Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien

The Sunday Times - Britain ^ | April 16, 2006 | Marc Horne

[texas booster]

THE creator of Max Headroom, a 1980s television cyber-presenter, has claimed he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film, the grainy black and white footage supposedly showing a dead alien being dissected by American government scientists after a UFO crash.

Alien Autopsy, a movie about the footage, is currently on release across Britain. It stars real-life television presenters Ant and Dec.

John Humphreys, a sculptor and consultant on Alien Autopsy who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, said it was he who made the models for the alien dissected in the original fake footage.

His confession, 11 years after the Roswell footage was first shown, will raise questions about the role of Channel 4, which unleashed Max Headroom on the world in the 1980s and bought the UK rights to screen the Roswell footage in Britain.

The footage was first exposed as a fake by The Sunday Times, but an estimated billion people still watched it around the world.

Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.

Philip Mantle, a UFO researcher and author who has been investigating the Roswell hoax for 10 years, said Humphreys had been a prime suspect but had never before admitted involvement.

Mantle, who next month will deliver a lecture at Glasgow University on the Roswell story, said: “I didn’t think it would take so long, but I am delighted this hoax has finally been exposed and the mystery has been solved.”

Humphreys, who is based in Manchester, says he also appeared in the Roswell film as the chief surgeon. The bug-eyed alien models were filled with sheep brains, chicken entrails and knuckle joints bought from Smithfield meat market. After filming, the dummies were cut up and dumped in bins across London.

For a few short weeks the world held its breath after the 91-minute silent film was unveiled by Ray Santilli, a London-based video distributor. He claimed to have bought the footage, shot on 14 reels, from a retired American military cameramen.

Humphreys said the Roswell film was shot by himself, Santilli and three others. He said he spent four weeks fashioning the models from latex using clay sculptures.

Humphreys, a graduate of the Royal Academy who has also created special effects for the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp, says he only told his wife about the hoax when he was hired to work on Alien Autopsy.

“It was a very, very strange feeling to know that I had played a key part in it,” he said.

Santilli, who is played by Declan Donnelly in Alien Autopsy, insists he was trying to “re-create” a real Roswell incident. He claims he bought genuine footage that was badly damaged when it was exposed to the air after 48 years in a can. “John was given very precise images to work with and what he did was sheer genius,” he said.

[George Smiley]

Looks like the .ru site distorted the image and I got their specs (you get the height and width of an image on a web page by right-clicking on it)

Here's how you do sizing inside of an IMG tag:

(And, BTW, it makes the page load faster as the rest of the page doesn't have to wait for the image to display completely before loading.)

<IMG SRC="http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/digest/Doherty.jpg" HEIGHT=219 WIDTH=196>

I put it in this way and FR's text parser moves the HEIGHT part so that it's right past the IMG part of the tag. (View Page Source on this page to see it.)

numbers are in pixels and may either be enclosed in quotes or not.

Let's see if that fixed things.

[Denver Ditdat]

[Elsie]

He said it was a man in an ape suit that was so crappily designed, he would have instantly fired anyone in his shop who tried to hoist it on him.

He'd been even MORE upset if, instead, they'd tried to FOIST it on him!

[Elsie]

Formerly known as Prince...

[null and void]

Uhhhh, that is his day job...

[null and void]

(Sorry about the format sizing, don't know how to shrink pics)

Nully's FR HTML Guide

[The_Victor]

Uhhhh, that is his day job...

Hmmmm,.... most people choose a day job for which they at least have some talent....

[null and void]

Or they go into politics...

[Mr. K]

I don't care whether the video is true or not- I know what I want to believe~!


so there



(learned that from democraps)

[SunkenCiv]

Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.

I guess that explains all the folks who claimed to have seen the same footage as a work of fiction back in the 1960s. ;')

[SunkenCiv]

Well put.

[Quix]

There's always more than sufficient smoke, mirrors, lies, disinformation, half truths, . . .

in the UFO field.

That film was one of those things I put on a high shelf and waited to see what fell off. I'm still waiting. Who's to know if this is the whole story, or not. Seems valid that it is . . . but who knows. It did seem at least clunky, if not hokey. On the other hand, it was plausible that such goings on would be a bit clunky back then.

The drama continues . . . to some degree.

Still expecting it to get more dramatic sooner than later.