The Digital Antiquarian

The fifth season of The X-Files, spanning from 1997 to 1998, marked the absolute zenith of the show’s popularity, when it put up the best average ratings in its history. Everybody seemed to want a piece of its action; even William Gibson and Stephen King submitted scripts that season.

As we learned in an earlier article, The X-Files was always two shows in one. One show consisted of the “mythology” episodes: a heavily serialized, ever more convoluted tale of extraterrestrial interference in the affairs of humans and a myriad of conspiracies deriving therefrom, in which the stakes were, it had by now been revealed, positively apocalyptic in scope, involving alien plans to exterminate the human race and repopulate the planet with their own kind. The other show consisted of one-off “monster of the week” episodes, which were freer to go to unexpected places in terms of form and content and to not always take themselves so darn seriously. The hardcore X-Files fandom that had sustained the show through its first couple of seasons had been built on the back of the first type of episode, and this was still the type that got the most attention even in the glossy mainstream press. Yet there’s a strong critical consensus today — a consensus with which I heartily agree — that almost all of the most enduring episodes are actually of the “monster of the week” sort.

It was and is almost impossible to reconcile the coexistence of the two types of episode in the same fictional universe. Doing so demands that we accept that Mulder and Scully periodically decide to take a holiday from saving humanity from extinction in order to check up on rumors of Yet Another Freaky Serial Killer in Podunk, Idaho. The creators themselves were by no means unaware of the cognitive dissonance. One argument they deployed in response was a plea to treat Mulder and Scully like Superman, Nancy Drew, or Kirk and Spock had once been treated: as characters who simply have adventures in the abstract, without sweating the details of chronology. “Who knows in what order the fictional lives of Mulder and Scully take place?” said producer-director Rob Bowman. “We never said that that was week two and this is week three in their lives. We are just saying that this is episode two and this is episode three and it happened whenever.” Such hand-waving may have been thoroughly out of step with obsessive X-Files fandom, but it does indeed seem like the most satisfying way to approach the series today, not least because it allows us to appreciate the best of the standalone episodes as the little self-contained marvels they are.

I speak of episodes like Chris Carter’s own “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” whose name is a play on the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It’s a funny and sad retelling of that story, moved to twentieth-century small-town America and shot in stark black and white, the better to evoke the old monster movies from which the show drew so much inspiration. But it’s more than just an homage; the “postmodern” in the title is amply justified. The story is barreling along toward its inevitable tragic climax when Mulder decides that tragedy just won’t do. He demands to see the writer, who turns out to be a chubby teenager who’s drawing a comic book. And suddenly the entire gang — Mulder, Scully, the monster, and your stereotypical gaggle of pitchfork-wielding villagers, who were getting ready to string the last-named up from the nearest tree a minute earlier — are taking a road trip to see Cher, the monster’s favorite singer. She sings “Walking in Memphis,” his favorite song, and Mulder and Scully dance together with big smiles and glowing eyes while the monster shakes his booty right up there onstage. It’s weird and sweet and funny and yet still achingly sad at its core, and just thinking about it leaves me with a tear in my eye. I’ve just about decided that it’s my favorite episode of The X-Files ever. And it turns out that I’m in pretty good company there: both Chris Carter and David Duchovny have said the same.

Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood” is another standout from the fifth season. It has Mulder and Scully investigating an apparent vampire on the loose in a small Texas town — not exactly revolutionary subject matter for the show. Yet Gilligan turns the episode into a riff on Rashomon, letting us see the story from the points of view of both Mulder and Scully. For example, the sheriff of the town seen through Scully’s admiring eyes is the epitome of a handsome Southern gentleman, through Mulder’s jealous ones a bucktoothed hick. Once again, I find myself in good company in highlighting this episode. Gillian Anderson has named it as her own all-time favorite: “It was fun and challenging to film and even more fun to watch.”

Just because a vampire has to buy plastic fangs in a novelty shop, it doesn’t mean he isn’t real.

The fifth-season finale led right into the big X-Files feature film, which had actually been shot almost a year before, during the break between the fourth and fifth seasons. It was a mythology episode blown up in length by a factor of about two and a half, and was neither notably better nor worse than that description would imply. The movie was perhaps most notable for existing at all; it was highly unusual to make a theatrical film set in the world of a television series that was still on the air. Chris Carter and Fox had been inspired by the success of Star Trek Generations, featuring the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that film and its sequels had come out only after the television series in question had wrapped for good. There was some thought that The X-Files too might transition into a purely cinematic franchise at some point, although it wasn’t clear when or how that might happen. “Hopefully,” said Gillian Anderson in an interview at the time, “the film will be so successful that the series will trail off and we’ll just be doing movies once in a while.”

Despite the limitations which its tight connection to the serialized mythology of the television show would seem to place on its mass appeal, the X-Files movie grossed $84 million in the United States alone, enough to make it the twentieth biggest film of the year there. All told, it was a solid performance, if not quite the gangbusters one that might have prompted Fox to think of turning The X-Files into a spectacle available exclusively on big rather than small screens sooner rather than later.

