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Philip Mantle - Alien Autopsy Film & UK UFOs
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Philip Mantle is an international UFO researcher, lecturer and broadcaster. His books have been published in six different languages around the world. He is the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and former MUFON representative for England. Philip has written articles and features for numerous publications around the world and has been both editor and assistant editor of high street UFO publications. He is the founder of FLYING DISK PRESS.
Flying Disk Press: http://flyingdiskpress.blogspot.com/
Philip Twitter: https://twitter.com/philip_mantle
Alien Autopsy video: • Alien Autopsy - T...
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Transcript
Alien Abductions: Extraterrestrial Skepticism
00:00:10
Speaker
They were complex narratives of being taken by alien beings into UFOs on beams of light. The Air Force is trying to cover up with a picture of Venus and the Moon. From my own point of view, I'm going to be very disappointed if UFOs turn out to be nothing more than visitors from another planet, because I think they could
Host Introduction and Co-host Update
00:01:05
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the channel. I'm your host, Vinny Adams. Now, a lot of you are aware that I announced my new co-host this week, Katie Howland. Unfortunately, Katie is unwell today, so she's not able to join us here for this interview. So I hope you'll join me in sending our best wishes to her for a speedy recovery. So Katie, if you're watching or if you're listening at a later date, please get back soon. I can't wait to get started doing these interviews with you.
Channel Sponsor Highlight
00:01:34
Speaker
um thank you all for being here i see a lot of you in the live chat already really good if any of you have any questions throughout this interview please pop them in capital letters um that way i get to notice it we do accept super chats as well things like that and i mentioned in one of my previous interviews that we now have a sponsor it is a novel 29 degrees north by dan quinn i highly recommend it if you like a good kind of adventure
00:01:58
Speaker
story. The links are in the description for that. It's about $3 on Kindle, about $7 for paperback. So that helps support the channel and the work that we do here. So yeah, thanks, guys. As always, keep that chat cool, calm and collected, as you always do. And yeah, let's get
Guest Introduction: Philip Mantle
00:02:16
Speaker
straight into it. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So let me welcome a guest veteran UK UFO researcher, author, lecturer, broadcaster and publisher.
00:02:27
Speaker
Mr Philip Mantle. Philip, how are you? Good evening, me. Nice to speak to you. It's a pleasure to have you on. I've been following your work for quite some time and it's great to finally have the opportunity to talk with you. My pleasure, I can assure you. Thank you.
Philip's Early Paranormal Interests
00:02:42
Speaker
Philip, if you don't mind, I'd love to just basically touch upon what really sort of got you started in the UFO subject, you know, those years ago. It'd really be interesting to hear how it all began.
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, go back as far as I can really, I was always interested in all things, shall we say, paranormal, you know, even as a young kid, as far as I can remember. And I had several interests. There was the paranormal. I loved horror movies, astronomy and the space race. You know, that was about it, really.
00:03:16
Speaker
And I would read whatever I could find about certain topics. My mom, God rest her, was always, you know, very inquisitive. I don't know if it starts with her. My mom came from Northern Ireland. When she was young, they lived in a very rural part of the country. This is pre-Second World War. And they had a little small holding. And she told me,
00:03:44
Speaker
that she met a fairy down by the stream, a little female fairy, pretty clothes, wings, and she conversed with it. She talked to it. And this fairy said, if you drink from this bottle, you'll never have an accident. So she drank it.
00:04:01
Speaker
And she never had an accident. Well, unless you call my father an accident, I don't know. But I remember she told me the story down the decades, I would ask you about it. I said, you know, Mom, was this real? She said it was real to me, son.
00:04:18
Speaker
And she told my children, her grandchildren as well, you know, so it was certainly real to her. So I was she was always open minded about things. She wasn't any great intellect was my mom or anything like that. But I was fortunate because where I lived, I was
Curiosity Sparked by UFO Skepticism
00:04:34
Speaker
brought up on a council estate.
00:04:36
Speaker
And literally, the other side of the road was my best friend's grandma. And she used to go, we lived just outside of Leeds in West Yorkshire. She used to go to the local spiritualist church every now and again in a little town called Morley. It was just 10 minute bus ride away. So on occasion, I would go with her. And I found it fascinating. I didn't necessarily agree with what they were saying and what their stance was. But nonetheless, I found it interesting. And of course, when I was at high school,
00:05:06
Speaker
Some of the teachers after the school holidays, when we return, would say, what did you do during the holidays? And somebody said, oh, I went pony riding. We went to Spain on holiday. What about you, model? Oh, I went to the spiritualist church. It wasn't a great way of getting a girlfriend, I can assure you. And I don't say at some point, I don't know if it's just before I left high school,
00:05:35
Speaker
I read an astronomy book, to this day I can't remember what it was called, but it had one chapter on UFOs and it basically dismissed them. Which I found a bit curious because elsewhere in this book there were things about space and space travel that were purely science fiction but seemed to be nonetheless accepted.
00:05:57
Speaker
But of course, now we realize that most of what they were talking about was wrong anyway. We've learned so much more. So that kind of intrigued me. And I read a few books on the subject and a few things. I left high school in 1974.
Joining the Yorkshire UFO Society
00:06:14
Speaker
In the winter of 1978, over into 1979, a very famous winter in the UK, it's known as the winter of discontent, when the country was collapsing and pretty much everybody was on strike. Well, I wasn't because I went out to work in what was West Germany with a friend of mine. And of course, couldn't speak a word of the language.
00:06:39
Speaker
So I run my mom, I said, can you send me some books to read? Anything, you know. So she sent me a parcel of books and they were all paperback books on UFOs. Where on earth she got them being, I have no idea. So I'm reading these things on a night after work. So by the time in 1979, I returned to the UK, I had a bit more knowledge about the subject.
