A magician who filmed famous footage of a purported examination of an extraterrestrial has said it is entirely a hoax produced as a psychological experiment.
Spyros Melaris, 66, told the High Court on Thursday that he had evidence he filmed the entire footage in April 1995 at a flat in Camden, north London.
The black-and-white silent film was purported to be a recording of an autopsy on extraterrestrial beings recovered from a UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Since being made public in 1995 it has been widely cited as evidence of a conspiracy by the United States government to cover up proof of alien life.
Louis Theroux’s production company, Mindhouse, was due to broadcast a documentary on the origins of the “alien autopsy” on Sky this year.
Louis Theroux is known for creating documentaries about unusual or taboo subcultures
STIAN LYSBERG SOLUM/NTB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Melaris sought an injunction to prevent Mindhouse breaching his alleged copyright by using footage of the “autopsy”. However, Judge Richard Hacon gave summary judgment against Melaris, saying he had no reasonable prospect at trial that he had a copyright claim and dismissed his injunction application. He ordered him to pay Mindhouse £17,000 of legal costs.
Sam Carter, representing Mindhouse, told the court that the autopsy footage was “an immediate global sensation” and was estimated to have been seen by 1.2 billion people worldwide. He said Ray Santilli, 70, a former musician turned film producer, claimed to own the rights to the footage.
“[Santilli] purchased some genuine 1947 footage of the ‘Roswell Incident’ from a US ex-serviceman in about 1992 [but] it had deteriorated to the point of being largely unusable by the time he got it back to the UK,” Carter told the court. “[Santilli] contends that he therefore put together a team of people to recreate the 1947 footage.”
The “Roswell Incident” refers to the discovery of debris on a ranch, which the US government said was from uncrewed military balloons rather than a UFO crash.
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Santilli said the film was made by a team including Melaris, who was the cameraman, Melaris’s girlfriend at the time, Georgina Damak, whose flat was used for the filming, and John Humphreys, who designed and made the alien body and other props, the court heard.
Santilli, from London, claimed that some frames from the 1947 footage he obtained were inserted into the 1995 autopsy “to give it greater authenticity”.
The film producer and his associated companies, including Orbital Media, have been “primarily responsible for the global exploitation” of footage over the past 30 years, the court heard.
Santilli first “came clean” about the making of the 1995 footage shortly before the release in 2006 of a comedy called Alien Autopsy, with Ant & Dec.
Carter said that Santilli “then maintained, as he does now, that the 1947 footage did exist, and that frames from it had been spliced into the [1995 film], purportedly justifying his description of the [film] as a ‘restoration’ of that 1947 footage”.
Melaris’s copyright claims “amount to bare assertion, and are unsupported by any corroborating third-party evidence or any relevant contemporaneous documentation”, the court was told. Mindhouse has applied to the court to dismiss the copyright claim and injunction application.
Melaris, from Friern Barnet, north London, told the court that he and Santilli jointly funded an initial video of the autopsy, which was never edited or released because it contained obvious errors.
The magician said he funded a second version which he insisted does not include any footage from the purported 1947 film, which he said he has never seen.
Melaris said clues to the footage being a forgery include the appearance of a bunsen burner dating from the 1960s and outfits, worn by the team carrying out the “autopsy”, that were made by him.
He said Santilli had agreed to distribute another version to broadcasters to test if it would be accepted as genuine before releasing a second film showing how the hoax was carried out.
“The UFO community is very easily led, they believe everything,” Melaris told the court. “I wanted to say, ‘Don’t believe everything you see’. It was a psychological experiment.”
He said Santilli breached their agreement by filing the second version as genuine 1947 footage at the Library of Congress. “The film lodged at the Library of Congress is my 1995 film,” he told the court.