Even with all of its success, however, the show was navigating some logistical turbulence. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had both signed five-season contracts at the outset, and Duchovny wasn’t at all sure he wanted to renew his as the fifth season was winding down. He had aspirations of making the leap from television star to becoming a sought-after leading man in movies that weren’t named The X-Files, but this would be hard to do if he had to be off in Vancouver playing Mulder for all but a few months of every year. Further, he had just gotten married to the actress Téa Leoni, whose role on the sitcom The Naked Truth bound her to Hollywood. Duchovny gave Fox an ultimatum: he would join Gillian Anderson in signing a two-year contract extension if and only if the entire production was moved to Southern California.

It was a tough call — the move would make the show dramatically more expensive to produce each week — but nobody could imagine The X-Files without Mulder, and certainly nobody thought the show had run its course as of yet, not when it had just enjoyed its biggest season ever. So, Duchovny got his way. The folks who were working on the show in Vancouver were given a choice between relocation and severance packages. These dozens of people who had their lives so disrupted so that one man could have the arrangement that pleased him might be forgiven for concluding that David Duchovny was a self-entitled jerk. He didn’t do his reputation among them any more favors in the aftermath of the move, when he went around disparaging their hometown of Vancouver and its “400 inches of rain per day” in interviews on the talk-show circuit. But so be it; the show must go on.

The results of the move to California were evident from the first shot of the first episode of the sixth season: a desert landscape baking under a clear blue sky. That wasn’t the sort of shot you were ever going to get in Vancouver. The default tone of the show brightened in tandem with the sunshine quotient, prompting derision from some quarters of its hardcore fandom, who labeled this new Southern Californian incarnation “X-Files Lite.”

But these people do not speak for me. For all that I wouldn’t leap to defend David Duchovny from anyone who said he was a bit of a tool at this stage of his life, I’m afraid I can’t get behind those other criticisms. In fact, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that I like the sixth season the best of all of them, and that at least some of the seventh season isn’t that far behind it in my esteem. To my mind, the standalone episodes got warmer and wiser and smarter and funnier than they had ever been before. Granted, most continue to play with established mass-media archetypes. If not usually original in conception, though, they’re sly and clever in execution, with that good old Mulder and Scully charm and with more willingness than ever to stretch and bend the formal boundaries of the show. In their willingness to burrow deep into the universals of life and fate, I daresay that some of them remind me of nothing so much as the masterful short stories of Ted Chiang.

Vince Gilligan’s “Drive” opens with a helicopter’s eye view of a car chase that is obviously intended to evoke the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase over the highways of Los Angeles. Indeed, it initially presents itself as a special news broadcast that’s airing in place of your normally scheduled X-Files episode; these seasons do a lot of this sort of mucking about with credits sequences, etc., as if the fiction is escaping from the cage in which it is meant to be contained. The episode evolves into The X-Files’s take on the tautly wound 1994 film Speed. Here as there, the plot hinges on a vehicle that cannot stop if dire consequences are to be avoided. In this case, though, it’s Fox Mulder who’s behind the wheel, with a man behind him in the backseat who will die if he doesn’t keep moving. The reason why he will die may be down to the usual conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo, but that has little bearing on the propulsive problem at hand. This was arguably the first time The X-Files went full-on action movie — and, lo and behold, it does it rather brilliantly. (In a meta sense, “Drive” is also famous as the episode where Vince Gilligan first met Bryan Cranston, the man you see in the backseat above. Cranston would go on to become the star of Breaking Bad, Gilligan’s own acclaimed television show.)

At first glance, the most surprising thing about Chris Carter’s “Triangle” may seem to be that it took The X-Files this long to get around to doing an episode about the Bermuda Triangle. It was worth the wait. Defying a promise Carter made in the early days of the show to never fall down the wormhole of time-travel fiction, the script does indeed send Mulder back in time, to the first days of the Second World War, where he winds up aboard a passenger ship that’s about to be commandeered by some of its Nazi passengers. Doppelgängers of both Cancer Man and Scully are aboard, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The important thing is that this gives William B. Davis the chance to try on an SS uniform that suits him to a tee, and gives Gillian Anderson the opportunity to try her hand at playing a hard-edged femme fatale straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The episode is fast-paced and frothy and a little bit campy. Perhaps most of all, though, it’s a tour de force of technical film-making: in conscious emulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental classic Rope, its 45 minutes consist of just 24 ultra-extended single-camera takes. (By way of comparison, the average X-Files episode contained around 1000 switches of perspective.) “To watch ‘Triangle’ now,” writes the critic Emily St. James, “is to remember a time when this was the most daring show on television.”

