Dr. Uthman's Prognosis Dr. Page Hudson was Chief Medical Examiner of the state of North Carolina for eighteen years. He received his M.D. from the Medical College of Virginia, located in Richmond. After spending four years on the faculty at his alma mater, he served two years (1958-59) as an Air Force medical officer, performing general medical duties as well as pathology and surgical pathology while stationed at Tachikawa, Japan. (Surgical pathology is the analysis of tissue taken from a patient during surgery -- biopsies and so on.) Following his Air Force stint, Dr. Hudson finished his residency at Johns Hopkins and at Kingman County (New York) Hospital, which is affiliated with the State University of New York. At SUNY Dr. Hudson again specialized in surgical pathology. He received advanced training in forensic pathology during a fellowship at Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine. In 1968 Dr. Hudson was recruited to become the state medical examiner for North Carolina. In the course of the next eighteen years he personally performed 4,000 autopsies, and assisted in or directed another 4,000. By the time he retired in 1986 his office was responsible for 7,500 to 8,000 autopsies a year, including 600 suicides and 800 homicides per annum. Upon retirement Dr. Hudson accepted a post at East Carolina University, in Greenville, N.C., as professor of pathology. Four and half years later he retired as an emeritus professor. Dr. Hudson remains a sought-after consultant on forensic matters and often testifies as an expert witness in court. I met Dr. Hudson a few years ago at a writers' conference in Raleigh, N.C., where he was giving a lecture to mystery writers on how forensic pathology assists criminal investigations. We had lunch together, and discussed many fascinating things, from notorious murder trials to spontaneous human combustion. (For the record, Dr. Hudson doesn't think there's anything to SHC, but he remains open minded on the subject.) Clearly Dr. Hudson would be a valuable man to consult regarding the alien autopsy film. I arranged for him to view the home video version of the Fox TV show "Alien Autopsy -- Fact or Fiction?" and relate to me his opinion of the scene, the people, and the body shown in the film. As other forensic professionals have noted, the operating room struck Dr. Hudson as quite bare and spartan, but that alone was not suggestive of fraud. Dr. Hudson said some facilities maintain similar small rooms as "dirty" rooms, where potentially dangerous procedures can be carried out. "Hot" cadavers -- such as those dosed with high levels of radiation or infected with AIDS -- are examined in dirty rooms so that the larger facilities won't be contaminated. Such rooms have only minimal equipment (to minimize contamination) and are often in isolated wings of the hospital. The surgical instruments were standard and appropriate, too, with one notable exception. The handsaw used to open the "alien's" skull was very out of place. Dr. Hudson's medical career began in the early 1950s, not long after the film was allegedly made, yet he said electric saws were universal in autopsy rooms then, and had been for some time. This is the same type of saw used by orthopedists to remove plaster casts. It uses an oscillating blade that will not cut unless pressure is applied to the handle. Thus the saw cuts through hard bone (or plaster) but will stop cutting when soft tissue is reached. The only place Dr. Hudson has ever seen a handsaw being used in an autopsy was in Bangkok, Thailand. I asked Dr. Hudson if it would be hard to find surgical implements if one were staging a fake autopsy. He said no; any supply house will sell you scalpels, hemostats, clamps, and probes. The design of surgical tools has not changed very much in the last half century; most of the advance in basic instruments has been in the form of new materials -- plastics, composites, disposable sterile blades. Stainless steel instruments are still widely used, however, and are not hard to obtain. But when Dr. Hudson critiqued the film doctor's technique, a surprising fact surfaced: the incisions made by the prosector in the alien autopsy show that he was European. American pathologists always have to consider that the bodies they examine will eventually be embalmed and shown at a funeral. As a result, American pathologists have evolved a style that does not disfigure the corpse, assuming the body will be dressed later by the mortician. American medical examiners make a Y shaped incision, beginning at each shoulder. The two cuts converge and meet at the bottom of the breastbone. From there a single incision is made down the stomach. European pathologists don't do this. Embalming is far less common in Europe than America, and open-coffin funerals are almost unknown. The incision pattern of a European doctor is T shaped; a horizontal cut is made along the collar bone, or slightly above, and a long perpendicular incision goes down the breastbone to the abdomen -- exactly as the "American" army doctor does in the autopsy film. The long parallel cuts made by the film prosector down the sides of the "alien's" neck are also indicative of European technique, part of a later procedure that allows the doctor to remove the skin from the neck and face. Dr. Hudson said, "I've never seen anyone [American] make an incision like that. I've seen diagrams of it in Europeans texts." It might be countered that the prosector in the Santilli film knew his subject wasn't going to be embalmed or presented to grieving relatives at a funeral, but the fact remains that the style of cutting is not typical