BTS: John Dower on The Alien Autopsy Scandal

In 1995, 18 minutes of grainy film shocked the world and sparked one of the most compelling mysteries of our time. The so-called ‘Alien Autopsy’ footage appeared to show three government officials in hazmat suits dissecting the corpse of an alien recovered from a crash-site near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The footage became an international sensation, captivating film experts, military analysts, and even the Secret Service. But the question remained: was it genuine, or an elaborate hoax? The truth is far from straight forward. 

Director, John Dower (My Scientology Movie and BAFTA award-winning Lockerbie) and Mindhouse, produced the stranger-than-fiction documentary series for Sky that follows members of an ambitious group of filmmakers who found themselves at the centre of an unprecedented media storm after re-creating a landmark alien encounter in a North London apartment, with some still insisting it was based on a genuine film recorded by the US military.

This time last year I was on a sun lounger in Palermo, Sicily when I learnt a key contributors, the Greek Cypriot magician and one of the creative minds behind the 1995 Alien Autopsy film, Spyros Melaris had pulled out. It’s an occupational hazard for documentary filmmakers to lose characters along the way but I was genuinely baffled because when I’d met Spyros we got on well. I liked the guy and we’d bonded as fellow directors.

I was still keen to somehow have him in the series and, as filmmaking is always about finding solutions, I decided to cast an actor – the brilliant Andy Pandini – to play Spyros and have him lip sync to his previous interviews. Hardly an original idea but here it felt motivated as it would turn out this would be a documentary, as much about filmmaking, as it was about extraterrestrials.

I say the 1995 Alien Autopsy film because that’s where I thought the story started – Britpop’s Blur vs Oasis Battle, the OJ Simpson ‘not guilty’ verdict … and eighteen minutes of mysteriously unearthed, grainy film that also shocked the world. The so-called Alien Autopsy footage appeared to show three government pathologists in hazmat suits dissecting the corpse of an alien recovered from a crash-site near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and became an international sensation, captivating film experts, military analysts, and government superpowers around the globe.

I remembered the eerie black and white footage because it possessed the realism of found footage and had affected many in the same way The Blair Witch Project would when released not long after. I realised, though, that I actually knew nothing of how this strange film came into being and I think that’s a great starting point for non-fiction, you share the adventure of discovery you are about to have with the viewer … and what an absolutely bonkers adventure this was, as one film quickly morphed into a three part series.

This is a summary of the story – In 1993 two British record producers, Ray Santilli and Gary Schoefield, are in Cleveland, Ohio searching for rare Elvis Presley footage. They are approached by a figure they now call ‘The Mysterious Camerman’, who says he has something else they might be interested in. Ray travels to the man’s house in Florida and is shown a black and white film with figures in hazmat suits cutting open a ‘non-human figure’. Stunned, he desperately wants the film but its owner, who reveals he was a former military cameraman at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, wants a 100 thousand dollars. Over the next two years Ray raises the money, with the help of a German business associate called Volker Spielberg (no relation) and buys it.

Well, that’s just a summary and I had no idea as to the strange and peculiar encounters it would lead to including Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, a sculptor from the Royal Academy, a butcher from the east end of London, and … Spyros.

When Ray and Gray eventually got their film from ‘The Mysterious Camerman’ there was a problem. In the two years since the cannisters had been opened in Florida the film had oxidised leaving only a few frames of the original footage. As I said filmmaking is all about finding solutions, so Ray and Gary decided, inspired by Leonardo’s Last Supper, to restore the original 1947 film from those remaining bits of celluloid. In a flat in Camden, North London. Aided by the sculptor, butcher and magician Spyros Melaris.

Things then got really weird as during production Spyros decided to sue and prevent the series from going out, claiming he owned the copyright to the 1995 film. I was again baffled. Why is he suing us and not Ray and Gary? Thankfully my Execs Arron Fellows and Emma Whitehead bore the brunt of the legal action, alongside Series Producer Rebecca Champan (who developed a penchant for working from paper scrolls during the case), leaving me to get on with the editorial. Such as – what about these original frames …

Those contested frames led to two of my favourite ever documentary characters – Philip Mantle, one of the UK’s leading ufologists, who lives in Pontefract, and Hollywood producer Bob Kiviat. And in one of those wonderful moments of serendipity that is the reason I still love, even after a quarter of a century, making documentaries Philip and Bob teamed up to form the most unexpected of investigative duos. I’m not going to give anything away here but episode three is one of the favourite things I’ve ever made.

On the one hand this is a very English story, with characters called Philip, Ray, Gary, John, Trevor, Keith, Mike and Sue (the one woman in this male-dominated world), in locations ranging from Pontefract to Eastbourne. But it also thirty years on, as debates over extraterrestrial life reach the highest levels of the U.S. government — with military whistleblowers testifying to encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena — ventures deep into the darker and crazier recesses of America and the founding myth of Ufology, Roswell. In the series a former American intelligence officer with access to Area 51 who told me the US government had had a live extraterrestrial in captivity for several years. It seems fitting that we are now released in the same week as Steven Speilberg’s Disclosure Day.

Oh, and we won the legal action brought by Spyros, with his Honour Judge Hacon ruling, “There is no prospect that Mr Melaris will succeed in his claim for copyright infringement at trial”. He added – “I make no finding regarding the truth of any of this save that, there is a film…”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.