00:07:03
Speaker
And like I said, we live just outside of Leeds, and Leeds then, and as it is now, has an evening newspaper, and it's called the Yorkshire Evening Post. And my aunt, who lived around the corner from us, she brought the newspaper around one night, and she said, have you seen this? And there was an advertisement in it for the formation of the Yorkshire UFO Society coming up that Sunday in Leeds. And it gave you the location and the time, just a small ad, literally a small ad,
00:07:33
Speaker
So as you're probably aware, in those days on a Sunday, the whole country used to pretty much close down anyway. So I got, I didn't drive, I got the bus into Leeds. I found this place, it was called Santini House on North Street in Leeds, it's still there. I just heard some noise in one of the rooms and there was the Yorkshire UFO Society. They've been formed by two brothers, Graham and Mark Birdsall. They put on a presentation.
00:08:02
Speaker
So it was obvious they'd been involved for a few years already. For me, it was great. They had a table of books. I could buy some more books. And that was it, Vinny. I felt as if I'd found my niche in life. I felt like I'd come home. I just felt comfortable there. And I joined, I think I paid two pound for the whole year as my membership. And that's literally how it all began.
00:08:30
Speaker
Amazing, thank you. I certainly know that feeling of finding your place where you're meant to be and finding your home as I found the subject. No, that's really interesting. Thank you.
Involvement in the Alien Autopsy Film
00:08:42
Speaker
talk all day about everything that happened in the in between years but I really love to just jump to when this this alien autopsy thing really first you know came up on your radar where it started and how you got involved and the hype that kind of came with it. Yeah well you know as the years progressed at the Yorkshire UFO Society I'll give a lot of stuff
00:09:04
Speaker
We had another organization that we formed here called the Independent UFO Network. And then I went on to join Pufora, the British UFO Research Association, which was a national organization. And again, I did a variety of roles for them. And we jumped forward in time now to 1993. And one of the roles that I played was I was their press officer.
00:09:29
Speaker
So these are the days before the internet and before email. So anything from any media would eventually make its way across my desk. And we had a letter one day from a company called the Merlin Group in London, a very straightforward letter saying, could we assist them in the making of a UFO documentary? Nothing specific. I wrote back and sent them some information about view forward and what we could and couldn't do.
00:09:59
Speaker
So we had a couple of letters exchange and a couple of faxes, believe it or not. We had a fax machine in those days. So in the end, I spoke with the CEO, the managing manager of this place, the owner. It was a chap called Ray Santilli. And initially we were talking about, you know, a very general sort of UFO documentary. He was looking for
00:10:23
Speaker
film footage, still photographs. We didn't have that, but I knew places that did and so on. And then as our conversation developed completely out of the blue, I know, I mean, no warning about this whatsoever. Santilly said, well, I've got film of Rosewell. He didn't call it Roswell. He called it Rosewell. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I've got film of the UFO crash.
00:10:51
Speaker
and the creatures being examined. So naturally, I just said, show me. So I met Ray in London. We used to have meetings in London and evening lectures at the London Business School, which wasn't far from where Ray Santilli's offices were. So I invited him around one evening and after the lecture was over, he told me this story again and he said,
00:11:17
Speaker
I went out to Cleveland, Ohio. He said, my main business is music, buy and sell things, license it, photographs, all this, you know, back catalogs. And he said, we were actually looking for old film of the rock and roll stars before they were famous, you know, Elvis, whoever, because they did the college circuit in this area. And this is one guy step forward and old boy said, I've got a clip of Elvis.
00:11:45
Speaker
The company I work for is no longer in existence, so there's no copyright. So he said, fine, cash transaction, check-ins, thank you very much. Then he said, this old boy came back to us before we flew home and said, well, actually, before I was a freelance cameraman, I was in the military. And I filmed the UFO crash at Roswell.
00:12:09
Speaker
So Santilli said he went to this guy's home where he got the film, put it on a projector and showed it on the wall. And he said, basically, how much do you want for it? And they shook hands, you know, no paperwork, not allowed to release his name. And I said, that's a great story, right? You know, fantastic story. Show me.
00:12:32
Speaker
It's as simple as that. Yes, I can. No, I can't. So I went home. This conversation went backward and forward. And in the end, I just told him to bugger off, Finnegano. I said, it's rubbish.
00:12:46
Speaker
I did tell a few of my colleagues what Santilly was claiming. I said, keep it to yourself. You know, I spoke to some of my colleagues at beautiful or some at move on and some other guys I knew within the UFO community. Basically, I could trust them and they wouldn't say anything. Yeah. But at least I wasn't claiming anything. I was just telling them what Santilly was claiming.
00:13:12
Speaker
So we jump forward to now early 1995. And at this point, I'm also Buforda's conference organizer.
00:13:23
Speaker
And we get a video tape set for review, and it's Roswell the movie, made by Paul Davids, starring Cal McLaughlin and Martin Sheen. And so many music were releasing it. It was only a small time release. There was no big fanfare. We had just been sent a review copy. And it's simply called Roswell. It's not bad, actually. But what it did, it reminded me about this guy called Santilli.
00:13:49
Speaker
and he'd given me his business card, which I kept with all the other business cards. I literally pulled it out and rang him out of the blue. And I said, Ray, do you still claim to have this Roswell footage? He says, yes, Philip, but you don't believe me. So I said, I can't believe you until you show me it. So he says, speak to my secretary, put a date in my diary, come on down to London and I'll show you it, which I did.
00:14:17
Speaker
I went with my wife. His office was on Volcom Street, which is a famous little street in its own right. There was the Volcom Street siege there where the embassy was attacked and the SAS went in and got all the hostages out. That's where his office is.
00:14:38
Speaker
And it's not some grand place when it was over about three floors of people running up and down with no lift. And I sat in his office and behind Ray, behind his desk is a pile of film canisters, big round film canisters in a box. And he takes out a videotape, switches the TV on, sticks it in. And this very poor quality black and white film starts to roll.
00:15:08
Speaker
And it's what he called the tent footage. A lot of people won't know about this. They'll never have seen it. Basically what he said, his mysterious cameraman had been called out there to the crash site and the creature had been put in a field tent before being shipped elsewhere. And so you've got this thing laid out, covered up, but you can see the head and the hands. There's two men, the other side of it in white coats. This blade glints every now and again.
00:15:38
Speaker
And you see some anglings, some giblets or whatever. There's an old fashioned lamp hanging from the ceiling. A guy walks in front of the camera every now and again, the camera's static. There's no dialogue on it. And it runs for about eight minutes. And I thought, well, at least there's film. We now do have film. And to my amazement, Ray gave me a copy of it.