The two-parter “Dreamland,” written by Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz, opens with Mulder and Scully on yet another nighttime drive to Area 51 to meet yet another shadowy contact who may or may not be who he says he is. In what can all too easily be read as a meta-fictional message to a certain kind of rabid X-Files fan, Scully idly wonders whether the two of them will ever outgrow this stuff and make better, fuller lives for themselves. Shortly thereafter, they get waylaid by the authorities, the infamous Men In Black who are always lurking around places like this. But then a test of an alien spacecraft creates a quantum disturbance that swaps Mulder’s consciousness into the lead MiB’s body, and vice versa. Much discomfort and hilarity ensues, as Mulder learns that being an MiB is just a government job like any other. While he tries to adapt to life as a paunchy, middle-aged family man, his alter ego embraces with gusto the swinging-bachelor lifestyle that Mulder’s looks have always cut him out for. Lessons are learned on both sides, until a way is found to reverse the trend. In other words, this episode turns all of the stuff about aliens and conspiracies into an excuse to tell a more resonant, universal story about life choices, opportunity costs, and roads not taken. Plus it’s really, really funny.

The ghosts in Chris Carter’s “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” are played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin, two stars from an earlier era of television who probably would never have appeared on the show if The X-Files was still shooting in Vancouver. The episode is another meditation on life choices, this one with a spooky Dickensian vibe, with some crackerjack comic-tragic dialog. But my favorite part is the ending, when Mulder and Scully hunker down in the Mulder’s cozy apartment to exchange the gifts they promised one another they wouldn’t buy. It’s hard to imagine an earlier incarnation of the show embracing the spirit of the holidays in such a forthright, non-ironic way.

“Monday,” written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, is another episode that concerns time travel — once that genie had been let out of the bottle, it was hard to stuff it back in — along with, yet again, choices and consequences. It’s The X-Files’s version of Groundhog Day. We see the same day play out over and over, a day in which a desperate man with a bomb decides to rob a bank and Mulder and Scully keep getting caught in the crosshairs in different ways.

“Arcadia” by Daniel Arkin is The X-Files meets The Stepford Wives. Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple, moving into a white-bread Middle American neighborhood where residents whose lives are insufficiently tidy have a nasty habit of disappearing. The commentary on the horrors of suburban conformity isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s great fun to watch Mulder and Scully play house for the benefit of the neighbors, passive-aggressively needling one another all the while. It almost goes without saying by this point that the monster at the heart of the case they’re investigating is the least interesting part of the episode.

One of the ways the show’s brain trust tried to keep their stars engaged during the later seasons was to offer them the opportunity to contribute behind the camera as well, by submitting scripts of their own. This sort of gesture doesn’t always turn out well, but David Duchovny at least proved a surprisingly soulful and agile writer, putting his earlier life as a graduate student in literature to good use. In “The Unnatural,” which he directed as well as wrote, he cleverly juxtaposes The X-Files’s standard version of aliens with aliens of another type: the Black baseball players who braved scorn and violence to desegregate the sport in the 1940s. It’s a lovely, luminous episode that oozes the magical-realist quality the show was embracing so successfully by this point. Sure, it owes a lot to Field of Dreams in tone and feel, but it’s hard to disparage it for that. Given the choice between conspiracy theories and the crack of wood on cowhide on a starry summer night, I’ll take the latter every time.

As we saw in an earlier article in reference to the alien-autopsy documentary, The X-Files loved nothing better than to satirize its parent network’s tackier tendencies. One of the urtexts of Fox’s brand of tabloid journalism was the series called Cops, an early example of “reality” television in which a camera crew rode along in the backseat of a police cruiser on the mean streets of a big American city. (Rather astonishingly, Cops is still on television to this day, being in its 36th season as of this writing.) Vince Gilligan’s “X-Cops” is a picture-perfect re-creation of the show, from the Cops theme song and credits sequence that take the place of the standard X-Files version of same to the shaky handheld camerawork, from the suspects and witnesses who live in a liminal space between sympathy and ridicule to the know-it-all police officers who give us the benefit of their hard-won wisdom in running commentaries. Into this hard-bitten milieu are dropped Mulder and Scully on the trail of a monster of the week. It’s incongruous and bizarre and most of all hilarious, another of those episodes that are so brave and cheeky and completely out of the box that it’s hard to believe they were actually made. Who would ever have imagined during the first season of The X-Files that the premise would someday be bent far enough to yield episodes like this one?

Lately I’ve been indulging in a thought experiment, or maybe more of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Wouldn’t it have been neat if The X-Files had taken a bow already after a sixth season that was absolutely spectacular? Said season would have been created by junking all of the increasingly tiring and tiresome mythology episodes from the extant sixth and seventh seasons and then throwing out the handful of clunkers among the standalone episodes as well. Do all that, and you’d end up with what I’m going to have the audacity to call one of the best single seasons of television ever created. Such a victory tour would necessarily conclude with Vince Gillian’s “Je Souhaite,” the last standalone episode of the real seventh season, an episode that’s as universal as a fairy tale — which is almost literally what it is, come to think of it. Here Mulder and Scully meet a genie — yes, complete with the bottle — who has the power to grant three wishes. We all know how stories like this tend to go. Be very, very careful what you wish for, kids! When Mulder gets his chance to wish, he asks for peace on Earth — not a good choice, because the easiest way to achieve that is to simply remove the species that has been causing all of the chaos on our planet all these centuries. But then, after using his second wish to undo his first and repopulate the planet, he hits upon the perfect third wish, by looking at the genie herself with eyes of empathy. The best way to change the world, he realizes, is by showing kindness to the people who are right there in front of you. What a perfect grace note that would have been for the show to go out on…

