Dissecting Aliens, Imagining Futures. Rethinking the 1995 Roswell Autopsy Video Hoax

Abstract

This paper draws on De Martino’s notion of cultural apocalypses to address the global circulation of the 1995 Roswell alleged Alien Autopsy video and its truth-claim as a hoax. Framing Science Fiction and Ufology as discourses connected to anxieties about exobiology, post-contact anomie, and genetic engineering, the paper focuses on the Roswell video to discuss Ufology’s ambition to achieve scientific authority and its distrust of power and institutions. Focusing on the screening of the hoax on Italian national television and offering an autoethnography of the author’s role in a local «teen Ufology» group during the Nineties, the paper highlights the hoax’s ability to spark debates around epistemic authority and transcendental thinking and considers how the figure of the alien is incorporated within diverse eschatological visions and ideas of interplanetary futures.