00:16:07
Speaker
on VHS. I took it home but before I left and I'm thinking, you know, what can I do? He said I've got more. We're processing it now. So over the next few weeks he showed me more film and this was what we've all seen on the TV or online as the alien autopsy film. You've got the creature on the slab
00:16:30
Speaker
two people in hazmat suits, you know, dicing and slicing, somebody behind the window and so on. But what other people are not aware of, Vinny, is that, that's the one, there's actually two autopsy videos, two. One that you're showing here, where the creature has a big wound on its leg. The other one,
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, there you see it. The other autopsy film is the same creature, same location, but it has no damage. And it's a lot brighter and it runs a few minutes longer. And then he essentially showed us some wreckage. He calls it the debris footage. You see these panels and beams and so on. So I said to him, what is your intention? What are you going to do with this?
00:17:21
Speaker
And he said, I'm going to make my own documentary. I'd like your help with it, Philip. I said, OK. But in return, bear in mind, I told you that I was before his conference organiser. I said, why don't you show it at our conference? We got one already organised this year in Sheffield, at Hallam University in August. And he said, yeah.
00:17:46
Speaker
And we shook hands, there was no contracts, no money involved. And because the way I looked at it, Finney, rightly or wrongly, I thought the only way we're gonna get to know anything about this damn film is if it's out in the public domain. Absolutely, yeah. And I knew by association with the conference, we would be able to do that.
Media Frenzy and Authenticity Strategy
00:18:07
Speaker
We always got good press coverage. And he agreed. And
00:18:14
Speaker
a colleague of yours played a very significant part of this. He's now Dr. David Clark. He was only David Clark and he was working at the Sheffield Star newspaper. So somewhere around, I don't know, April time, David contacted me and he said, I'm writing a little piece about a local UFO investigator who's starting up.
00:18:43
Speaker
I know you've got your conference later in the year for it. Just give us a few quotes. And I said this, that, and the other. Oh, by the way, the alien autopsy film. So David wrote his article. I never saw it until many, many years later. But then a couple of days later, the phone's going mad. And it's somebody called White's Press Agency.
00:19:09
Speaker
And all they wanted to know about was the alien autopsy film. And all I could tell them is what I'd seen and what race until he claimed. And I told them, I've basically forgot all about it, Vinny. Goes to bed, gets up the next morning, the fax machine had been going berserk all night. And there was literally requests for access to this film from around the world.
00:19:36
Speaker
And I thought, what the hell? And that was from White's press agency. And all I could do was pass them on to Ray Santilli. And that was it. The story was then out. And up to that point, there was no media involved. There was no television involved that I'm aware of. It's only when the story leaked out. What it did, it was just an off the cuff remark. And it took off and it went from there.
00:20:05
Speaker
So where do the other players come into this? Where does the story start sort of getting more questionable, let's say, because obviously we, you know, for anyone that knows the story, there's quite a cast of characters involved with all of this and creating it. In May of 1995, Ray Centerley organized his own screening of it at the London Museum. Right. And basically that was mainly an invitation for the media.
00:20:34
Speaker
I was there, what was strange, we're all sat there. Bear in mind I'd seen this dark tent footage, I'd seen two autopsy films, I'd seen this wreckage, I'm fully expecting to see all of this come on the screen. The screen comes on, there's no introduction and it's just the one autopsy film. There's no sign of Santilly, I mean absolutely no sign of him.
00:20:57
Speaker
What we didn't know, and we learned much later, he was in the projection booth at the back, talking into the microphone, but he forgot to switch it on. And there was such a clamour when this film had finished, he legged it out of the back door. He'd gone.
00:21:15
Speaker
and I was left there to answer all the questions from from a lot of the media. So that's where it then that's when the the television became involved. Ray showed it at our conference that August to a packed house and I mean deadly silent I mean people came from all over the place to see it because
00:21:36
Speaker
The way I thought about it is just let people make up their own minds. You know, some of my colleagues at Pimfora weren't so happy about it, but that's just, that's, you know, you can't make everybody happy. And my idea was, look, if we're not involved with it, somebody else is going to be. So why not? You know, it fell into our lap.
00:21:54
Speaker
And I decided, again rightly or wrongly, in public and to raise sound to his face, I would say, you know, I think it's real, Ray, you're doing a great job underneath. I was just trying to find out what it was. I was 100% positive that once it went out on television, that the phone would start ringing or whatever. But it went on television around the world the day after our conference.
00:22:23
Speaker
And I'm sat there thinking, we'll find out the answers now. And it was literally the old sagebrush thing, not a thing, not a word. You know, nobody came forward and said,
00:22:35
Speaker
That's me. I'm one of the actors. Or my granddad told me about this film. I think that's him that's in it. I mean, nothing. Of course, it was on a huge documentary called Alien Autopsy Factor Fiction in the US. I was interviewed for that. It was so popular. They had to do another two specials after it and additional bits.
00:23:01
Speaker
It was the biggest selling documentary of the year on video. I mean, tens of millions. I mean, you know, so I'm thinking, you know, we'll find out the answer now, but it just went quiet. I mean, nobody said a word. So it's a question of where do we go from here? So all we had was the film itself.
00:23:25
Speaker
But in mind, Santilli had only released one autopsy film and the so-called debris footage. So you start with that. Is there anything on the film that is not circa 1947? No, there isn't. Some people thought there was a phone hanging on the wall. It's got a curly flex. Yeah.
00:23:48
Speaker
thought, oh, you didn't have a curly flex in 1940. Well, you did, you just had to pay a bit extra for it, you know, it was there. The instruments, the next thing we did was we asked the medical profession, if this is an autopsy, and you'd be surprised how many were impressed by it, you know, you didn't see anything drastically wrong.
00:24:13
Speaker
We are special effects experts, all of them said, yeah, I could do it with enough money. And I said, that's okay. If it's a special effects, who the hell did it? Because the special effects industry, certainly in the UK is not huge.