Whether you love or hate the sun-kissed X-Files of the sixth season and beyond, there can be no question that it marked a commercial turning point for the show — and not in a good way. By the end of the sixth season, the average episode’s viewership had dropped by almost 25 percent from what it had been just one year earlier. Measured by the standard metrics, The X-Files was still a popular show, but it no longer took pride of place at the center of the zeitgeist, no longer garnered shiny awards and glossy magazine covers and navel-gazing think-pieces from critics and pundits. It had reached the top of its mountain of destiny a year earlier, and now it was on the downward slope that lay just beyond.

What were the reasons for its decline? I’m tempted to say it had something to do with the mythology episodes that had always dominated in public discussion of the show. These had by now grown so convoluted and ridiculous that it was becoming hard for even the most sanguine optimist to believe they were going anywhere coherent. (Scully is abducted by aliens! Scully is back! Scully has incurable alien-caused brain cancer! Scully is cured! The aliens aren’t real, they were just a carefully engineered distraction all along! No, belay that, actually the aliens are real! Mulder is abducted! Mulder is back!) “The mythology was becoming an awful lot for people to continue to keep track of,” admits X-Files executive producer and writer Frank Spotnitz.

At the same time, though, this objection hardly began with the sixth season. The more encompassing explanation for the show’s decline in popularity is likely the simple fact that even the biggest cultural phenomena always run their course and then give way to fresh things. To wit: right in the middle of The X-Files’s sixth season, the cable-television channel HBO aired the first episode of The Sopranos, a heavily serialized mobster drama that was free of most of the strictures of broadcast television, among them restrictions on language, violence, and sexual content, a rigid 45-minute running time for every single episode, and the need to churn out twenty episodes or more every single season. The Sopranos inaugurated the fifteen-year stretch that some critics today like to call The Golden Age of Cable Television, during which the medium eclipsed theatrical films in many respects to become the most prestigious and satisfying of all forms of moving image. In illustrating that long-term serialized storytelling could attract a mass audience on television in genres other than the soap opera, The X-Files was an important forerunner to shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But it was not one of their peers.

The gradual decline of The X-Files’s popularity continued in the seventh season. Chris Carter and his colleagues actually went into the season thinking it would probably be the last. Not only were the ratings getting slowly but inexorably worse, but the contracts of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were due to run out once again when the season was over, and Duchovny was less interested than ever in renewing his. In fact, he was suing Fox and Chris Carter personally for allegedly selling syndication rights to the show to a subsidiary network for less than their full market value, which impacted his own residual earnings. As one would expect, the legal battle “didn’t help the creative energy,” as Carter put it.

This late in its run, the show had just one surefire way of making headlines again, however briefly. In light of this, the makers’ handling of the transition of Mulder and Scully from platonic partners to a romantic couple is as bizarre as any monster of the week that ever appeared on the show. In Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz’s “Millennium” — an episode whose main function was providing closure for the semi-spinoff series of the same name, which had been abruptly cancelled after three seasons — Mulder and Scully celebrate the arrival of Y2K by sharing their first ever onscreen kiss. Thirteen episodes later, in “All Things,” which was written and directed by Gillian Anderson, it’s off-handedly revealed that the two are now sleeping in the same bed. And that’s it. Restraint has its virtues, but come on! Shippers who had been waiting 150 episodes for the other shoe — or perhaps some other articles of clothing — to drop were rewarded with this damp squib. I have no idea why the makers didn’t turn “Mulder and Scully finally do the deed!” into a mass-media event. As it was, they squandered their last bit of dry powder from their glory days in about as anticlimactic a fashion as can be imagined.

The show easily could have — and probably should have — ended after the seventh season. Yet it didn’t. David Duchovny agreed to settle his lawsuit with Fox, and then shocked everyone by agreeing as well to play Mulder just a little bit longer — for another half of a season, to be precise. The powers that were at Fox decided that was good enough for them, especially given that they didn’t have any strong candidates to hand to air in place of The X-Files on Sunday nights. And so it was on to the eighth season. It was decided that Mulder would be absent for the first half of the season, having been abducted by aliens. (What other explanation could there possibly be?) Then he would return for the second half, so that the show could finish strong.

An actor named Robert Patrick won the unenviable role of Special Agent John Doggett, the replacement for one of the most iconic television characters of recent history. This may explain why everyone was at such pains not to call him a replacement. “Robert Patrick is an addition to the show,” insisted Chris Carter. When David Duchovny did come back halfway through the season, he immediately began to complain loudly about having become “peripheral. Mulder’s story was one of three stories going on and it didn’t feel like the same show to me.” At the risk of editorializing too much, I must say that my mind is fairly boggled by the egotism on display in this comment. What did he expect would happen?

