamed up with Ray Santilli, a British marketer who's worked for Disney. From there, a bidding war ensued from TV stations in Israel, France, and the United States.
Part of it aired on the FOX network Sept. 4. It showed jerky, black-and-white footage of a gray-skinned, big-headed, bug-eyed alien who had a nasty right-thigh wound.
On the wall hung a '40's era telephone. The Kodak film company issued a statement that the film used to shoot the alleged autopsy had the serial numbers used in 1927, 1947, and 1967.
Believers called it a triumph.
Skeptics rolled their eyes.
But one month later, there are more than 100 homepages on the World Wide Web devoted to the so-called alien autopsy. All but two are true believers.
All but two.
Some are painstakingly documented. Some refer to government investigations, classified documents, film footage of other UFO sightings, attempts at proof. Some provide support groups for those who believe they've been abducted. Some drift into complete lunacy.
Here is the point: The Internet does not care if aliens crashed in Roswell. It does not care if they were autopsied. It doesn't care if the government, 50 years later, is so weak that it couldn't prevent a second-rate TV network from broadcasting this film. And it certainly doesn't care if FOX - and Santilli, who is selling videotapes of the film - are merely playing off a popular legend to make plenty of $$$.
Because fact and fiction are just as loud on the Internet. In other media, the media itself takes responsibility for filtering fact from lies. The Internet leaves that responsibility up to you.
That said, find [the cameraman's] story at http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/dvcamra.html.
Find Santilli ['s story] and connections to other UFO sites at http://www.crs4.it/~mameli/Alien.html.
If you're a skeptic, find the Center for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal at http://www.csicop.org/.
Also find the Truly Dangerous [Company], a special effects company that did the monsters for The Blob, The Abyss, and Species at http://www.trudang.com/autopsy.html. That's where the Truly Dangerous FX folks say "We've done plenty of aliens, and we certainly could have done that one. Easy."
Beam us up, Gort.
Send tech questions, news and gossip to Propellerhead, The Modesto Bee, P.O. Box 5256, Modesto CA 95352, or e-mail rcoats@moa.com.
© Rusty Coats and The Modesto Bee, 1995
Article reproduced for review purposes
TD Co. Note:
We received email from Modesto resident Ben Starr mentioning he'd heard about our autopsy page from The Modesto Bee. We replied that we were shocked to hear it, and he was kind enough to send us the article.
(We exercised some editorial license and updated the links - several have changed. We left in the part about how we "did the monsters for The Blob and The Abyss" and so on - it's not quite accurate, but we kinda like reading it.)