00:24:31
Speaker
And I started with one company and they said, it looks like Fred. So I would ring Fred and I say, was it you Fred? And he said, no, it looks like Bill. And I'd ring Bill and Bill would say it looks like so and so. I never got the same name twice. I just would go round and round and rounding circles, you know? So Santilli then released some labels.
00:24:55
Speaker
It claimed that, you know, the film is in the canister, the canister is in a box and the boxes got sealed with a label over the top, you know, and it's got a stamp on it. It's a military stamp and there's blurb about it, you know, when it was filmed and so on. Now the official stamp is a military stamp. Somebody said that's, you know, that's not the right era, but when we looked into it, it was, so it was from the right era. So there was nothing outstanding.
00:25:24
Speaker
that we could point to and say, you know, that proves it's a fake. So again, I thought, well, I'll just try and do whatever I can. I'll be nice to Ray. I'm on his side, but it's like the proverbial duck. My feet were paddling like bejesus under the water. Trying to find out what was what, Vinny.
00:25:52
Speaker
And it took a few years, I must admit. And I can't remember what year it was now. So time's gone by.
Uncovering the Film's True Creation
00:26:02
Speaker
You know, the alien autopsy film is still being discussed. We've now got internet and emails and so on. I got an email from a guy one day and he said, I know who made the alien autopsy film. Fair enough. Yeah, good. You know, who?
00:26:21
Speaker
And I said, give me your phone number. And I rang him up. And he told me the story. He says, I work as a video games animator. And he says, I worked for this company called AK Music. He said, I went to see them one day about some work. And I'm sat in their office. A stands for Andy and Kate.
00:26:48
Speaker
So it was AK music. They made a lot of animations, they made karaoke videos and all kinds of things. And this is the phone goes in the office and it says that the guy who owned it, Keith, is talking to this chap. He says, no, no, Ray. How are you doing? And he, you know, finished his conversation. So this lad, it was also called Keith.
00:27:12
Speaker
had seen the alien autopsy film, knew of Ray Santilli's name in association with it. And he said to the other Keith, stop Ray Santilli. He didn't say his name. He says, yeah, why? He says, the alien autopsy guy. And Keith started laughing. And he says, he didn't make it. Well, he did. What it turns out, it gave me
00:27:39
Speaker
the details and he was quite happy. I found out that AK music had closed. However, there was still the director's home address attached to it. So the gentleman called Keith Bateman. That was the Keith who'd been talking to in his office. So I wrote, got no reply, basically. And I said, look, I spoke to him on the phone and he
00:28:06
Speaker
He was like a politician. He spoke a lot, didn't tell you much. And in the end, I thought, I know it's him. And I put the newspaper onto him and a newspaper got hold of him and got an interview with him. Obviously, Keith had got paid a few hundred pounds, maybe for his story. But what happened was Keith said we used to do business every now and again with Ray Santilli. Didn't work for him. We worked with him.
00:28:35
Speaker
And he said, on occasions, we'd sit down informally and kind of brainstorm. He said, most of what we did was, you know, come up with the stupid things we'd fall about laughing, you know. But he said, one day, Ray Santilli says, you know, if we had some Roswell footage, we could really make some money. Just so happened that one of Keith's employees was reading a UFO book and he had Roswell in it.
00:29:03
Speaker
So Keith, on his own initiative, not at Central East behest, on his own initiative, went to a friend's farm in Bedfordshire, got his son on a trestle table to lay him down, and he made an alien's head out of a polystyrene head that you put wigs on, put big black eyes on it, stuck that on the top,
00:29:27
Speaker
He got two friends to wear the white coats. They got some giblets from a local butcher. The man seen walking in front of the camera is actually the farmer himself, and they filmed it. Now this was the so-called tent footage. And it was shot in color. They take it back to their offices. They run it through the computer. They change it to black and white. They put scratches and whatever you're on it.
00:29:56
Speaker
Keith takes it to Ray Santilli, said, here you go, you want some Roswell footage? Have a look at this. And Santilli plays it and he said, that's rubbish. You know, I need something more substantive, something that will make your eyeballs pop out.
00:30:13
Speaker
So Keith allegedly went away and spoke to some special effects guys and they caught him in 30 or 40,000 pounds. Santilli said, get lost. You know, that's too much. However, he kept the tent footage. He kept it. So the, you know, the, the touch paper had been lit and it was now burning in Santilli's brain.
00:30:37
Speaker
And when he contacted Buforda, it was putting out, unbeknown to us, of course, it's putting out the feelers to see if they were interested in any of this kind of thing. And again, we jumped forward in time. So Santu Lee said, no, he said, we took film to AK Music to be transferred onto video. And when they got it,
00:31:01
Speaker
It was blank. It was ruined. And they played a trick on me. They brought this back and said, this is the real stuff. It was only a long time later when I showed it to the cameraman. He said, I don't know what that is. And they disassociated themselves from it. So it kind of wriggled out of it, despite what Keith was saying.
00:31:22
Speaker
And so we progress again, and I'm sticking at it. And I used to say to myself every now and again, I'll shake the alien ore substitute tree and see if anything falls out. And we mentioned Graham Birdsall. Graham, at this point, was now publisher and editor of UFO magazine, a new stand publication, selling very well. And I wrote him an article about the alien autopsy film.
00:31:51
Speaker
And he put it on the front page. So, you know, you've got a picture of it and all this. Again, gets an email out of the blue from a chap, called himself Simon. And he said, I didn't realize there was any interest in the alien autopsy film. You know, I thought it was all dead. I said, well, much of this discussion is now online. It's not in the newspapers. It's not on TV. It's all online. So eventually I got Simon's
00:32:22
Speaker
telephone number. And I spoke to him and he said, well, my pal made the dummies for it. Would anyone be interested? When you say anyone, who do you mean anyone? I said, because I would. He said, I mean, anyone from the media.
00:32:43
Speaker
So I said, possibly. So we arranged to meet in Manchester. He actually picked a cafe for us to meet in Manchester. Why Manchester? I had no idea. The cafe we met in was completely open. It was glass all the way around. So you could, you know, you couldn't hide in it. So I met him. And it was about my age, you know, it was a nice chap.