By the last episode of the eighth season, when Mulder and Scully had a baby together, the proverbial shark had been pretty well jumped. And yet the second half of the season, after Duchovny’s return, actually managed to slightly outdraw the end of the previous one with the viewing public. The show got renewed yet again, even though Duchovny now declared himself to be gone for good — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The first episode of the ninth season had yet to air when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American passenger planes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (The hijackers of the fourth airplane, which was intended for the White House, met with heroic resistance from the passengers, and that plane wound up crashing over Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.) The X-Files was something of a shambling anachronism already by that point in the eyes of most television viewers, but this tragic day of infamy cemented that status. The mood of the nation changed on a dime; just like that, the epoch that some now call “The Long Nineties” came to a smashing end.

The 1990s had been the Age of Irony, when an anthemic hit single could be named after a brand of teenybopper deodorant, when videogames like Duke Nukem 3D were reveling gleefully in senseless violence amidst the trashy detritus of conspicuous consumption. And why should it have been otherwise, during a decade whose biggest ongoing news story was the dot.com bubble? “We’re the middle children of history, man,” said Brad Pitt of Generation Slacker in Fight Club. “We have no Great War, no Great Depression.”

Earnestness made a big comeback after September 11. Suddenly people had a cause again, Wanted to Believe again — not in the existence of aliens, conspiracy theories about which now seemed like the childish diversions that they had always been, but in the very government and military the conspiracy theorists had spent so many years questioning if not reviling. By September 21, the approval rating of President George W. Bush, who had lost a national popular vote to Al Gore just ten months earlier but squeaked out a controversial win in the Electoral College, had soared to 90 percent, the highest ever recorded.

It was difficult to imagine how any show could be more out of step with the changed times than The X-Files was. “The X-Files is the product of a time that is passed,” wrote the columnist Andrew Stuttaford. “It is a relic of the Clinton years, as dated as a dot.com share certificate, a stained blue dress, or Kato Kaelin’s reminiscences.” All of which is to say that it was all but foreordained that its ninth season would be its last before said season ever aired its first episode. The new standard bearer of the American zeitgeist was 24, another serialized show about a law-enforcement agent, but this time one who had no doubts whatsoever about the righteousness of his country or his government, a two-fisted true believer who wasn’t above a spot of torture when it was the only way to foil the Axis of Evil. Pop music and videogames too heeded the call: Celine Dion’s nerve-jangling rendition of “God Bless America” climbed the charts as the lead single of a charity album of the same name, while Duke Nukem yielded to Call of Duty.

Amidst it all, The X-Files shambled through its last season as best it could. (Raising a defiant middle finger to the scoffers, the makers even named one episode “Jump the Shark.”) David Duchovny, whose career as a cinematic leading man wasn’t going quite so well as he had thought it would, agreed to rejoin the cast for a 90-minute series finale, which endeavored to wrap up the mythology story lines about as neatly as could be done in that span of time. “It gives viewers answer after answer, until it feels like we’re reading somebody’s Geocities fan page for wild theories about the show,” writes Emily St. James of the finale. “But it’s also dramatically, death-defyingly boring.” When all was said and done, Cancer Man got blown up by a helicopter and everyone else rode off into the sunset of a changed America.

But they didn’t go away forever. Anyone at all familiar with the post-millennial media landscape knows that nothing ever seems to go away forever. There have been two attempts to date to revive The X-Files since that last hurrah of 2002.

In 2008, Chris Carter got the old gang back together for a movie. The X-Files: I Want to Believe had a budget less than half the size of the first X-Files film before adjusting for inflation. “It’s funny, but on the series we prided ourselves each week with making a little movie,” muses Carter. “Then, when it came time to do the second X-Files movie, we were given the money and the opportunity to make, literally, a little movie.” Probably smartly, he chose to do an expanded monster-of-the-week episode rather than reopening the Pandora’s box of the mythology. Even so, it was hard to figure out what reason the film really had to exist; it came a little too soon to be a full-blown nostalgia play, even as its moody atmosphere still felt badly out of joint with the times around it during that summer of 2008, when Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” was the slogan of the moment. The critics were not impressed, and its box-office receipts were less than a third of the first film’s — again, without adjusting for inflation.

Seven and a half years later, Carter made a more concerted effort to revive the show, this time as another television series on Fox — albeit one with dramatically truncated episode counts in comparison to those of its original run. By now, the times were falling more into step with The X-Files’s tendency to see everything in the world through the lens of conspiracy. (More on that subject momentarily.) Nevertheless, the new episodes never quite landed like a lot of observers expected them to. The scripts felt underwhelming, the alien stuff way past its sell-by date, and one at least of the two leads seemed a little bored and distracted. Ironically, it was Gillian Anderson now who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be there, and who most obviously turned in performances that reflected this ambivalence. The fact was that she was a more sought-after actor than David Duchovny this far along in their respective careers, with a larger number of interesting roles in both her past and her future.

