Last month Jeremy Corbell, a US filmmaker, released a new documentary called Patient Seventeen which shows the final surgery of Roger Leir, a foot surgeon and prominent ufologist who claimed to remove extraterrestrial nanotechnology that had been embedded in his patients.

Roger Leir performed surgical procedures on alien abductees and for those who had claimed to be abducted by extraterrestrials, his surgeries provided a link between personal experiences and the evidence needed to prove the reality of the encounters.

Dr Leir spent the majority of his career trying to make the study of UFOs and alien abductions a scientific endeavour.

In 1992, a study claimed that as many as 3.7million Americans may suffer from “UFO abduction syndrome,” or the belief that they have encountered extraterrestrial visitors.

Dr Leir’s theory was that the devices embedded in his patients were nanotechnologies created by extraterrestrials or aliens.

He believed that instead of radio signals these devices emit ‘scalar waves,’ which is a type of electromagnetic radiation that has never been proven to exist and as such can’t be detected by human radio instruments.

Nikola Tesla was the last physicist to entertain the possibility that scalar waves exist.

When Jeremy Corbell started to make Patient Seventeen he said he was skeptical about alien implant technology, but he had “no doubt” that UFOs are real.

He said: “I was working on documenting the fields of nanotechnology and advanced propulsion, and how they relate to the UFO phenomenon.

“I really didn’t want to make a movie about an alleged alien implant technology and I didn’t know what to think at the time.”

The filmmaker went along with Doctor Leir and the anonymous Patient Seventeen who was described as “just your average guy” as they prepared for the surgical removal and analysis of a small piece of mysterious metal that was found to be embedded in Patient Seventeen’s shin.

When the American turned up to the surgery, he found that Doctor Leir was trying to locate the piece of metal in his patient’s leg with a stud finder, a tool usually used for finding pieces of support wood behind the walls of a building.

In an interview with VICE Mr Corbell said: “I told Dr Leir that I would film his surgery, but if he was lying, bending the truth or trying to deceive the public in any way by altering his results, that I was going to out him.

“I asked him if he was sure that he wanted me to film his work, and he said, ‘Yes, Jeremy. I've been doing this for more than two decades, and there’s something to this!’”

Patient Seventeen was also sceptical about the metal object being extraterrestrial, however, he openly claimed to have had a number of extraterrestrial encounters as a child.

These alleged encounters led Patient Seventeen to contact Doctor Leir to surgically remove what could be invasive alien technology.

The scientist has claimed to have surgically removed embedded extraterrestrial nanotechnologies from seventeen different patients.

Although Dr Leir did not get to see the results of his final surgery after he passed away during the making of the documentary, two of his close research associates carried out the analysis of the strange object after his death and the second half of the documentary - Patient Seventeen - is devoted to their efforts.

The object removed from "Patient Seventeen" was sent to a New Hampshire lab for testing where the reports found that it contained rare-earth elements, some even toxic to the human body.

The results revealed electromagnetic frequencies, indicating that the object could be some kind of communication or tracking device.

Doctor Leir was a pioneer and regarded these reported “off-world implants” as the hard evidence that could either prove or disprove extraterrestrial visits to Earth.

The object in Patient Seventeen’s leg had a number of indicators of an extraterrestrial object because of its elemental composition.

Following Dr Leir’s death, Mr Corbell reached out to two experts including UCLA meteorite expert Alan Rubin who he said were unwilling to go on camera to talk about possible alien technology.

When Corbell presented them with the results from the labs they concluded that more tests would have to be done to determine whether the object was extraterrestrial.

According to the director, shortly after he finished shooting, Doctor Leir’s associate and a materials scientist named Steve Colbern stopped responding to Corbell or Patient Seventeen’s calls and emails.

Mr Corbell re-established contact with Mr Colbern after two years of hearing nothing where the scientist subsequently gave him the object from Patient Seventeen’s leg.

The filmmaker said he plans to repeat the initial tests run on the object to ensure they were not false positives before continuing to pursue other tests to determine whether the small object is in fact from Earth.

Mr Corbell said: “I don’t think belief should play a role here at all.

“I might be sitting on the most astounding physical evidence of an off-world, non-terrestrial nanotechnological device from an advanced Alien intelligence...or not.

“But you can be sure that I’m going to find out. I owe that to Patient Seventeen and I owe that to Dr Leir.”