00:33:08
Speaker
And he said, my pal is wanting to basically cash in. He wants to tell the story. He made the dummies for the alien autopsy film. I said, well, who is he? He said, I can't tell you. I said, well, the only person I know that might be interested is the guy that made the documentary in the States, Alien Autopsy Factor of Fiction.
Behind-the-Scenes: Film's Fake Production
00:33:30
Speaker
It's a chap called Bob Kibiot. Bob and I had kept in touch, still in touch today,
00:33:36
Speaker
And I said, when I get home, I will email you his contact details. It's up to you then. So we're chatting away, you know, we get another cup of coffee and he lets sleep that his friend had been responsible for making a dummy for a well-known channel for television show called Max Headroom. Right. Yep. I remember that. Yeah. And Max was this head and he wobbled and he talked.
00:34:04
Speaker
So, you know, the internet wasn't as good as it is now, but a dog and a dog and a dog and a dog, and I found the name of the guy who made the head. And he wasn't a special effects expert. He was a sculptor. And his name was John Humphries. He'd gone to the Royal College of Arts, you know, and then on occasion, his work overlapped into film and television. So I've got his name now.
00:34:34
Speaker
But that was about it. I couldn't find him. There was no contact telephone number for him or anything like that. However, Bolkivier got in touch with Simon. They agreed a deal. And John Humphries was about to spill the beans when everything stopped. And he said, I can't do any more. I can't say anything. What happened? We didn't know this at the time, is that Reg Santiliani's business partner, Gary Shufield,
00:35:04
Speaker
I just signed a contract to make Alien Autopsy the movie. John Humphries was hired to make the dummies for it. So he was now on the contract. What's funny Vinny, what's really funny is I was working for a small publisher that he leads. A young lady called Heather. She got her own little company. She was starting up and I was working there. And she says, my boyfriend's coming.
00:35:34
Speaker
We're going to have lunch. We didn't know she had a boyfriend. So this fella arrived. She says, oh, he lives in London. Smartly dressed, briefcase, you know, very affable. I said, what do you do? He says, well, I'm actually a trained barrister, but I don't practice in court. I do contract law, you know? Oh, great. And Heather knew of my involvement in the UFO subject and the alien autopsy film. And he says, well, I've got something you'll be interested in.
00:36:03
Speaker
He says, what's that? He says, I've got the contract for the alien autopsy movie. They are clients of mine. And he literally showed me the contract. And I was able to flip through it. I was kind of looking if I could get him to go to the bathroom and I can make a photocopy.
00:36:26
Speaker
So I thanked him profusely, of course. Not long after that, I think it was my last ever meeting with Ray and Gary. I went down to London on the train to meet them. We didn't meet at the office. We went to this like a like a gentleman's club nearby. Very, very extravagant. And what happened? A drink and they're very chatty. Gary Shufill, I didn't like. Ray's a very nice guy to get along with, you know,
00:36:56
Speaker
And they're, you know, giving it all this. And I'm just sat there thinking, this is complete and utter BS. You know what I mean? I said, I've got some news for you guys. What? I know you've signed to do the movie. What movie? I tell them. You know, nobody knew with an deck.
00:37:16
Speaker
going to play the parts of Gary Enright. I did. I even knew how much the budget was and how much money they were getting. And I told them, you should have seen the look on their faces. They didn't know what to say. But I followed it up. I actually lied myself. I made other things up because they obviously knew that that part of what I'm saying is true.
00:37:37
Speaker
So I also, you know, said, I know a lot more about you two guys, you know, and that was the last time I saw them, you know, and of course the Art and Deck film was made.
00:37:51
Speaker
It wasn't hugely successful. Ant and Dec have never made another movie since. They've never done any acting since. They started off as child actors. I think I read an article sometime later that that film had scuppered their acting career. I think it was a bit unfair because they played good parts in it. It wasn't a great film, it wasn't rubbish.
00:38:17
Speaker
So, you know, they changed the story now, Santile had changed the story. There was a documentary to help promote the movie with Eamonn Holmes as the presenter. And hey, Presto, who did they bring on? John Humphries. John is saying, no, these guys brought me some film. And I based the Alien Autopsy on the film, but we only had a few scraps. Most of it had rotted away, but that is real film, you know,
00:38:47
Speaker
And I thought, well, you know, so Ray and Gary changed their story now. They called it, you know, we've got this film and we've re-create, restored it, they called it. We've restored it. Barely in mind, there was two autopsy films. You know, one seems to have disappeared and been forgotten about. So again, you know, they're not telling anything. We haven't got,
00:39:13
Speaker
By this time, nobody believes them. Nobody in their right mind believes them anyway. But I'm thinking we still can't prove it, you know, 100%. There's still not enough proof there. Sometime later, again, I was working with an old colleague of mine. He's actually the son-in-law of Graham Birdsall. It's called Russell Callahan. Russ started his own little magazine called UFO Data. And I write a few things for him.
00:39:41
Speaker
Russ's phone goes one day. Russ and I had been interviewed Keith Bateman and one or two others and Russ had made a little video and got a phone call and somebody's inquiring about this video. And, you know, and this fellow on the end of the phone says, I'm the man who made the alien autopsy film. So,
00:40:07
Speaker
Ross says, well, you don't need to be speaking to me. You need to be speaking to Philip. And he got his phone number around him. Now, we've got half a name. This had come up in conversation with people at the film company who made the Ant and Dec film. We've got half a name. And it was just the first name. And it was Spiros. It meant nothing to me. He typed Spiros in Google.
00:40:37
Speaker
You know, so I rings this bloke. I said, what's your name? And he says, my name's Spiros Mallares. Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong. The bells start ringing. And Spiros, I had my tape recorder on, so I was recording it just in case, told us the whole story. And the missing parts of the puzzle are falling into place as he's telling me. I then arranged a more formal
00:41:06
Speaker
phone conversation where I could have time to write some questions out and ask him. So I didn't know what he was going to say to begin with. Spiroth told me he was a filmmaker, was a magician. It served his apprenticeship as a motor mechanic. And he said he had a little film business to do pop promos, you know, film any damn thing.
