The Alien Autopsy Scandal review – an exquisite, playful look at how a faked video swept the world

The story behind the grainy footage of a dummy filled with butcher’s off-cuts is an extraordinarily eccentric and knotty joy – with the hoaxers resembling Scooby-Doo baddies

You will, no doubt, be familiar with the 1995 footage of a supposed alien autopsy. Since its yikes-inducing TV debut, the jittery black-and-white film is estimated to have been viewed by a billion people. Still, for better or worse, here it is again: a scrum of faceless hazmat suits hover over the corpse of a pot-bellied humanoid. Its forehead? Bulbous. Its expression? Pensioner outraged at price of bark chippings in local branch of Wickes. Over the next 18 minutes the suits proceed to dissect this appalled sod, slicing it open to reveal what appear to be various organs, condiments and splodgy, flopping … things.

“Those were lambs’ brains,” chuckles Trevor the butcher as The Alien Autopsy Scandal zooms in on a quivering hillock of the aforementioned horrors. Trevor was one of the individuals involved in the titular film, its production taking place not, as initially claimed, in a US military facility in 1947, but a Camden living room in 1995. Trevor had been approached by a sculptor to supply “guts” with which to stuff the “alien” mould that would, the latter had explained, be appearing in “a film”. Hmm. Nevertheless, guts – in the form of knees, hearts and miscellaneous entrails – were duly supplied. Anything else? “Pig eyes, ’cos they look like human eyes,” guffaws Trevor, before taking a hacksaw to the remains of a decapitated pig. Disgusting? Yes. But fascinating, too. And certainly no stranger than anything else in John Dower’s exquisitely directed documentary; a thing of great playfulness and eccentricity that, over three increasingly extraordinary episodes, unknots the tale behind the notorious film. Or at least does its best to do so. But the truth proves slippery and its gatekeepers are … well. Enter Ray Santilli (tinted glasses; deep shiftiness) and Gary Shoefield (tracksuit; air of one comfortable with the phrase “it is what it is”).