Darin Morgan, the man who first made The X-Files safe for comedy, came back to pen “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” one of the few episodes where the revival found some creative traction. The lizard-man in tighty whities who serves as the monster of the week here turns out to be a normal lizard who got bit by a human. After spending some time on a job peddling mobile-phone plans in an anonymous strip mall, all he wants to do is become a lizard once again. And who can blame him?

The revival sputtered out in 2018, after two seasons with a total of sixteen episodes between them. As of this writing, The X-Files’s legacy is once more being left in peace. But never say never, especially in these current times of ours when nostalgia is a bigger business than it has ever been.

And what can we say about the legacy of The X-Files now, a quarter-century after its high time in the zeitgeist?

Well, as I think that even many of its most zealous boosters will admit by now, it was a show subject to wild swings in quality, not just from season to season but from week to week. When all is said and done, The X-Files probably produced only about 20 to 25 episodes — that is to say, about one season’s worth of them, in the course of nine seasons — that might legitimately be called classics. Still, that’s a lot more than nothing, and a better batting average than the vast majority of television shows achieve. And betwixt and between its standout moments of brilliance, The X-Files offered plenty more episodes that remain perfectly watchable today despite their flaws, especially if you’re one of those who can enjoy just hanging out with its two charming leads.

On the broader canvas of television history, The X-Files occupies an important position. It wasn’t the first show to have survived thanks largely to the activism of a relatively small group of passionate fans — the original Star Trek leaps immediately to mind as a much earlier instance of same — but it was the first to be joined at the hip from the get-go with Internet fandom. In this sense, it was a harbinger of a new reality, in which almost every artifact of traditional media would have to adjust to a life spent in a symbiotic relationship with cyberspace.

Then, too, as I already noted, the mythology episodes paved the way for the Golden Age of Cable Television by serving as a demonstration of both the power of long-form storytelling on television and, less happily but no less usefully, of some of the ways it can go wrong. The conspiracy angle in The X-Files quickly became, to steal a phrase from the Cold War historian David Martin, a “wilderness of mirrors.” Partly this was down to aesthetic intent, but it was equally down to practical necessity. The only way to keep the conspiracy story arc going was to just keep putting more and more mirrors in the heroes’ way. Later serialized shows — not all of them by any means, but a lot of them — would use more limited seasonal episode counts, or in some cases entire runs that were planned as limited from the start, to do better on this front. We should never forget that, in this respect as in a number of others, The X-Files was a pioneer, with few if any examples to follow; we therefore shouldn’t be overly surprised that it did so much wrong. Indeed, the media world into which it was born made it effectively impossible for it to do some of what shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad later did so well. In short, The X-Files’s creators played the cards they were dealt as well as they knew how, and there’s never any shame in that.

All that said, there does remain another sense in which The X-Files seems today less like a brave pioneer and more like one of the shadowy agents of evil who featured so prominently in so many of its episodes, and it’s this elephant in the room with which I feel sadly obliged to close this series of articles.

Chris Carter most definitely didn’t invent conspiracy theories; the roots of the modern fixation on evil cabals manipulating events behind the scenes can be traced back at least as far as 1903 and the infamous antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet conspiracy theories have been weaponized in the years since The X-Files went off the air to a degree arguably not seen since the Nazis used them as a partial justification for the Holocaust. Carter himself was never a committed believer in UFO conspiracies; he saw them first and foremost as a cool set of ready-made fictions around which to build his show. Many or most fans of said show doubtless saw them the same way. But, by doing so much to break conspiracy culture into the American mainstream, The X-Files must shoulder some small portion of the blame for what seems to be an increasingly post-truth United States, where uncomfortable facts like electoral defeats can be hand-waved away with claims of voter fraud, where essential public-health measures like vaccines can be imagined to be agents of mind control, where people can convince themselves to kill in the cause of thwarting an international pedophile ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, and where duly elected members of Congress can tell us that the current administration in the White House is attacking the parts of the country that it doesn’t like with bespoke hurricanes. This is the poison pill lurking behind that iconic poster hanging on Mulder’s wall. If everyone decides that just “wanting” to believe is justification enough for doing so, this world of ours is going to wind up in a very bad place. It strikes me as deeply unfortunate that, in all of its 218 episodes and two movies, The X-Files never saw fit to address the deeper psychological dilemma of such a smart man who would tack such a dumb poster to his wall. On the contrary, as late as the first revival season in 2016, the show was presenting in a fairly heroic light a conspiracy monger who is quite plainly based on Alex Jones of InfoWars, a pernicious huckster of dangerous, reactionary nonsense. In a recent survey of X-Files fan attitudes conducted by the academic researcher Bethan Jones, one anonymous respondent said that “I always thought of The X-Files in retrospective as an (incidental?) instrument [in] getting people to become paranoid of their government, which is an instrument of the real power to manipulate democracies.” This seems to me a fair assessment.

