Wasn't it decades later they backtraced? After the guy who made showed us where he did it and how, I believe it was in the U.K. I know it didn't help matters when special effects legends like Stan Winston were interviewd and he said something like (paraphrasing) "and with all my years of expertise in the field, if it is a fake I have no idea how they did it.". Which means he had to know because even a young person like me (at the time) could take one look & realize it's a dummy. So if I could tell Stan Winston sure could tell. I'm sure they paid him a few bucks to make that statement.
View: https://youtu.be/822HtiBwxQY
The bizarre assertions about extraterrestrials were made by Dr. Shirley Wright, who felt an obligation to reveal the...
en.ammonnews.net
Dr Shirley Wright, who unfortunately died in 2015, was Albert Einstein's secretary and she was among a small group of scientists invited to see Roswell derbies and corpses. Now, the scene that she described was exactly the scene I've seen on a few seconds long damaged footage of the B&W film on YouTube. Personally, I find it highly unlikely that she was lying, because she was an academic.
That
damaged B&W footage showed an alien laying on a concrete floor near a gate of an aircraft hangar, presumably at a Wright Patterson AFB, and there was a crowd of people, many of them in bright air force uniforms, walking around and taking a look at a body. At that time I was a bit of film buff, and what particularly stroked me about that short footage was that body language of these people walking around was unrestrained and un-self-aware. When you watch movies you'll notice that movement of actors is always very self-aware and constrained, for a simple reason that they must keep their body inside pre-agreed frame of the camera, while their mind is focusing on instructions given to them by film director. From this observation I concluded that footage I've seen was too spontaneous and unstaged for it not to be authentic. Now, Its very unfortunate that I didn't save that clip, nor I can now find it on YouTube.
The reason I'm saying this is, that this lead me to believe, that Roswell cameraman was real, that he really lived in Florida, that he really had fallen into financial difficulties, which resulted in him removing cans with a film out of fridge, which lead to damage. The German producer had seen this short clip that ended on YouTube and decided to finance the whole hoax.
So, from what I've seen and testimonials of different people that I've heard, I believe, that Roswell autopsy hoax was half a hoax, if you want. There was a real cameraman, real
damaged B&W footage, but for purely commercial reason producer who bought
damaged B&W footage, decided to recover his investment by going on with hoax and the plastic doll that laid on the table was a faithful remake of the real alien corpse shown in the original footage.
Update:
Here is Wikipedia article that mentions how original tapes were obtained and how original film was damaged:
en.wikipedia.org