Alien Autopsy is the name given to about 17 minutes of grainy black-and-white film released in 1995 by British entrepreneur Ray Santilli and presented as footage of government pathologists dissecting a creature recovered after the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico. Santilli said he had obtained it from a retired military cameraman he met while seeking archive footage of Elvis Presley. Its broadcast and its makers' later admission made it one of the best-known hoaxes in UFO history.

Fox broadcast the film on August 28, 1995, in the special Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, hosted by Jonathan Frakes, and aired it twice more; TIME later reported that one screening drew 11.7 million viewers. Channel 4 showed it in Britain, and it aired around the world. In the Sky One documentary Eamonn Investigates: Alien Autopsy, first shown on April 4, 2006, Santilli and his co-producer Gary Shoefield admitted that they had staged the footage in a flat in Camden Town, London. Sculptor John Humphreys made the dummy bodies and played the chief examiner, and a man recruited in Los Angeles posed as the cameraman. Santilli maintained that the result was a "restoration" of genuine footage he said he had seen in 1992 and that had deteriorated before he could buy it, and he has continued to insist that a real film existed.

No trace of that original film has been produced. In 2018 magician and filmmaker Spyros Melaris told The Sun that he had led the team that made the footage. In 2025 he sued Mindhouse Productions, the company of journalist Louis Theroux, alleging that its forthcoming Sky documentary pushed a false narrative and that he owned the copyright in the 1995 film. In 2026 Judge Hacon of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ruled that there was "no prospect" Melaris would succeed in his copyright claim at trial.

The 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy, directed by Jonny Campbell for Warner Bros., cast Declan Donnelly and Anthony McPartlin as Santilli and Shoefield and retold how the pair staged it. In June 2026 Sky released The Alien Autopsy Scandal, a three-part series directed by John Dower for Mindhouse, in the same week as Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. That July, writer and producer Bryce Zabel contrasted the 1995 film with The McPherson Tape, a work of fiction that many viewers mistook for fact. Three decades after its broadcast, the film is still cited in arguments over crash-retrieval claims and over how far filmed evidence can be trusted.