Dear Mr. Birdsall,
As a company who specialise in special make up effects for films and television we've been following the great Roswell debate over the last few months with much interest. It occurred to us that if anyone was really qualified to judge whether the aliens in the film were faked it would be us. We would know the likely materials that the things would have had to have been constructed from, where to look for possible seam lines, etc. The chances are that if the alien(s) were faked that it would have been done by someone within our profession. Two weeks ago we were invited by Union Pictures to look at the Roswell footage.
We were shown all the footage that Santilli had released at that time. The autopsy footage that had been shown at the Museum of London and some footage of debris laid out on a table. We'd be very suprised if any other footage exists despite the claims of Mssrs. Santilli and Mantle. We certainly saw no footage of the crash site, the saucer, President Truman or more than one alien. Here for your interest are our observations on what we were shown - this taken from our letter to Union Pictures Aug 3, 1995.
None of us were of the opinion that we were watching a real alien autopsy, or an autopsy on a mutated human which has also been suggested. We all agreed that what we were seeing was a very good fake body, a large proportion of which had been based on a lifecast. Although the nature of the film obscured many of the things we had hoped to see, we felt that the general posture and weighting of the corpse was incorrect for a body in a prone position and had more in common with a cast that had been taken in an upright position.
We did notice evidence of a possible moulding seam line down an arm in one segment of the film but were generally surprised that there was little other evidence of seaming which suggests a high degree of workmanship.
We felt that the filming was done in such a way as to obscure details rather than highlight them and that many of the parts of the autopsy that would have been difficult to fake, for example the folding back of the the chest flaps, were avoided, as was anything but the most cursory of limb movement. We were also pretty unconvinced by the lone removal sequence. In our opinion the insides of the creature did not bear much relation to the exterior where muscle and bone shapes can be easily discerned. We all agreed that the filming of the sequence would require either the use of two separate bodies, one with chest open, one with chest closed, or significant redressing of one mortal. Either way the processes involved are fairly complicated and require a high level of specialised knowledge.
On a more general note, we didn't feel that anything that we saw suggested that the material had been shot on 16 mm film. There seemed to be no evidence of scratches etc., that might be expected, and some of the camera movements suggested that the camera must have been fairly lightweight. Other than the body - which as we've said must have involved a considerable amount of time and effort - the other production values seemed positively poverty stricken. We were particularly unconvinced by the wreckage laid out on the table, and by the hand shaped control pods which seemed very crudely fashioned, and then of course there were the "VIDEO TV" heiroglyphs (the heiroglyphs on one particular piece of wreckage appeared immediately to form recognisable words). Once more we were more disappointed by what wasn't there - again no verifiable personnel, etc."
Please feel free to reprint this letter or any parts of it...
All Best Wishes,
Cliff Wallace
Original file name: .CNI - Film.Special Effects
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.