00:41:32
Speaker
Every year in Cannes, there is a TV film festival. And he says, this year I'm going out to Cannes, I'm going to be doing a bit of filming, but I've got some spare time. So we had a trade publication with all the different television companies and their contact details. And he said, I picked, he said, maybe a half a dozen or a dozen that were pretty near to where we were located. And I faxed him, basically saying,
00:42:02
Speaker
We're in Cannes. We have a film crew. If you need one, we've got time on our hands. Of course, one of those places he sent a fax to was the Merlin Group. Ray sent him his company. He met Ray out in Cannes. They had a chat. Ray tells him this fantastic story about this alien autopsy film, this footage, the cameraman.
00:42:26
Speaker
And Spiros is thinking, anyway, for whatever reason, he decides to go to Santilli's office and have a look. And the film that he played him was the 10 footage, because that's all he had. Of course, yeah. Spiros says, it's a fake. I can tell you it's a fake. So Santilli said, I laid a lot of money out for this, and I'm hanging home. So Spiros is driving home.
00:42:54
Speaker
And again, he has a light bulb moment and thinking, well, my best friend is John Humphries, a world-class sculptor. I wonder, I wonder just if, you know, they have a chat, they go back to Santilli with a proposal and how much it'll cost. And hey, Presto, the alien autopsy film, as we, you know, love it or hate it, was born.
00:43:23
Speaker
So the guy behind it was Spiros Melaris. The man who made the dummies was John Humphries. Santilly had little...
00:43:32
Speaker
import, Gany Shufil had no input in it whatsoever. And of course, the name Spielberg cropped up at some point, everybody's thinking Steven Spielberg, it was actually Santilli's business associate in Germany. He's called Volker Spielberg, the one that put up the money for it, Santilli didn't have it at the time. So the Spielberg was involved, he was actually there
00:43:58
Speaker
on May the 1st when they had the screening in the London Museum, but nobody knew who the hell it was. It's only looking at some photographs that were taken at the event later, this strange fella, and that was Volker Spielberg. That's the only photograph we have of him. But he was the mysterious Spielberg. And Spiros told me everything.
00:44:20
Speaker
So I said, okay, no disrespect. You have to prove it. Your story on the end of a phone, it's just like Santilli's story. You know, for all I know, you could be a business associate of his and you just trying to, you know, throw some muck at him. So again, I arranged a day with my wife and went down to Spiros's house.
00:44:43
Speaker
It got out everything he could lay his hands on. He even had his diary from 1995 with meetings in it and phone numbers. It got out boxes of paperwork. There were faxes from Kodak because one of the big contentious issues was that the film had these little codes on them.
00:45:05
Speaker
you know, little symbols. I think symbols represented the year of manufacturer. Right. Yeah. Faxing Spiros back in 1947 is this and this. So he knew what and all kinds of stuff. Spiros himself is quite a decent artist and he hadn't done a few scribbles. He actually did a, you know, a whole range of paintings.
00:45:31
Speaker
So he made the alien autopsy. He did a storyboard in effect and he painted it. I've got one of them here. That's one of them. It's not. This was done by somebody else based on one of Spirosis paintings. And another thing he had, for example, he had a huge file folder of American military vehicles.
00:45:56
Speaker
And I'm talking dozens and dozens and dozens of them. It's what the hell do you want them for? It's what we were also going to do. He says we were going to make a flying saucer crash. Wow. You'd have the crash in the background, you know, the thing in the desert. We'd have a vehicle and we'd have an actor made up as president.
00:46:20
Speaker
And we would tell him what to say. And then if you could lip read, you'd be able to see what I was saying. And he said, I was going to use this truck here. He said, but I was going to build just the back end of truck out of out of order. Right. Yeah. End of it in screen.
00:46:37
Speaker
But I would use that number plate. So if you could go and check military number plates, it would turn out to be a real vehicle from 1947. And he'd got any more and more and more stuff. So there was no question that he was behind it. And I said, well, why have you decided to come out now? He said, well, we had an agreement between us that we wouldn't say anything because he said, originally,
00:47:08
Speaker
it wasn't made to make any money. The idea we had behind it was we'd make it, we'd let it out there, and then six months, 12 months later, we'd go, ta-da, aren't we great? In the hope that people would then say, these guys fooled everybody, we better get, we better, we can hire these guys. It says every time I went to see Santilly about it, he just said, oh, I haven't made my money back.
00:47:34
Speaker
You know, Spiros, I didn't have a clue what was going on in the background. I had no idea about the TV deals that were being done, didn't know, and it's only when the Ant and Dec film was going to be made, essentially went to show him
00:47:52
Speaker
And Santini said, this is enough, Ray. Enough of this nonsense. We've got to tell people the story. So he said, once they made the movie, as far as I was concerned, that our agreement was finished. And he started looking round for the first time to see what happened to Dale in our Topsy film. And his jaw fell off.
00:48:13
Speaker
And it was going round all the different products that mentioned the alien autopsy. One of which was Russell's little DVD that he'd made himself, you know? And that's why he rang him. Because basically he's saying, well, the film you see that everybody's seeing on television or online, he says, I actually own it. The reason why I own it is because we filmed one before it.
00:48:42
Speaker
that is the autopsy that has no defects in it whatsoever and he said my girlfriend at the time she did all the medical things and we were playing it back and she said you've done something wrong there they would never ever do that in an autopsy so if you let that out you're finished straight away
00:49:07
Speaker
So he said, we had run out of money. Santilla was, you know, shaking his head, didn't know what to do. So Spro says, I will pay the crew and the costs. We'll make another one. So they already got the mold for the, for the creature, the alien. John Humphries does his magic. They opened the mold in the morning. And of course there's a fault with it. There's a hole in the leg. There'd been an air pocket.
00:49:35
Speaker
So they improvise, they get a Bunsen burner or whatever, they burn it. He sends John to the butcher to get a bone. They put that in it so there's a bone joint in it as well. So they improvise. That is the one that everybody's seen. That's why Spiro says, I own that because I paid for it.
00:49:55
Speaker
Sure. Right. Makes sense. I paid for that. And he went to the copyright office and he had to show his proof and they have given him a copyright license. They haven't withdrawn it from Santilli. You have to go to court for that.
