Alien Autopsy Part III: Two famous Roman coroners view the footage

This report is released here for the first time ever (except Italy).

In October 1995, I organized a private viewing of the Santilli Footage with two Italian leading autopsy technicians, Cesare (now deceased) and Massimo Signoracci. In fact, four generations of the Signoracci family have worked at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Rome and their experience is beyond question.

Of the two technicians, the youngest, Massimo, had already seen the material.  He felt the being in the film was neither human nor a dummy.  This reflects the opinion of Pierluigi Baima Bollone, a professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Turin. The autopsy they viewed is the one released officially by Ray Santilli and broadcast in the documentary “The Roswell Incident,” produced by Union Pictures for the British television network Channel Four, which is of excellent quality.

Upon their initial examination, according to the Italian technicians, the body revealed obvious abnormalities: the evident swelling of the abdomen, the sagittal fissure, a deep laceration to the left leg with clean, hard edges, and the apparent absence of a bone structure in the thigh where there seems to be a joint. The lack of tissue suggests a major burn, or carbonization, or hemorrhagic lesion. This is a transcript of their comments during the viewing.

Massimo Signoracci, M.S.: The table looks like the type used at the time, perhaps made of metal. From the images it is not easy to establish rigor mortis. Stiffness in a person appears in the second or third hour after death.  It starts from the head, the jaw, the caudal region of skull, and moves down to the small joints and then the large joints. Rigor mortis is present from the third hour onwards, until the forty-eighth hour, when it consolidates well. We usually operate after 24 hours. It looks like a female subject. It’s strange.

Cesare Signoracci, C.S.: They are taking tissue from the wound for analysis.

M.S.: I had not noticed the smaller wound, high on the thigh. There is another hole.

C.S.: The white parts appear to be extraneous metal fragments.  We find these in the X-Rays plates on the gun shots wounds, the reflection shows the metal, bone does not stand out in this manner.

M.S.: To me, they appear to be swollen parts that reflect light.

C.S.: It’s a pretty deep wound, it is strange that it does not off-set the bone. The markings of the under jugular part stand higher up the grooves.  If this body is a fake, it’s done very well.

M.S.: He is making a cut from the mastoid region to the region of the neck, doing a semi-circle and then going the other way. The blood comes out profusely. I’ve never seen that before. What does it mean?

C.S.: With an injury of that extent on the thigh, there must have been severe hemorrhaging. It may be that this autopsy was performed immediately after death, because the blood coagulates in the cadaver. In this case, the blood loss due to the injury on the thigh, on the femur, must have been strong, plus the subject is not a big size. With such an incision, this sort of bleeding is not seen even during a surgical operation.

M.S.: One would think that if the person died of bleeding, of course, when you cut on the head there would be blood, but there isn’t any and there should be. When we execute a cut on the mastoid region, blood is not there. The hypostasis tends to converge at the rear of the body.

C.S.: How many hours after death did they say that this autopsy was done, roughly?

M.S.: That’s what we need to figure out.

C.S.: The bureaucratic procedure usually…

M.S.: Forget red tape. This thing was in the hands of soldiers who must perform their duty.

C.S.: Yes, but there are times when jurisdiction changes from one group to another before getting authorization for an autopsy. Now the surgeon performs the ventral cut, he should divert to avoid the navel, but he does not.

M.S.: Taking off the skin of the sternum region, look how hard it is, you see the rib cage…

C.S.: A diminutive rib cage, however.

M.S.: I can not recognize the ribs, it’s a problem with film, some images are not clear… here are the arches of the ribs, then this organ that protrudes at the center here.

C.S.: What do you think?

M.S.: I do not know. This is an organ that seems to be in the area of the liver. Watch out for a liver! What kind of liver is that?

C.S.: I do not know. And the leakage of blood in this bi-mastoid cut is already excessive, let alone when they cut lower down, and it’s a lot of blood coming out.

Up to now I have to believe that this is a real thing, it is a reality. But I wonder why this was done? Can we go on?

M.S.: These two black tubes protruding here, I do not understand what they are. They opened the chest, it’s strange, the peritoneum is rigid, if there is a muscle under the skin, the skin should also be folded sag…

C.S.: The skin flap was folded, as we normally do to give a better view to explore the thorax/abdominal section, but the black and white images do not allow us to distinguish the organs, it is a dark mass. What is the surgeon doing now?

M.S.: He operates in the central area, theoretically at the heart, that is a sort of central organ in the chest, and now he is pulling something, a strange material, indefinable, but it is hard and perhaps clear, I do not know if it is crystalloid. It looks like a triangle, not stuck outside because there are no wounds in this area. And here they seem to have cut the aorta.

C.S.: You see that is a big cable.

M.S.: It does not go up, it is folded down and now the surgeon has taken hold of the heart, perhaps.

C.S.: Anatomically, it should be.

M.S.: The aortic arch is rather small; it could be linked to a narrowing of the aortic arch. I would understand. This could be… a lung? Here he has already checked everything. I do not see the intestines. You recognize them?

C.S.: No, it lacks the intestinal mass.

M.S.: I did not notice the leakage of blood from the nose. Now he immediately proceeds with the bi-mastoid cut. In an individual who has suffered a trauma, blood comes out of the head. Do you remember this type of rectangular saw? It’s wide.

C.S.: Yes, it is like that roughly, it is certainly an old anatomical saw.

