Speaking of The X-Files, if you were around in the 1990s you probably remember Fox's "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction" television special. This still ranks high on the list of the oddest, most preposterous television stunts. It fired the imaginations of millions of gullible viewers, and provided grist for talk show host jokes for years to come.

 

These days if you think of Fox you probably think of Fox News, with its strong right-slanting bias. But in 1995, there was no Fox News to prop it up, and Fox was mainly known as the struggling, fourth-rate network that catered to lurid, down-market tastes. "When Animals Attack" was one of the network's most popular non-animated series.

 

So to say that Fox lacked credibility is to drastically understate the case. Fox had also - not coincidentally - recently become the home of a surprise hit. The X-Files debuted in 1993, and by 1995 it was one of the network's most popular shows.

 

Is there any possible chance that footage of a supposed alien autopsy would be taken seriously, under these circumstances? Not really, but we all watched it anyway.

 

The footage claimed to be from the famous Roswell UFO crash of 1947. Supposedly, one of the aliens was recovered alive from the crashed UFO, and this was the footage of the autopsy. The film's provenance was, suffice it to say, pretty shaky. A man named Ray Santilli, who Wikipedia describes as "an entrepreneur," claims to have gotten the footage from a "former military cameraman."

 

In 2006 Santilli admitted that he faked the footage. His excuse was that he was recreating footage of a real film that he really watched in 1992. He calls the new footage a "reconstruction," and claims that the original footage had deteriorated past the point of visibility. 

 

Even by 1995 standards, the autopsy "footage" was pretty lousy. The film's supposed degraded quality clearly could camouflage a lot of sins. To his credit, Santilli went with practical effects - a rubber alien head - instead of trying for computer graphics. Nevertheless, it was clearly just a rubber puppet with some sheep's brains thrown in for texture. Here is a great list of everything that was wrong with the Alien Autopsy footage!

 

For sheer fakery, this was second only to the fake Blair Witch special that aired on the then-Scifi Channel right before the Blair Witch Project opened in theaters. But that is a story for another day!