Santilli's Deception and Film Impact
00:50:09
Speaker
But Spiros does have a legal copyright ownership of that and the debris film.
00:50:17
Speaker
And it's the little details that also add up. Spiros told us, he says, we made the creature, the first one, put it laid out on the slab, it's perfect. We dissect it, take the giblets out, take the brain out.
00:50:36
Speaker
And then we realized we'd made a mistake. He said, we literally left it on the slab because they'd set this up in his sister's apartment, in her flat. She was having it renovated. So it didn't make any difference. They built the set, you know, and off they went. We'll reset the mold tonight. We'll come back and we'll make another one tomorrow. When they came back the following day, the door was open of the house, the flat. And I thought, oh shit. And it had actually been robbed.
00:51:07
Speaker
And he said, the only thing they took downstairs, they had a few other props that they didn't use, one of which was a sidearm for an American soldier. So when they filmed the debris footage, there's a guy holding it up with his uniform on. He was going to be wearing a sidearm.
00:51:25
Speaker
but they'd stolen it. He said, but can you imagine the burglar's face when he walked up the stairs and put the door, and this thing is then laid out on the slab? Because they thought at first, oh, we've been rumbled. And they thought, well, the cat would be rumbled, because he'd have to admit to burglary to begin with. Yeah, of course. And that's just one of the little stories that goes with it. You don't have to make up stories like that. But Spiros has since done his own book. I've done a book. And Spiros,
00:51:55
Speaker
What he said to me is he said, everything in the book, Philip, I can prove. I've got the evidence to back it up. He says, I know a lot more, but I can't necessarily prove it. Right. Okay. So if you, if I'm questioned or challenged on anything that's in this book, any specific item or all of them, for that matter, I can provide the proof for that. And it's a damn good book. I must say it's nearly as good as mine.
00:52:25
Speaker
But yeah, so then it all goes quiet again about this damn film. And I got an email again from a chap. I don't know. I have no idea who the hell he is. And he said, have a read of this. And it's this email thread. And it's from NIDS, what was NIDS, the National Institute of Discovery Sciences.
00:52:54
Speaker
And a number of other people are copied in on it. And it's basically addressed to a gentleman called Christopher, Dr. Christopher Kit Green. He's known as Kit Green to his friends apparently. And they're clarifying some of his comments that he previously made. And they're all about the alien autopsy film. Now this thing then was uploaded to some website the following day and off it went again.
00:53:23
Speaker
So there's a number of people on this email thread that I knew who they were. And I emailed them and said, is this real? And they said, yeah, fair enough. And look at me, I'm mentioning it as well. Because in whatever year it was, I don't know if it's 2001,
00:53:46
Speaker
A gentleman by the name of Colm Callagher, who was part of NIDS, contacted me about the avian autopsy film, and I put him in touch with his race Antilles. I left them to it, but I'm mentioning it. Basically, Kit Green, he did work for the CIA, I believe, at one point, and he operated what was called their Weird Desk. I think that's an over exaggeration, but anything weird or wonderful that came their way. I think he was the go-to man for it.
00:54:15
Speaker
And he's saying in his original statement that, you know, the alien autopsy film of Sam Tilly's was exactly the same as one that he was shown to him by the CIA years before this. Yeah. In the eighties. Yeah. And he, in fact, it was shown several films and
00:54:40
Speaker
He talks about Ray Santilli's associates. Well, you know, I don't remember any associates like he's describing them. And he, you know, he answers their questions. And basically all of them, all of these people on this email list were all doctors of one form or another. And they all thought the alien autopsy film was real, probably based on Kit Green. So I managed to get hold of Kit Green on email.
00:55:11
Speaker
And I said, and he didn't want to talk about it, to be honest. I think others had pestered him. But eventually I got him to talk and he said, we don't believe it's real now. And he believed that the CIA had pulled some kind of stunt on him or whatever. But Sam Tilly gets over this email thread
00:55:36
Speaker
And he calls it the CIA email. Well, it's not from the CIA. It's from colleagues working for Bigelow at the time, NEDS, National Institute of Discovery Sciences. My way of looking at it was that Bigelow is a big believer in this kind of thing.
00:55:59
Speaker
They've looked into it and they've said it's real. They don't really wanna upset the apple cart. They wanna keep the paychecks coming so they can do the inverted commas, the real research on the real stuff. Whether that's correct or not, I don't know. But once again, just when you thought the alien autopsy film was dead, it wasn't. And then just, what was it, last year or the year before?
00:56:28
Speaker
Santilli pops up again. He's now selling a frame, an original frame of this alien autopsy film. Was it an NFT or NTF? That's it, NFT. I think it was asking for a million pounds. I think it was a million, yeah.
00:56:49
Speaker
And of course, Spiros, he gets in touch with the company who's auctioning this thing, saying this is nonsense. They take it down and Santilly kick point it back up again. I'm still in contact with Santilly. We've exchanged an email once in a while, just pleasantries, nothing out of the order. And I've just made him aware, Ray,
00:57:13
Speaker
When you're ready to tell your side of the story, and by that I mean the truth, you know where I am. And that is like a pocket history of the alien autopsy film, you know? I was determined, Vinny, to get to the bottom of it. I didn't think it would take as long as it did. Because when it hit, you know, when it hit the headlines, there was those that said I was, you know, on the take from Santilly,
00:57:39
Speaker
I was his, you know, his partner in crime, so to speak. This came about basically because my wife and I had a small family at that point, and we're building an extension on our house. And somebody said, well, where does Matt will get that money from? Well, I didn't have that money. My wife did. My wife had had her own property prior to his meeting.
00:58:04
Speaker
We'd sold it, and we used some of the proceeds from it to build the extension on our house. Nobody ever asked me that. They just thought Matt was on the take. He's getting all this tons of money. I got paid a small fee for writing Race Antilles' documentary. He eventually made it and sold it. And it's narrated by Brian Blessed, a well-known actor.
00:58:28
Speaker
And I got paid a small, just a small fee for writing that. None of us, Santini included, knew that this would take off like it did. And we are still talking about it how many years later, you know?
Reflecting on Film's Legacy and Future Topics
00:58:43
Speaker
Yeah, over 25 years. Oh, don't remind me.