M.S.: The skull cap was removed and there is a kind of “dura mater” (brain membrane). This image shows that there has been, it seems, bleeding under the skin. But perhaps it is a prevalence of black on the background of the photograph. If it is, we call it “bleeding cake”.

(The following conversation is after the viewing of the film.)

M.S.: During the first broadcast [of the Italian TV show] “Misteri”, Professor Baima Bollone said that he had identified a gynecological instrument, maybe a kind of Klemmer pliers. I believe the table is sheet metal.

C.S.: We had marble tables in the old Rome City Morgue, and a big basin for washing the corpses, but the anatomical plates were made of metal. The table you see is normal. As for the deformities present in this being, the six fingers, etc. these sorts of deformities happen, but never six digits on all four limbs, although perhaps this is a macrocephalic [having a head with a large cranial capacity] or hydrocephalus [accumulation of serous within the cranium often causing enlargement of the head]  subject. It is not important to define whether the person doing this autopsy is a surgeon or an anatomical pathologist, given the nature of specialization, because with a scalpel in hand, you can either do surgery or autopsy.

M.S.: Usually I do not use scalpels, but an anatomical knife called “Marchiafava” that has existed for 200 years. But we can also use a relatively small scalpel. We operate according to the needs of the moment. The “Marchiafava” is very flexible, you can cut, low-cut, and so on.

C.S.: Here they use the classic old metal lancet, long handle. However one thing is certain. Massimo had told me about this footage, I saw something on TV and some photographs and I was skeptical, but now I am not sure. I’m more inclined to say this is real. I wonder what the purpose of this autopsy was when the film was made.

M.S.: When the flap of skin around the neck is lifted and is bent on his face, if you notice, usually the organs of the neck should be here, higher up. You do this cut and turn the skin to expose a lot more. It is a matter of anatomical topography. Why would they have not laid it all out? Here the arch rib, the sternum handler, and these two tubes at the sternum cledo-mastoid are similar to humans. But here the technique is wrong. The procedure is not clear. Because usually you examine a body from top to bottom, analyzing the organs of the neck to the sternum plastron in order to highlight the entire apparatus. Perhaps it was done at a later time, but in terms of an autopsy it should have been better observed.

C.S.: This was an autopsy at the time.

M.S.: But when your grandfather executed the autopsies was that not so?

C.S.: It’s been 50 years. The technique is different in many ways. Moreover, we do not have a full field of view, we have to make a determination with just the available images. Who says that’s the heart and those are the lungs? This being had a heart? The surgical instruments still look a bit different from those of today.

M.S.: There is an anatomic hammer, a chisel and these are two small double-blade razors. There is the removal of the eye membranes.

C.S.: It’s a dark substance that was applied so as not to distort the eyeball? Certainly he went a bit too fast. He is going much slower now in executing the scalp.

M.S.: He has some issue in dissecting the skull.

C.S.: They seem to be dealing with something they do not understand, a very special case. Whatever the cause of death, it was obviously traumatic. Then the organs were removed, apparently they were placed in a freezer afterward.

M.S.: They didn’t even cut them for analysis.

C.S.: No, these doctors could not cut the organs, just keep them intact to study later. They certainly have taken fluids and small parts of the body.

M.S.: But for a histological examination don’t you immediately remove some samples?

C.S.: Here you have to go thorough a full autopsy. Remember that the Americans created formaldehyde. You can’t put the blood in formalin, but you do that with organs and supposedly that’s what they have done here. These were the people who performed the autopsy, but somewhere else there are people ready to study the organs. There is another issue, the surgeon in the resection of the skull cuts way too deep, he may have damaged the brain.

M.S.: You see the two hemispheres of the brain, with the lobes divided by the sagittal line, where the dura mater passes.

C.S.: He pulled awkwardly, the two occipital lobes have been torn, you notice white patches, maybe they are injuries and this is the residue of the cerebellum. But I want to return to the possible causes of death. Judging from the level of injury on the leg, I gather there was an explosion outside the object that they were in. From the inside there would have been loose burning metal fragments that caused the very deep wound with the burn. Two possible causes of death: a head injury, given the bruising on the left temporal region, and the injury to the right thigh. We should be able to determine the body temperature.

M.S.: The skull does not seem broken, maybe it was protected by a helmet [the computer thermo graphic investigations of Dr. Corrado Malanga, Chemistry, University of Pisa, had highlighted the possibility that during the undressing of the body a helmet or cap was removed from the head].

C.S.: And who says so, maybe not. Depends on the efficiency of the individual.

M.S.:  I think that the autopsy report from the pathologist in Sheffield is worth very little, it is far too simplistic.

C.S.: As for my opinion, in keeping with that of other pathologists, I am in favor of the hypothesis that it is not a human being, in the order of 70 percent. What I do not think is that it is a human being in the autopsy. As far as the tent footage, I do not know: they seem to perform some odd resuscitation maneuvers.

M.S.: I rule out that the body is a dummy.

C.S.: We worked with movie directors like Dario Argento and Luigi Zampa, creating cinematic tricks for many years. Here we do not have any technical problem in reenacting the scene on stage. If this is fiction, who created this monster? Honestly, I saw something that leaves me very puzzled. I am among those who taught the craft to Massimo. He is very good, and is also able to reconstruct a destroyed and maimed body. But what you see in this film is not the same thing. Finally, I can say that if it was a real autopsy, the body is certainly being reassembled and preserved together with the removed organs. Who knows where.