[30 years ago this week, the pseudo-documentary film Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility of alien life, leading up to a post on recent revelations!]
On two cultural
contexts for a historic hoax.
30 years
ago today, Fox broadcast for the first time Alien Autopsy: Fact or
Fiction? The hour-long special, hosted by Star Trek: The Next
Generation actor Jonathan Frakes, got such high ratings that it would be re-broadcast
two additional times, to even bigger audiences. In my bracketed series intro
above I called the film a “pseudo-documentary,” but the truth is that it was
entirely staged, its footage fully fabricated, as its creator, the British film
and record producer Ray Santilli,
would finally admit 11 years later (although Santilli has continued to claim
that the film was based on real events from Roswell). Its “aliens” were plaster
casts filled with garbage and raspberry jam; its “laboratory” was a cheap set
constructed in a living room; its “experts” were either paid actors or had
their interviews severely edited and their perspectives badly misrepresented.
But despite all that, the ratings were through the roof as I noted above, and Time magazine noted that the film was
being viewed “with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruder
film.”
That final
phrase is a telling one, as I would say that Alien Autopsy has a good
bit in common with another 1990s film, Oliver
Stone’s JFK. At the end of that hyperlinked post I mentioned the
most striking and to my mind most frustrating aspect of Stone’s film, his blending
of actual archival footage with “re-created” (fictionalized) scenes, all of it
presented in black-and-white so it’s incredibly difficult for audiences to tell
what’s what. That’s not identical by any means to Alien Autopsy, which
to my knowledge has no archival footage at all. But Santilli did subsequently
describe his fictionalized filmmaking as an attempt to “re-create” actual but
lost such footage, and certainly his film, like Stone’s, is trying to convince
audiences that the fictional film is just as “real” as any archive. And
moreover, I would argue that in both cases audiences were very willing to go
along with the filmmakers (Stone’s film made more than 5 times its budget at
the box office, success not dissimilar to the high ratings for Santilli’s work),
due directly to the widespread existing interest in the conspiracy theories
(JFK and Roswell, respectively) that they were tapping into.
I would also contextualize
Alien Autopsy with a second, much older and quite distinct, cultural work,
however: Orson
Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
To my knowledge Welles did not hope to pass off his fictional storytelling as “real”
in the same way as Santilli and Stone, but as is well known audiences
did respond to the broadcast that way, which makes for an interesting twist
on my points in the last paragraph: a reminder that it’s not only up to artists
whether and how reality and fiction get blurry, that audiences have a significant
say in that process as well. And the terrified responses to Welles’s broadcast
also remind us that audience interest in aliens is driven by both hope and
fear, as nicely engaged by Don Henley at the end of the first verse of the song
I quoted earlier in this week’s series, “They’re Not Here, They’re
Not Coming” (2000): “Anxious eyes turned upward/Clutching souvenirs/Carrying
our highest hopes/And our darkest fears.”
Last
aliens tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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