The Mysterious Case of Skinny Bob

This is part 4 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1 , part 2 , and part 3 .

"Skinny Bob” generally refers to a series of short video clips posted to YouTube in 2011, purportedly showing various scenes of aliens and alien paraphernalia between 1942 and 1970-ish. Skinny Bob is, of course, also one of the aliens; allegedly the one who crashed at Roswell and survived in captivity under military and scientific scrutiny for some time.

Here's the first video, to give you a taste.

You can watch the rest on the original poster's channel, ivan0135, or see all four videos collated into one on another channel. I recommend you take at least a cursory look before you read the rest of the post. Four clips went up, and then the account went quiet and it's been like that ever since.

So okay, on the surface, this looks like a leak of KGB info showing secret footage of live! Aliens! In an old-timey grainy B&W film kind of way. Is it real? Who can say! But there's a pretty good amount of evidence it might be fake. Let’s start there.

It's Obviously Fake

Yeah, okay, big whoop, somebody made some clips and put them online for the lulz. And yeah, there's actually a decent body of evidence for that.

First, the clips have been obviously manipulated in a few ways. The projector reel sound, for example, was almost certainly added in after the fact and might be a stock sound clip. The visual noise on the film — that's the graininess and "damage" that flickers in and out — is definitely a stock filter, and the specific one has even been identified. There are time codes in the clips, but they're inconsistent to the point that they might as well be totally made up.

And I mean c'mon, it's aliens.

And yet.

The Motive Problem

These clips were released in 2011. Video SFX of this nature were possible in 2011, but it would have been a professional effort — an expensive professional effort. And yet nobody has ever taken credit; no film or video game was ever associated with this; no money has been made from it. The YouTube channel ivan0135 isn't even monetized. There aren't so much as links to t-shirts to buy.

If this were a hoax, it's a costly one that would have required a full production crew plus the special effects people to pull off. In 2011, nobody was producing film from nothing the way it's possible now — there's no way this is some guy just screwing around on Blender, not back then. Which means a lot of people would have to know what this is and how it happened: actors, set designers, camera crew, producers, director, editor, SFX people, costume designers or maybe puppeteers, at the very least. The clips take place in several locations, in different lighting, and are very professionally executed.

The theory has been floated that this was a test of multiple options for some film that ultimately went in another direction or didn't happen at all, and some joker decided to leak it. The test idea is just… not how this stuff works in my experience. That kind of decision is made a long time before you're hopping around different locations, because again — expensive. Nobody is spending that kind of money on a test.

Most interesting of all, there isn't the accompanying cloud of rumors about how your friend’s cousin’s daughter was in the alien costume when she was 12, isn’t that cool? (I can assure you that industry people tell each other stuff that's supposed to be secret allllll the time.) And in the 11 years since, nobody has put it in a portfolio, mentioned it in an interview, nothing.

That's really, really weird.

It's a lot easier to explain why this is up if it's real, ironically. Somebody was gettin’ blackmailed over their super bad intelligence leak. If this were the case, the lack of rumors would be a lot less surprising, because spies, as a whole, are less loose-lipped than media folks. Or so I've been led to believe.

Wait, It Might Be Real

There's a fair body of evidence that it's not a hoax, too. There are touches in the film that strike people as oddly and non-intuitively realistic. For example, in that alien autopsy clip, the table holding the tools is draped in a white cloth. Modern audiences would have expected to see a stainless steel tray, but that cloth is in fact accurate to practices in the 1940s, when this was purportedly filmed.

In the clip with a flying saucer hovering near a house, there are no power lines leading to or from the building. It would be difficult to find a place like that to shoot now, but in the 1940s, the massive rural electrification effort hadn't yet taken place; only a third of rural farmhouses had power.

And despite the obvious editing of the footage — the filters, the sound, the cropping, the time codes — the underlying material is widely regarded as absolutely flawless. The alien's eyes blink like a real creature, with both an upper and lower lid moving. Shadows are accurate, proportions are accurate, and — interestingly — the vast majority of the material isn't actually aliens at all. When shaky footage is corrected for stability, everything is consistent.

And there are lots of minor touches that take substantial deciphering to notice, but are nonetheless there, such as footprints next to the collapsed alien in the crash scenes, and the subsequent the appearance of bruises or injuries on the alien's head in the medical/office setting. Indeed, in that medical/office clip, there's a sliver of a silhouette seen at the edge of the screen that's been positively identified as exactly matching the cuff and lower hem of an Eisenhower jacket… used as Army standard issue from 1944 to 1957.

This is an astonishing attention to detail — especially in light of ivan0135's lack thereof, including the spelling "Rosswel" in metadata, and other, similar signs that whoever it is isn't a native English speaker.

So What Do I Think?

I dunno, man. I don't have the answers, but I find the uncertainty incredibly compelling. On a personal level, I should say that I find the biomechanics of the neck and skull unconvincing. How can that skinny neck support that massive head? And JFC can you imagine if your center of balance was in your throat? But I guess there are some real implausible looking animals out there in the world, too, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And finally, credit where it's due: many of my details come from skinnybob.info, a fantastic resource that is a collective detective-style effort to figure out WTF with these videos, either debunking or confirming them, that has been unsuccessful for 11 years and counting. If you're interested in diving deeper, that's your place to start. There are several areas where they're asking for people to help identify locations, objects, and other outstanding mysteries. Maybe you can crack the case!

And that's it for today. Next time in aliens: the Five Observables!