Ant and Dec once starred in a movie called Alien Autopsy, and it’s genuinely really good…
Remember that time Ant and Dec made a movie about staging an alien hoax? Well I did, so we’re going to talk about it.
Alien Autopsy is one of those movies I was convinced I’d partially hallucinated as a kid. Like did I actually see it in the cinema or did I just drink too much Sunny D while watching Saturday Night Takeaway? Also this is going to be full of British pop culture references, you’ve been warned.
It lived in that fuzzy part of childhood memory where obscure British films go to hibernate, next to Thunderpants and whatever Bernard Cribbins VHS your school wheeled out on rainy days. For years I didn’t think much about it, until recently, when I found a second-hand DVD in a charity shop wedged between The Da Vinci Code and Bend It Like Beckham. As soon as I saw Ant and Dec’s faces on the cover – looking oddly proud of something they now seem borderline embarrassed about – I knew I had to pick it up. The disc cost £1.50. Honestly, they could’ve charged me a tenner and I still would’ve bought it. It’s one of those hidden gems that you’ll probably never find on a streaming site, and would even struggle to seek out in the backwaters of the internet.
Rewatching it as an adult, I realized just how perfectly Alien Autopsy captures the bizarre energy of the real life saga it’s based on. And it’s definitely worth touching on what it’s all about. Back in 1995, Ray Santilli claimed he’d acquired grainy black-and-white footage of an alien being dissected after the Roswell crash. As you can imagine, people lost their flipping minds. TV specials treated it like sacred artefacts. VHS copies circulated like forbidden treasures. It was an era where people genuinely gathered around CRT TVs to watch experts argue about whether a prop alien’s knee joint bent too easily. It sounds ridiculous now, and, to be fair, it was ridiculous then, but in a charming way unique to the pre-internet age. If you weren’t alive or conscious during that time, or if (like me as a kid) you only learned about it secondhand, then the movie becomes this weirdly cosy crash course in 90s conspiracy culture: equal parts earnest curiosity, tabloid sensationalism and people with questionable hairstyles trying to sound authoritative about extraterrestrial physiology. Also sexy, sexy Jonathan Frakes.
But the thing that really strikes you on rewatch is just how endearingly small and scrappy the film feels. It takes this global hoax – something that genuinely had people questioning whether we were alone in the universe – and filters it through the eyes of two very ordinary lads in way over their heads. And those lads are, of course, played by Ant and Dec at the height of their mid-2000s ubiquity. As a kid, this felt completely normal. Of course Ant and Dec were the stars. That was the law. They hosted everything from Saturday-night talent shows to children’s TV to whatever PokerFace was. Watching them now, though, adds a whole new layer of fun, especially knowing that they fucking hate it. Although I don’t really know why, it’s genuinely a lot of fun.
And I’d forgotten quite how fun and charmingly innocent it is, never straying into cynical satire. It would’ve been easy to turn Santilli and his mate Gary Shoefield into smug con-men, but instead they’re portrayed as just two blokes with more ambition than foresight, tumbling from mishap to mishap. More Delboy and Rodney than the Krays. The autopsy footage isn’t some master forgery, it’s more like a GCSE art project that got a worldwide audience. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before; a mixture of slapstick and absurdity, but it all feels cosy and wholesome. And through it all, the film treats its characters with real affection. You’re not laughing at them – you’re rooting for them to somehow pull off the bollocks they’ve got themselves into.
But the real Ray Santilli was involved in making the film, and that gives the whole thing a meta flavour that I didn’t fully appreciate as a kid. Knowing this as an adult, it becomes clear that the film isn’t trying to reveal cosmic truths or debunk anything. It’s more like Santilli and the filmmakers are in on the joke together, gently ribbing the fact that the world once fell for a very wobbly alien. It’s an invitation to enjoy the silliness rather than moralise it. There’s an undeniable warmth to that approach, like the film is telling you that it’s okay to have been fooled, because being fooled is part of the fun of being human. Especially for those of us who were kids at the time, and weren’t even aware we were living through one of Britain’s greatest ever mass gullibility experiments.
What surprised me most on the rewatch, though, is how relevant the film feels now. Conspiracy theories used to be fun. I still firmly believe in the Loch Ness monster. There’s no evidence, and if anything it’s been debunked. But it doesn’t hurt anyone for me to believe in it, and it adds some much needed fantasy to the world, so damnit, I’m going to believe Nessie’s swimming around up there.
But now, conspiracy theories aren’t the silly fun they once were. Today’s misinformation spreads faster, hits harder, and usually comes with actual social consequences. Watching Alien Autopsy in 2026 is almost nostalgic; not for aliens or autopsies, but for the time when a hoax could dominate the news cycle without tearing society in half. The movie captures a moment when conspiracy theories were more like ghost stories: fun, slightly spooky, and ultimately harmless. People debated the footage in pubs, not in angry Twitter threads. The film becomes a portal to a gentler kind of gullibility, where the stakes were low and the worst that could happen was buying a dodgy documentary VHS that turned out to be nonsense.
The atmosphere of the mid-2000s also hits differently nowadays. So many of the creative decisions feel wonderfully earnest in a way that modern productions rarely do. Everything’s proper ‘kitchen sink’ in the best possible way. The performances are all-in even when the script veers into the absurd. It’s not ironic; it’s enthusiastic. And maybe that’s what makes it so fun to revisit. As a kid, I loved it because aliens were cool and Ant and Dec were in it. As an adult, I love it because it’s a reminder that filmmaking doesn’t always have to be sleek or self-serious. Sometimes you just need two charismatic Geordie lads, a fake alien, and a story too ridiculous not to tell.
There’s this fascinating double nostalgia when you rewatch it now. On one hand, it’s looking back at the 90s, capturing the chaos of tabloid culture and the peculiar optimism that allowed people to believe an alien corpse could plausibly turn up in someone’s attic. It is at the same time a perfect snapshot of the mid-2000s British film landscape: scrappy, quirky, and deeply unbothered about international box-office prospects. Even the DVD menu (yes, I watched it) feels like an artefact: weird looping music, awkward animation, and those slightly clunky transitions that were the height of DVD technology at the time. It’s all part of the charm. But the real joy of revisiting Alien Autopsy is how it made me feel like a kid again for 90 minutes. There’s something incredibly satisfying about rewatching a film you loved without fully remembering why.
As the scenes unfolded – Ant and Dec bumbling through the hoax, weirdly sexy investors shouting threats, scientists squinting suspiciously at footage that looks like it was filmed on a Fisher-Price camera – I found myself laughing at jokes I didn’t know I’d forgotten. The whole experience becomes a kind of cinematic comfort food: warm, silly and deeply familiar even when the details are fuzzy. And the best part? The film absolutely holds up. Not in the sense that it’s secretly a masterpiece (no one’s pretending it is) but in the sense that it knows exactly what it’s trying to be and nails it. It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s earnest, and it has Ant and Dec delivering lines with the exact same rhythm they’d use to introduce a celebrity on Saturday Night Takeaway. Even if they now treat it as a running joke in their presenting career, as if starring in a film about a fake alien autopsy is their version of an embarrassing high-school yearbook photo, their charm still shines through.
It’s a wonderfully odd slice of British pop-culture history, told with warmth and mischief and just enough absurdity to keep you grinning from the first scene to the last. So if you ever stumble upon a copy of Alien Autopsy in a second-hand shop, do yourself a favour and give it another go. Or watch it for the first time if you’ve never seen it.
Oh also Harry Dean Stanton’s in it. Chef’s kiss.
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
