Dr. Uthman's Prognosis Though anatomists have been dissecting the dead for centuries, the science of forensic pathology is little more than a hundred years old. The main purposes of pathology are scientific and social; it serves science by expanding our understanding of the processes of the body in life and in death, and it serves society by uncovering the truth about the causes of death. Medical doctors learn much of their art from studying the lifeless body, much as archeologists learn about the architecture of the ancients by studying their ruined buildings. As with most branches of science, more advances have been made in the past thirty years than all the previous centuries together. In the first seventy-five years of the modern era of forensic pathology, most work was done on the gross level -- dissecting organs, making chemical tests on tissues and body fluids. Today investigations can be conducted on the most minute levels, right down to the DNA itself. Much of this ultra-detailed work does not even require a scalpel, relying instead on imaging systems using ultrasonic waves, atomic particles, and advanced X-ray techniques. The state of the forensic art was not as sophisticated in the 1940s. World War II provided an unhappy wealth of corpses to study, and the catalog of death grew larger as new weapons were added to the world's arsenals. Even so, the level of detail available to pathologists of the later 1940s was not significantly greater than it had been ten or twenty years before. Ray Santilli's "alien autopsy" film immediately came under the scrutiny of medical professionals. One of the first and best equipped to analyze the UFOlogical aspects was Dr. Joachim Koch, a general surgeon practicing in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, who firmly believes in the possibility of alien visitors. Dr. Koch is a leading member of the International Roswell Initiative, a grassroots organization dedicated to bringing out the truth about the original Roswell Incident. His comments were posted on Usenet on August 12, 1995. Dr. Koch has been working at a seven hundred bed hospital in Germany for the past nineteen years. As a medical student and surgeon he has attended his share of autopsies, an experience he says still moves him. His first objection to the Santilli film was a personal one. Assuming the body was not a prop, its exploitation, whether extraterrestrial or not, offended Dr. Koch. Dr. Koch compared the Santilli alien to descriptions given by various Roswell witnesses and noted a number of discrepancies between them. Glenn Dennis, a mortician in Roswell, was informed about the autopsies of the recovered alien corpses by a mysterious nurse he claimed to know, who worked at the air base hospital. She told Dennis the dead aliens had four fingers on each hand, not six. Other Roswell witnesses have noted this difference in digits. Moreover, if autopsies were done at Roswell Army Air Field, it is unlikely that they would be conducted again at Fort Worth, as Santilli's cameraman alleges. If the procedure at Roswell was merely preliminary, the corpses in the Santilli film would show signs of an earlier medical examination. Dr. Koch noted that preliminary or gross autopsies are usually done in a rough, cursory manner. Corpses are opened, examined, then stitched back up for transferal to some better equipped facility. The bodies in the Santilli film show no signs of earlier attention. Someone -- either the film or the Roswell witnesses -- is wrong. The protective suits worn by the personnel in the film struck Dr. Koch as wrong. They could not be anti-radiation suits, because earlier tent footage from the Santilli reels shows bodies being worked over by men not in total body suits. Presumably Army technicians would be aware of the danger of radiation from the outset and would have checked for it. Major Marcel indicated that no residual radiation was found at the site of the Roswell crash. Had the men in the film required protection from unknown bacteria or noxious odors, the hooded suits they wore would not have provided either safeguard. Respirators, masks, and gloves would have been used, and the suited dissectors are plainly not wearing respirators (in some scenes the tops of their hoods can be clearly seen billowing in and out as they breathe). Dr. Koch's conclusion is that the suits have but one undeniable purpose -- to obscure the faces of the men in the film. It is worth remembering that in all the other sequences of the Santilli film shown on Fox TV, not one recognizable face is ever shown. This is all the more remarkable (and damning) when you consider that these reels of film are meant to be outtakes. It would actually take careful preparation to shoot so many minutes of film and not get anyone's face on camera. Dr. Koch also supports the view that so momentous an event as an alien autopsy would have been attended by a much larger group of observers. Even under conditions of strict secrecy, many scientists should have been present. Compare the vacant autopsy room to the scene at Trinity Site when the first atomic bomb was detonated. Scores of witnesses were on hand for the historic, top secret event. In the Santilli film there is one observer: the masked man at the window. Considering the corpse itself, Dr. Koch points out there are thirty-four syndromes in which polydactylism of the hands occur, and thirty-six syndromes that can cause a person to have more than ten toes. There are specifically twelve syndromes that feature hexadactylism (six digits) of the hands and a further thirteen that can affect the feet. One form of genetic defect described by Dr. Koch is "C-Syndrome," or Opitz trigonocephaly syndrome. C-Syndrome is characterized by an oversized head, widely spaced eyes in deep sockets, a wide, flat nose, mongoloid shaped eyelids, little or no body hair, low placement of the ears (which are often also abnormally small), and underdeveloped jaw, and polydactylism. This sounds quite like the body in the Santilli film, although C-Syndrome cases tend to die in infancy. It is apparent from Dr. Koch's remarks that he thinks the body in the alleged alien autopsy film to be human, possibly with rare genetic defects. He recalled that in his student days it was possible to bribe the attendants in the dissection lab for extra time with a corpse. Might it not be, he wondered, that some students made the "alien" autopsy film as a prank, or as a way to make some cash on the side? Next: Dr. Hudson's Post Mortem Abra Cadaver Index What do you think? Tell us in the message boards!