Of course, The X-Files is at the very worst a small proximate cause of the situation in which we find ourselves today. And yet even its tiny portion of the blame is enough to cast a faint shadow over any retrospective like this one. It took us a long time to go from the alien-autopsy film to QAnon, but it seems safe to say that The X-Files had a hand in propagating both of them. The best we can do now is hope the day will come when it can be remembered as just a groundbreaking television show again, with no further prevarication required. Until then, it will have to remain both a victim and a proof of a force that is more insidiously frightening than any alien invasion: the law of unintended consequences.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Computer Gaming World of August 1998.

Online sources include “X-Files Creator Wants You to Chill Out on the Conspiracy Theories” by Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair.

The idea that there are visitors to the planet, that they are not only visiting now but have been visiting since prehistory, and how it affects us is a very interesting idea. I suppose, just looking up into the night sky at all those millions of stars up there, you wonder if it’s possible. I have a pet theory that everyone wants to have that experience where they’re driving down a desert road at night, and they see something and can’t explain what it is. I think it’s all about religion. Not necessarily Christian religion, but it’s about beliefs — and meaning and truth and why are we here and why are they here and who’s lying to us. Encountering a UFO would be like witnessing a miracle.

— Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files

In July of 1993 — or maybe it was 1992 — a British music archivist named Ray Santilli traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, a city which had been a hotbed of early rock and roll three and a half decades previously, hosting concerts by everyone from Bill Haley to Elvis Presley. Now, Santilli was hoping to unearth some buried treasures of that era for the sake of posterity and profit: audio recordings, pictures, or, best of all if possible, video footage of one of the most important cultural movements of the twentieth century in its nascent stage.

Santilli put an announcement in a local newspaper, explaining who he was and what he had come for, dangling the prospect of generous compensation for any artifacts that fit the bill. Amidst a lot of dross and false leads, he received a call from a fellow whose 82-year-old father, so the caller claimed, had just what the energetic Briton dreamed of finding here in the American heartland. The elderly man in question, whom Santilli would later identify only as “Jack B.,” had worked a big open-air concert in Cleveland in 1957 as a cameraman. While some of the footage he had shot there was already a part of the public record, he had some additional reels of heretofore unseen film stashed in his attic in Florida, the state to which he had retired some years ago.

Santilli secured an invitation to visit Jack in Florida the next time he came to the United States; luckily, this was to happen in just a few months. When he arrived at the former cameraman’s snug little home, he was gratified to learn that his host was a straight shooter. Just as promised, Jack produced footage of a lean and hungry Elvis Presley giving the staid America of the Eisenhower era a good solid rocking and rolling. The transaction was quickly concluded: Santilli handed Jack a wad of cash, and Jack handed over the film, which Santilli would go on to include in a videotape compilation of early Elvis and Johnny Cash concert performances.

He was packing his suitcase in his hotel room the next morning, feeling quite pleased with himself at having gotten what he had come for, when Jack unexpectedly rang him up again. “Ray, are you interested in other material as well?” asked the old man at the other end of the line. Santilli said cautiously that he might be, depending on what it was. “Then come over here again,” said Jack. “I have something here that may be even more interesting than the Elvis film.”

Intrigued despite himself, Santilli swung by the house on his way to the airport. Jack sat him down on the couch and pointed to a raggedy cardboard box that sat on the living-room floor. It was full of 16-millimeter film canisters. “Ray, have you ever heard of the Roswell incident?” asked Jack. Santilli shook his head. “Well,” said Jack, “a UFO crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. I filmed the salvaging.”

Jack went on to explain that he had been drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War, but that a childhood bout with polio had rendered him unfit for combat duty in the eyes of the military. Instead he had worked as a cameraman for the Army during and after the war; he hadn’t left the service until 1952. During his near-decade in uniform, he had filmed various top-secret projects and tests, including the very first explosion of an atomic bomb in another part of the New Mexico desert. But nothing compared to the day in 1947 when he was sent to Roswell to document everything that was going on there. He filmed extensively at the crash site of the UFO. And then he was flown to a military base near Dallas, Texas, to film the autopsies of two alien corpses that had been recovered from the wreckage. This was the footage that he had been storing in his attic all this time. According to him, the Army had simply forgotten to send anyone around to pick it up. Now, at long last, he had decided to sell it, in order to pay for a big wedding for his favorite granddaughter. He wanted $150,000 in cash — “owing to the taxes, you know. You get the film. I get the money. And you tell nobody where you got the film from.”

Santilli told Jack that he wasn’t the sort of person to buy anything sight unseen. Acceding to the wisdom of this policy, Jack set up the same projector on which they had watched Elvis’s gyrations the day before, pulled the curtains down over the windows, and started the machine clack-clacking into motion. On a clear patch of wall in front of him, Santilli saw the flickering images that would transfix the world a couple of years later. A humanoid but plainly inhuman corpse lay on a bare metal table. It had a bulbous head and eyes and a shrunken, childlike body with a distended belly that caused him to wonder if it was pregnant. It had two arms and two legs, but six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. It appeared to be completely hairless, its skin vaguely fish-like in pallor and texture. Two presumably human doctors, their faces hidden beneath the hooded contamination suits they wore, examined and then cut the body open while a third man in a face mask looked on from behind a pane of safety glass.