of what an American medical man would have learned -- and it is illustrative of a European doctor's method. Dr. Hudson extended Dr. Uthman's remarks about the use of a body block. "I didn't see one," Dr. Hudson said. "In this country a head block, or body block, usually starts out under the back to make the body arch. A block is nearly always used. In some parts of the country autopsies are done in funeral homes. Even there the funeral directors have a virtually identical type block. I think that's where they originated." What of the table shown in the film? Was it a typical autopsy table? "It was hard for me to evaluate the table," Dr. Hudson said. "The traditional autopsy table, the older style in this country and quite a few I've seen in Great Britain -- the older ones -- were very simple, and I never thought at all adequate. They were big rectangles with a shallow trench maybe an inch deep and an inch in from the edge, with a single drain hole at one end." This description is totally at odds with the table in the Santilli film, which looks like a wooden table with some kind of covering nailed in place on the top (nail heads are visible between the body's legs). Dr. Hudson disagreed with Dr. Uthman's observation about how pathologists hold and use scissors. "I've never seen that done," Dr. Hudson said. "There may be surgeons who do that in the operating room, but I don't recall doing that." Dr. Hudson was puzzled by the total-coverage decontamination suits. "I don't think I've ever seen anything even close to them," he said. "I don't know where they dug those up! I've seen autopsies on contaminated bodies, bodies that were suspected of carrying a lot of radiation, bodies in which there was live ammunition, even a small rocket buried in one of them... I've seen various kinds of special protective gear used, most of it pretty doggone makeshift. That's what I would expect to see in the '40s. Nowadays, particularly in the past ten years (mostly generated by AIDS anxiety -- AIDS is really a bete noir), there have been a lot of closed gowns in use. [But] that sort of thing in the '40s? Hardly." Dr. Hudson agreed that the hooded suits in the film were convenient for obscuring the faces of those involved. Who, then, were the two gowned figures? Did they behave like real doctors? "It looked to me like one of those two was probably a physician, maybe a pathologist, maybe a surgeon," Dr. Hudson said. "The other one, I think, is strictly an assistant. That would be fairly typical. If I were to do an autopsy tomorrow I would expect to have an experienced technician to work with me." Dr. Hudson thought the prosector was a medical man because "he looked reasonably comfortable with a knife, but he was very mincing with it. He used very short strokes... it's usually easier, cleaner, and simpler to take long strokes. It made me think he was a surgeon. Surgeons, of necessity, cut that way, as opposed to long cuts." Is it feasible, I wondered, for an actor to be trained to behave this way in a short time? Dr. Hudson agreed it was possible, and added, "You could get a lab tech or an autopsy room assistant," and have them play the role of pathologist as well. What did Dr. Hudson think of the third person watching the procedure through the window? "The fact he was there didn't surprise me. If anything, I would expect to see two or three people observing. I saw no reason for the person to be gowned and masked." Upon reflection Dr. Hudson continued, "It could be (if it were real) that they wanted a 'runner' of some sort. This would be the person, if they needed some solution or piece of equipment, this would be someone they could call on to bring it into the contaminated room." Dr. Hudson had mixed opinions about the way the "alien's" organs were handled. "That struck me as a little odd, but again it made me think of the stripped room, a contamination room, where they might not have had any more equipment than they needed. It was something to wonder about, but if I tried I could explain it away; they took things to the next room where they did have scales [to weigh the organs]. It is hard to shoot pictures of an autopsy room without showing the dissecting area, that is, a little elevated table where the organs are put for further dissection, for really opening them up and exploring the blood vessels and channels." What did Dr. Hudson think of the cameraman's technique? [Laughs] "Oh jeez... well, he certainly had no experience of autopsies. He found it terribly hard to stay out of the way. I've seen so many ill-trained people taking pictures in an autopsy room (typically law enforcement people), who are experienced with a camera but not in the autopsy room. I wondered most when the head was being opened. It was almost as if the photographer was hiding behind the person who was opening the head. I don't know why we never get a better view of the head." Dr. Hudson was surprised that there was no still photographer present, but did not find it odd the procedure was filmed without sound. "[Sound] wasn't much used in the '40s," he said. When I asked Dr. Hudson for his impressions of the body, he laughed and said, "I certainly can't explain everything I saw, but you've got a large, gaping, crater-like defect in the right thigh, with a lot of changes in the soft tissues around that. That darkish coloration around the crater is -- I don't know if we're looking at infection, or what. It's just excavated. It does not appear simply traumatic. It did not look like anything I've ever seen before in an airplane crash, an automobile crash... it looked to me like the left thigh would have looked the same