Everyone by now has seen either the FOX TV special{ext. link} in the U.S. or the Channel 4 Roswell documentary in the U.K. and no one is much the wiser. The mystery of what this footage shows and whether it really depicts the autopsy of an extraterrestrial is still an open question. But there is much reason for suspicion.

The most important conclusion that one can draw from the FOX segment is that both the leading pathologists consulted, Dr Christopher Milroy and Dr Cyril Wecht, seemed clearly of the opinion that this was a dead body rather than a special effects dummy. This impression was reinforced by the Hollywood special effects experts who watched the footage. Top creature designer Stan Winston, who made some of the "Jurassic Park" dinosaurs and the extraterrestrial predators of "Alien"{ext. links}, said: "Nothing about this thing feels phony. If you came to me and said you'd created this illusion, you'd be working here ... [snaps his fingers] like that". It would be pretty incredible if this were a built prop and the cost of it would run to many many multiple thousands of dollars.

If the corpse is flesh and blood, the possibilities of it being a human freak of some kind should clearly be examined. The pathologists discussed various genetic defects which produce Turner's Syndrome, hexadactylism, etc., which could account for some of the creature's unusual characteristics. But the likelihood of finding them all together in one human being seems to be a vanishingly remote possibility. Dr Wecht had not come across any corpse even closely resembling this one in any of the 40,000 autopsies which he had performed or supervised. And it should be remembered that a second different corpse of entirely similar description appears in a further autopsy sequence. Quite apart from this the creature has no navel which is unknown with humans. Dr Wecht clearly says that what he has seen here does not appear to be a human being - he prefers to call it a humanoid, but not a member of the human race.

I have been pressed very hard to say whether I really think this is the autopsy of an alien or not. It is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand there are the compelling reasons, which are touched on above, for believing that the creature is neither a dummy nor a human, particularly as regards its internal organs; on the other hand there are the highly suspicious circumstances under which the footage was presented to the public together with a most unsatisfactory account of how the pictures came to be taken by the elusive unidentified cameraman