Alien Autopsy

Sat down last night a little bit the worse for wear to watch Ant and Dec's film, Alien Autopsy, based on the Ray Santilli saga of 1995. Ant, or Dec, played Ray himself as a shuffling idiot, funny and accident prone; Dec, or Ant, played his mate, a sort of straight man propping up the chaos. The look and feel of the film is very mid-70s, maybe it is cashing in on the style of Life on Mars (ho ho). This was all well and good until, through the acohol and pizza daze I had been laughing through, I realised that this was just not funny.

Santilli is a con-artist and a shyster, not a fool. I have lost count of the number of straight faced interviews he sat through in 1995 and afterwards, earnestly proclaiming his honesty. I even had one of these on video, until I threw it in the bin; perhaps I can now produce an amusing little film about howI did really did have Ray Santilli on video insisting he was telling the truth but the tape got destroyed so I made one up instead. That he has allowed himself to be portrayed as such a tool only goes to prove that he is still sticking a massive two fingers up at the people he lied to for ten years.

Did I think the autopsy footage was for real? Well yes, I did - until I saw it. I wanted it to be real, like many people desperate in those grim 90s for something to come along and give us something new to believe in; but the footage itself was so disappointing and taken apart so well by almost any magazine you care to name (except the execrable UFO Magazine, I think) that it would have been fair enough if Santilli at that point had said "Ok, you've got me bang to rights", instead of which he continued to try and milk the thoroughly discredited footage for all it was worth. Now the film, which is so jokey in style and substance that you know that Santilli is still taking the piss, continues that milking. I left Forteana some years ago, disgusted with the disappointing rationality of much of the world so I may be out of touch on what the weirdness-community thinks of Santilli now. I think he is a twat, but then at least I didn't pay to watch his film.