in a couple more days. Something was going on in the left thigh. It was about to give up or break down." I reminded him of the cameraman's story about the crashed UFO. Did the damaged leg look like an impact wound? "No," Dr. Hudson said, "[and] I couldn't tell if there were fractures or not." Dr. Hudson did not believe he was looking at the body of an extraterrestrial. "I don't believe in ghosts or aliens," he said wryly. When I asked him to comment on the stranger features of the body, he fell back on his medical knowledge. Most of the MDs who have commented on the Santilli film have couched their answers in terms that suggest they think the body is a body, not a manufactured theatrical prop. What about the unnatural number of fingers and toes? "I give up on that altogether. I've never seen such a well developed case of polydactyly. I've seen my share of folks with six fingers, but they're usually rudimentary or vestigial; they're not really fingers. I've never seen one that approached being as well formed as this. If that was fudged -- and I assume it was -- I don't know anything about how it was done. It may have been started with someone who actually had twelve toes and twelve fingers." Pursuing the altered-corpse theory, Dr. Hudson continued: "I wondered if this wasn't a person, a doctored body who had a pretty severe infection. What we were seeing in the abdomen was partly organizing pus. That was peritonitis; peritonitis can easily obscure the organs. It would give them the appearance of what we were seeing... a coating of pus or fibrin would involve the omentum and mesentery, which are large membranes, and gloss them over with pus. The organs would be covered over, at least from the front, and would lose their individual identity. "The head looks oversized, but I'd carry on my infection notion. When they started opening it, it looked like the soft tissues, particularly between the skin and the bone, were thick and looked different... fibrin is a blood protein that's involved in coagulation. When there's an injury, fibrin is released and [the "alien" body] really looks like someone who had developed a tremendous infection under their scalp, so that it covered the whole cranium. [An infection] would give that rough, formless appearance and increase the thickness [of the skin]. Before the skin of the head is opened, the head would look enlarged because of the increase in material between the skin and the bone." What about the infamous black membranes over the eyes? "[Laughs] I have no idea what that was about." But Dr. Hudson noted that both eye membranes would not have been put in the same bowl, because it would be impossible to later determine which eye each was removed from. Beneath the oval lenses were seemingly human white eyes, rolled back. "It's unusual to see eyes that are rolled back," Dr. Hudson said. Was the body in the film an altered human corpse, designed to resemble the big-headed, big-eyed alien 'grays' so common in UFO lore? "I lean in that direction, yes," he said. "Even with today's technology it would be pretty tough to create from plastic, whatnot, or non-human material anything that would look that good. I've been playing with the idea that they had someone who, either because of radiation exposure or whatever reason, died of an overwhelming infection. Radiation wipes out the bone marrow. People exposed to heavy radiation usually die of infections. They're very susceptible." Any other general impressions about the body? "I thought at some angles the neck didn't really look human," Dr. Hudson said, "that and the number of fingers and the breastless chest. Absence of body hair makes me think of radiation exposure [again]." Dr. Hudson thought it was unlikely that the body had been shaved. "The only thing you'd shave for in an autopsy is to expose wounds, wounds in the head where hair might obscure the fine detail of the wound." If the corpse was human, Dr. Hudson said that the leg injury would have certainly been life-threatening, but he noted no other signs of trauma, "with the possible exception of the right thigh. I really don't think that right thigh [wound] was traumatic." The cameraman's story implied that the aliens had a different atmosphere than ours, but Dr. Hudson did not notice any external signs of asphyxiation or pressure damage on this body. To sum up, I asked Dr. Hudson his general opinion of the whole alien autopsy affair. He was, in a certain sense, puzzled by the film. Dr. Hudson has no interest in UFOs and is so innocent of the lore of flying saucers that at one point he asked me if UFOs were reported anywhere but in the United States. I assured him there were reports from every corner of the globe. "Well, I wonder why anyone would [film a hoax]," Dr. Hudson said. "What motivated them to want to do this? I think somehow they had a running start, a peculiar looking body that they may have helped to look 'alien.' By really capturing the imagination of some people it became a little game, a hobby, to confuse the news media." "I don't know what is so discomfiting about this film," Dr. Hudson concluded. "It just doesn't hold up. Talking about the combination of how the people [in the film] act or don't act, what the corpse is like, what is seen or not seen -- I feel like it's telling me something, only I don't know what. I feel I ought to get more out of it. "It all has a touch of reality, but it also has a touch of unreality, [of] needing explanation, needing an excuse for it to be the way it is." (c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc. Abra Cadaver Index What do you think? Tell us in the message boards!