00:58:48
Speaker
Listen, that's just an incredible story and obviously recently I was made aware of this four-part TV series Alien Autopsy, the search for answers which is available I think on Amazon Prime, this one here. Yeah. And that was really good, it laid it all out. Yeah, I mean a company in London asked me if I'd take part in it and I agreed. I didn't know how many parts it was going to be, they made it into a four-parter
00:59:15
Speaker
Some people say that's a bit long. They might be right, but all, you know, I didn't know Santilly was going to be interviewed for it. He's still telling you this false story. And what is interesting for me is on it, you know, they asked him a question about the second autopsy film and he said, what, what second? He's now forgotten. Because if you're doing a restoration, you don't make two films, do you?
00:59:45
Speaker
If I, if you were an art restorer and I said, Vinny, I want you to, I've got, you know, I own the Mona Lisa. I want you to restore it for me. You wouldn't make, you know, wouldn't restore that one and make another one that's completely different. You know, bearing in mind, the other autopsy film, the creature is completely undamaged. It's in the same location, same people. Um,
01:00:10
Speaker
But there is a fault with it. And that fault is of a medical nature. I've seen it. And it's also a lot brighter. And I asked Spiros about this. He says, well, the reason it's a lot brighter is because we were never going to use it. He said, what I did with the other one, I run it through the computer and just darkened it a little bit. I didn't bother with that one because we weren't going to use it. So that's why it's brighter.
01:00:38
Speaker
You know, so it keeps on going. It keeps on trucking, so to speak. So does Santilly still claim there's a couple of frames in the video from the original real autopsy that I think he said he first saw in 92, is that right?
01:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, he originally said 93, but it was 92. And the reason we know it's 92 is Santilli did a newspaper article about some of his finds in 1992. Not mention of any Elvis footage, but he did buy some Elvis correspondence
01:01:10
Speaker
that the newspapers like was Elvis the last letters and all this lot because he was a collector and he you know I remember sitting in his office one day for example and he was drooling over the shoebox and he opened it and there were all black and white photographs of the Beatles that he'd bought and they'd never been published anywhere.
01:01:30
Speaker
So, you know, how much did it be worth? I don't know. But that's the kind of thing he dealt with. And it was 1992. So what he claimed was he'd seen the film at the cameraman's house, shook hands on it, but didn't have the cash to pay him. And it took him a while to raise the money via Volker Spielberg, of course. They paid him, you know, some 18 months later, two years later, the film is shipped over. And when they opened the canisters,
01:01:59
Speaker
It's damaged. It started to melt and all this lot. Like, it doesn't do that. You know, but that was the story. And so all it was left with is some frames. And you can see the creature. And that's one of them you tried to sell for a million dollars, you know, and that they inserted some of these into the alien autopsy film. Excuse me, I just got to take these. No problem at all. But, uh,
01:02:29
Speaker
And these are the frames that sculptor John Humphries claims he saw. But there weren't any frames. It was all shot on 16 millimeter film, but modern day 16 millimeter. He can still buy it. Didn't he splice it though? Didn't Spiro splice some 16 millimeter with an old baseball film or something? Yeah, one of the things he went down Camden Market or wherever it was, and he bought some old film. One was a baseball film. But it was, don't you mind?
01:02:58
Speaker
Kodak had already sent Spiros a fax knowing what the edge code to look for that would tell you the year. And he bought a baseball film. And he snipped the leader off and a bit of the film. And he stuck it onto the alien autopsy film and spliced it onto it, which is the new stuff. He got a photography expert called Bob Shell over from the States. I met Bob several times. But any of mine as well, Spiros is and was then a magician.
01:03:27
Speaker
Yeah. So he does the old magician trick. All he did was reel the film out and he kept saying, knock out, show you, don't touch it. You know, and he's, you know, he's enticing Bob shell, you know, so he pulls it all out and all he does is he puts his finger in his thumb over the splice, holds the film up.
01:03:51
Speaker
You can see it going up into the locker room, which Spiros claims was the autopsy room, showed him the edge codes, and then following on.
01:04:01
Speaker
is the creature on the slab. But that is modern day film. And he put his finger, what do they call it? Misdirection magicians, don't they? They'll say, look at this, but it's the other hand you want to be looking at. You know what I mean? That's exactly what he did. And of course, Bob Shaw walked away saying it's real, it's genuine. He's now in prison, which is another story, all in its own. But he'd been fooled, basically.
01:04:31
Speaker
And that's just how things, there's all kinds of little things in it, you know, that happened and things that were said and done. And there's still people that believe it's real, Vinny. I mean, not that many years ago, a gentleman that I know said I'm going to, him and a business colleague were going to put a proposition to Santilly to buy the film from him for a substantial amount of money. And I said, don't.
01:05:00
Speaker
do not buy it. I'm telling you now, do not buy it. It is fake. It is what all of it, Philip. I'm saying yes. All of it is fake.
01:05:10
Speaker
You know, whatever you do, thankfully, you didn't buy it, you know. But it was him and a businessman wanted to buy the film for a substantial amount of money. And I'm just like, you would shake him head. So there you go. That's the alien autopsy film. And it will continue to resurrect itself every now and again.
01:05:34
Speaker
Absolutely. And I really appreciate you coming on and telling us the intricacies and the ins and outs of it. I really do appreciate it. For anybody that does want to go and watch the four-part series, it's available on Amazon Prime. It is linked in the description below. I think it's a great timeline of everything that happened. Philip, thank you again. Now, I'd love to have you on again. We can talk about other cases and other things you've worked on because obviously you've done that. So hopefully you'll come back in the not so distant future.
01:06:02
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Pascagoula case in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1973. We have a lot of information to release on that by September, October time. So I'm sure it'll get the tongues wagging and the teeth are chattering. But yes, we'll happily do that.
01:06:25
Speaker
Thank you ever so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you again. Thank you also to everyone in the live chat. Thank you for being here as always and showing your support. I really do appreciate it. Hopefully next time you see me, I will be here with my co-host Katie Howland. But for now, everyone enjoy the rest of your day, wherever you are. And we'll see you on the next one. Take care. Goodbye.