ALIEN AUTOPSY: FACT OR FICTION?
ALIEN AUTOPSY: FACT OR FICTION? (a title that desperately needs an exclamation mark immediately after its question mark) was a jaunt down memory lane to the mid-‘90s — a time defined by paranoid conspiracy theories, scandalous yellow journalism, and a not-too plump Jonathan Frakes.
I’m not sure what the point of this show is, other than to exploit a moment when Fox was hitting its stride with THE X-FILES. There’s barely anything going on in it, other than the same 45 seconds of footage looped over and over again, and some talking heads either declaring the authenticity or the fakery of it (with a heavy leaning into the authenticity).
Narratively, this thing sucks. The producers spend a lot of time and resources on finding the footage’s elusive original cameraman, even dragging in that peacock of a private investigator William Dear, before dropping sweeping the subject altogether under the carpet. Which is par for the course in its 45-minute runtime. A lot of questions are being asked, with apparently no answers to them: is this thing a deformed human or a elaborate prop? And if it is a fake body, how’d they pull off something that even creature designer extraordinaire Stan Winston is baffled by? Why are there no records of this thing or the Roswell crash in the national archives? Are aliens among us? Is the government covering it up?
Or perhaps the more burning question of all: why the fuck am I watching this in the first place?
