Are the "Roswell Slides" a 20th Anniversary Commemoration of the Santilli "Alien Autopsy" Hoax?

Is it possible that the now-famous Roswell Slides, set to be publicly unveiled very soon on Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City, are a hoax intended to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Ray Santilli Alien Autopsy hoax, possibly even by the same people who created the Santilli alien? The slides are to be publicly revealed in a big shindig in Mexico City on May 5, sponsored by the Mexican UFO fabulist Jaime Maussan, who has a long history of promoting bogus photos of UFOs and supposed alien creatures. This is the exact twentieth anniversary of when the Santilli hoax video was first publicly shown, a fact that has not gone unnoticed.

The famous Alien Autopsy video. Spyros Melaris says he created it.

After I met and spoke with Adam Dew, the apparent owner and chief promoter of the "Roswell Slides," at the International UFO Congress in Arizona this February, my belief was that the slides were genuinely found in an old house, and probably showed some mummy on exhibit somewhere. In this scenario, Dew recognized the opportunity to promote them as showing a possible "Roswell alien." He contacted Roswell authors Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey, and the rest was history.

Adam Dew at the 2015 International UFO Congress

This "innocent scenario" is beginning to look increasingly unlikely. On April 29 , the French skeptic Gilles Fernandez wrote a Blog entry titled "What if? The Roswell Slides Saga as a Social Experiment or a Hoax of some sort?" In it he pointed out some obvious problems in the scenario we are given by Dew and the other slide promoters. One of the slides in the collection, supposedly in a slide frame that was only used in the 1940s, shows an automobile that was not manufactured until 1958. And the photos, also from the 1940s that are supposed to show Bernard and Hilda Ray, show individuals who are obviously decades older than the Rays would have been at that time. Some slides in the collection are compared to genuine 1940s Kodachrome slides, and the differences are obvious. Fernandez asks whether it is possible that "the set of the 400 slides was put together from various sources, maybe even from eBuyers or physical markets, and a story was concocted, and the two slides were inserted?"

UFO researcher George Wingfield has even stronger reservations. Back in 1995, he wrote a piece in the British publication Flying Saucer Review accusing three men of hoaxing the yet-unconfessed Santilli alien autopsy video:  John Lundberg, Robert Irving, and, and Rod Dickinson, based on their involvement with Ray Santilli, their experience in producing special effects, and their reputation as Crop Circle makers. In that Flying Saucer review article Wingfield wrote that "The alien is, of course, called HILDA, which, in case you hadn't guessed, stands for Hoaxed Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien." In 1995, RAY Santilli's hoaxed alien is satirically named HILDA - and now we have HILDA RAY. It seems as if the hoaxers may have signed their work, as an inside joke.

Concerning the Roswell Slides, Wingfield (writing as George32) recently described the manner in which the Santilli Alien Autopsy dummy was produced, and suggested that

the “Roswell Alien Slides” were produced in a similar manner and supplied to targeted individuals likely to take the bait. If that’s right, the #1 suspects are John Lundberg and Rob Irving. Both of them were in California in December 2013 where they were commissioned to make a huge elaborate crop circle near Chualar, CA, for Nvidia who wanted to publicize their ultrafast Tegra microchip.

Wingfield concluded, 

Apart from their work behind and in front of the camera, Lundberg and Dickinson were the experts who made foam latex dummies for a TV series on UK's Channel 4 back then called "Crapston Villas". If Lundberg and Irving have been up to their tricks again on this 20th anniversary of Santilli’s alien autopsy hoax, it seems very likely they may have been the creators of the “Roswell Alien Slides”.

John Lundberg is now well-known as one of the Crop Circle makers at circlemakers.org. He is also the director of the documentary film Mirage Men. Based on the book of the same name by Mark Pilkington, it is a look at the purported role of government-sponsored disinformation in shaping the UFO phenomenon. I wrote to Lundberg asking for his comments on this. He might have replied something like, "I had nothing to do with either the Santilli Alien, or the Roswell Slides." Instead, he chose to reply in poetic and evasive terms, which I read as acknowledging that he was involved in those matters, but was unwilling to say so publicly. But one never knows what is to be taken seriously when dealing with Mirage Men.

If the Roswell Slides are indeed a hoax as is here suggested, it is certainly the most elaborate and sophisticated hoax since, well, the Santilli Alien Autopsy of twenty years ago. It almost feels like an act of art vandalism to betray their secrets.