Penthouse Alien Hoax

This summer's alien mania has taken many forms, from Jim Morrison-as-gray T-shirts to the multimillion dollar hypemonster known as "Independence Day." The common denominator in this frenzied interest in folks from Out There is money, cash, moolah. There are plenty of people around who would sell you their dead mother as a Roswell alien, if the price was right. Ray Santilli has been peddling his shabby "alien autopsy" film for a year now, and Fox TV recently (and shamelessly) plugged this hoax once again by re-broadcasting their "Alien Autopsy -- Fact or Fiction?" dog and pony show. Is there no bottom to this abyss of marketing and hype? Is there no point low enough for the exploiters of the public's desire to know the truth about UFOs and their possible occupants?

Apparently not. In its latest issue, Penthouse Magazine features what it claims are authentic photos of a dead extraterrestrial (from the Roswell crash, of course). Publisher Bob Guccione spins a dramatic tale of how he obtained the photos from the daughter of a "German scientist" (visualize Walter Gotell from "The X-Files") who fled Hitler's Germany and worked alongside physicists Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer during the war. In 1947 this unnamed expatriate was involved in investigating the crash of the unknown object at Roswell. The scientist and his daughter are conveniently anonymous in Penthouse's account.

Guccione says the stills printed in Penthouse are from the official filmed record of the autopsy of one of the dead aliens. He doesn't claim to be in possession of the entire film. The Santilli film, Guccione says, is a "dramatization" of the real autopsy, of which his prints are authentic copies!

"The pictures from the autopsy have never been seen in the national press until now," Guccione said in an interview with former Omni editor Keith Ferrell. "Other copies, originally shared with a close colleague, have appeared in the Japanese media and a few esoteric UFO magazines with extremely limited circulation."

Guccione has sent a copy of the September issue of Penthouse to Air Force Chief of Staff General Ronald Fogleman, for comparison with the "official" film record the Air Force presumably has. Said Guccione, "I am convinced that these are 100 percent genuine photos of an alien, but the government will never admit it because to do so would acknowledge a cover-up of the existence of life beyond our solar system." Guccione was so concerned about security prior to Penthouse hitting the newsstands he posted extra guards at the printing plant and warehouse.

(What a treat for the Men in Black! Imagine the scene as they rifle through mounds of full-color beaver mags, thumbing through them to find -- the pictures!

(MIB #1: "Do these look real to you?"

(MIB #2: "Nah, they're just silicone, man.")

Publisher Guccione's challenge to the world as he bravely prints the pictures of the alleged alien is, "With the publication of these pictures I challenge the government to acknowledge the existence of the complete motion-picture documentation of alien presence on Earth."

All well and good, but are the pictures authentic?

No. They're not even good fakes.

Last year a Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao News, published these same pictures as evidence of a crash in mainland China in 1977! Since their appearance in Hong Kong, the alien pics invariably made their way around the world via the Internet. Story has it that Bob Guccione paid $200,000 for his set of dead-ET photos. He could have downloaded them from Usenet for nothing. But are the pictures photos of a real, dead alien who crashed in China almost twenty years ago?

Not hardly.

Most ParaScope readers have probably seen or heard of the Showtime cable TV movie "Roswell," starring Martin Sheen and Kyle MacLachlan. Movie FX man Steve Johnson created a diminutive alien puppet for the movie, and it was so successful copies of the original latex dummy were made and offered for sale by The Sharper Image, Inc., complete with lighted "isolation chamber" for around $1,600.00. According to Paul Davids, executive producer and co-writer of "Roswell," one of the original prop alien dummies was given to a museum in Roswell for display. The battered, sorrowful-looking creature is displayed lying on a hospital bed. Funny thing is, the barred rails of the hospital bed show up in the Penthouse photos -- and Guccione's ET looks identical to Steve Johnson's prop, right down to the "wound" painted on the alien's oversized head!

So we're faced with two unhappy possibilities: one, that Guccione knows the pictures are fake and is hawking them anyway to make a fast buck; or two, he didn't know about the Hong Kong paper, or the Roswell movie, or the Roswell museum exhibit. Did he really pay two hundred thousand for snaps of a movie prop? An even better question is, how people will buy the September Penthouse, see the pictures, and believe they are seeing a real alien visitor?

I can't help but remember the case of the Cardiff Giant. Back in the first half of the nineteenth century, a farmer named Newell uncovered a recumbent giant while digging a well on his property. It was promptly declared to be the petrified remains of an antediluvian man. Thousands of people trooped through a tent and gazed on the rough stone visage, paying twenty-five cents a head for the privilege.

Sensing a profitable scam, famed showman Phineas T. Barnum offered to buy the Cardiff Giant from old man Newell. He wouldn't sell, so Barnum did the next best thing: he had his own stone giant made, and exhibited it as the REAL Cardiff Giant, claiming the original was a fake, and his copy was the original! Many people believed him, and flocked to his museum in New York. In the ensuing uproar, newspapermen discovered that Newell had purchased a block of stone a year before he "found" the giant. Soon it was proven Newell had made the stone man, and artificially aged it with hammers and acid before burying it in his field. The whole affair was a hoax even before P. T. Barnum got involved.

To make the latter-day analogy clear, if Ray Santilli is the Farmer Newell of dead alien pictures, is Bob Guccione the P. T. Barnum of the tale? How much more of this hype and hoopla must we endure? Already we have had new witnesses to various southwestern crashes come forward with breathtaking tales of crashed saucers and martyred ETs. We have new tales of crashed saucer fragments, invariably made of mundane materials. We have alien implants hacked out of abductees' toes and hands, exciting the UFO community for a few weeks, but nothing lasting seems to come of such investigations. And we have fake autopsies, fake bodies, fake UFO pictures and videos, more and more fakes. Some believe anyway. Others claim government disinformation is behind all the fakery.

The government doesn't have to fake UFO evidence. UFO buffs are quite capable of faking the nine-day wonders we've seen so far. If I were a government agent in charge of covering up the truth about UFOs, I'd have the easiest job in the world. I'd do nothing -- absolutely nothing -- and let the UFO buffs spread their rumors and extravagant claims all over the mass media until no one believed anything they heard any longer. That's how you maintain a cover-up: Muddy the waters, and make the truth as absurd as fiction.

The Penthouse pictures aren't even a nine-day wonder. Thanks to the Internet, serious UFO investigators have a wealth of information available from around the world at very short notice. The Penthouse pictures were exposed as fakes almost from the moment they became known. My hope is that those of us who follow the UFO question will get more and more skeptical, for only through critical thinking will we weed out the fakes, frauds, and exploiters who've come to build their names and their bank accounts at our expense.

For more on the Penthouse pictures and their relation to the "Roswell" movie prop, visit UFO World at http://web2.airmail.net/yogi/ufo.html. Users with AOL's web browser installed can access the site by clicking the button on the left. To download your own copies of the controversial Penthouse alien photos, click the button on the right.

(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.