ET Interview: Video of Grey Alien Interview Smuggled from Area 51, page 5

I saw the Alien Interview documentary some years back and was impressed by its creepiness.

I can't say that I'm convinced one way or the other about the authenticity of the events depicted, but I was puzzled by the response given by one of the experts interviewed. He was a puppeteer—or at least had worked heavily with puppets for film. I can't remember his name or who he worked for (Jim Henson comes to mind), but he had this funny reaction to something on the video as he was watching it.

Anyone who has seen the documentary will recall that the experts watched the video as they were interviewed. This puppet expert is saying that, yes, it's definately a puppet, it's well done, but...yada, yada, yada. Then at one point, as he's explaining something about its puppet-like features, he suddenly pauses for a second, furrows his brow and blinks. He's obviously puzzled or intrigued by something he just saw on the film. Unfortunately, the viewing audience doesn't see what he's reacting to. After that bit of pause, he continues with what he's saying, but in a hesitant fashion.

Of all the so-called experts interviewed for that documentary, he is the one whose opinion I most valued. Why? Because, if the thing is a puppet or animated robot (a la Disney animatronics), then this is the guy who could best make that judgement. The other experts were either raging skeptics who offhandedly dismiss any type of photographic evidence as nonevidence, or were true believers who will accept anything put in front of them as long as it supported their own claims. They were experts on issues which cannot do more than claim that the film was not created using iMovie. Other experts could not address the issue of provenance except by proclamations unsupported by direct evidence. Still others could only point to features in the scene and say yes, that is a monitor of some kind, and yes, one guy seems to be wearing a military uniform, and so on. Any film student could have put that thing together using a storeroom in the basement of their college theatre. A little research and the right props, a couple of willing actor friends, and there you have it—a genuine piece of film with real events taking place in it. Real in the sense that the camera is recording live action, and genuine in the sense that there's no virtual creations or processing tricks. Given this, the opinions of experts in film technology, provenance, the military, or what have you are fairly useless, for any element thay might point to can be replicated on a sound stage using ordinary film or video. The only useful expert interviewed is the puppeteer, for only he was qualified to assess the nature of the creature being depicted.

And he faltered while making that assessment.

That hesitancy is what caught my attention, and what causes me to set aside my decision about the authenticity of the film. To make that decision, I would need further evidence one way or another. All I can say for sure is that the puppeteer's pause has given me pause.

Oh, and one other observation: Yes, there were certain things about the creature that were puppety, but what I found very inetresting were the eyes. When you watch them carefully, they shimmer like living eyes. That's something that is very difficult to do with puppets, which always have a dead, flat, glassy appearance to their eyes. That deadness is the thing that makes puppets so unbelievable for me, so matter how well articulated or operated thay might be. If that is a puppet, I'd like to know how the eye shimmer was achieved.

Thank you.