Sky Documentaries Slates Extraterrestrial Series

Sky Documentaries has ordered Alien Autopsy (w.t.), a new original docuseries from director John Dower (My Scientology Movie, Lockerbie) and Mindhouse.

“The ’90s were the golden age of UFO fever—before smartphones, before streaming—when grainy footage, The X-Files and Roswell ruled the headlines,” said Hayley Reynolds, acting director of documentaries and factual at Sky. “The alien autopsy remains one of the most debated mysteries of the 20th century, and with UFOs once again sparking debate in governments around the world, we’re thrilled to reunite with John Dower, who helmed our BAFTA-winning documentary series Lockerbie and the talented team at Mindhouse as they set out to uncover the truth.”

In 1995, 18 minutes of grainy film shocked the world—so-called “alien autopsy” footage appeared to show three government officials in hazmat suits dissecting the corpse of an alien recovered from a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

This docuseries follows the members of an ambitious group of filmmakers who found themselves at the center of an unprecedented media storm after re-creating a landmark alien encounter in a North London apartment.

“Over a decade after the eerie black-and-white footage of an alien autopsy was released in the mid 90s and affected many in a similar way to The Blair Witch Project, the film was revealed to have been produced in a small flat in Camden, North London, and not in the New Mexico Desert of Roswell,” said Dower. “With its makers describing it as ‘a restoration,’ it is still possible that it’s based on original frames from an existing post-war film. I’ve directed some bonkers documentaries in my time, but never one in which it is so difficult to work out what is real and what isn’t.”

Arron Fellows, creative director at Mindhouse, added, “It’s incredible that the alien autopsy story has never been told in a premium documentary before, and we’re thrilled to be working with John Dower at Mindhouse again, after his success with Lockerbie. We look forward to him bringing the same storytelling craft and journalistic rigor to a tale that is as provocative now as it was in the 90s—and taps into our timeless fascination with extraterrestrial life.”