Passionate about music though he was, Santilli recognized immediately that this was more important — and vastly more valuable — than all of the lost rock-and-roll footage in the world combined. If, that is, it really was what Jack claimed it to be.

The reels were stamped with the Kodak name. So, Santilli placed a call right then and there to that company’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and asked to be forwarded to the records department. “I have some old 16-millimeter film which is supposed to date back to 1947,” he said to the man who came on the line. “How can I tell whether this is true?”

“We have a simple system for that,” answered the man from Kodak. “There should be a geometric code on the edge of the film. What symbols do you see there?”

“A square and a triangle,” said Santilli.

“Good. Just a moment… yes, that was 1947.”

Santilli was satisfied. Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t a wealthy man; he certainly didn’t have $150,000 in his pocket to hand to give to Jack there and then. Telling the old man that he would get in touch again just as soon as he could, he flew home to London to start beating the bushes for the funds.

It proved harder to raise the money than he had ever anticipated. Even leaving aside how absurd this claim of an alien-autopsy film sounded on the face of it, few would have been eager under any circumstances to pony up $150,000 for a source whose real identity they didn’t even know, for a piece of merchandise that only Santilli himself had seen. Convinced that he was on the cusp of a coup that would make the revelations of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seem like small potatoes, Santilli called every number in his Rolodex in a near panic. For he knew that Jack’s health was not particularly good, and he lived in fear that the old man would die on him before he could come up with the money. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until November of 1994 that he was able to convince a German music producer named Volker Spielberg to finance the purchase. That same month, Santilli made the round trip to Florida again, returning this time with the 22 reels of film in his luggage.

Ray Santilli and his financial backer Volker Spielberg.

Being nearly 50 years old and having been stored in less than ideal conditions throughout that time, many of the reels were in extremely bad shape. Santilli therefore sent them first to a conservator, to be restored as much as possible and then copied onto other media for long-term preservation. Once that had been done, it was finally time to announce the film’s existence to the world.

On March 11, 1995, Santilli invited to a London movie theater a bizarre cross-section of public figures: serious journalists along with not-so-serious entertainers; prominent UFO believers along with skeptics; noted scientists along with representatives of most of the world’s major religious faiths; even the former head of the British Ministry of Defence’s controversial, recently concluded “UFO Project.” That project had declared in its final summary that it could find no evidence that extraterrestrials had ever visited our planet, much less that any terrestrial government had conspired to cover up such an event. Perhaps its director would now feel compelled to revisit the matter.

Or maybe not. “The result [of the first screening] was absolute, total rejection,” lamented Santilli later on. “They all considered it a swindle. Some even left in the middle of the show.”

Undaunted, Santilli kept right on knocking on doors. Most of the news organizations he contacted wanted to do a full forensic examination of the film before they would agree to license it; this Santilli did not wish to allow. Rupert Murdoch, however, was not so scrupulous.

Already at that time, Murdoch was the worldwide king of tabloid journalism and much else in mass media besides. He was by then well along in the process of building a staggering fortune out of the understanding that many or most consumers of “news” don’t want objective facts; they want news that will entertain them, at the same time that it confirms the worldviews to which they are most predisposed. His fortune would only continue to grow over the decades to come, as he continued to put this understanding into ruthless practice.

Murdoch came out of a private screening of the alien-autopsy film knowing that he simply had to have it. He prepared a contract which made Santilli and his largely silent partner Volker Spielberg rich men overnight. Then he made plans to show the film to maximum advantage all over the world — including in the biggest media market of them all, the country of its alleged origin. He passed the film to Robert Kiviat, the coordinating producer of an American “documentary” series called Encounters. Airing on Murdoch’s young and scrappy Fox television network, Encounters dealt in alien abductions, crop circles, ghosts, Bigfoot, and similar paranormal and/or conspiratorial fodder.

On Tuesday, August 28, 1995, Fox broadcast a program called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, whose one-hour running time — or rather 45 minutes with commercials — included about four of the nineteen and a half minutes of footage which Santilli had provided to Murdoch. The balance of the time was spent talking about the film, plus the long-rumored UFO crash at Roswell whose veracity it might prove.

The host of the program was Jonathan Frakes, the actor who had played Commander Will Riker of the starship Enterprise on the recently concluded television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was thereby presumed to have some special insight into aliens from outer space. Although the title of the show seemed to describe it as an inquiry into the authenticity of the film, the affirmative case was given a lot more air time than the negative. “It was not what you would expect from a major network that thought it was broadcasting a history-making film,” noted the magazine Skeptical Inquirer later on. “It was, however, what you would expect from a network trying very hard not to spoil an illusion.” The show’s field director, John Jopson, claims today that he was told in no uncertain terms to can it when he persisted in asking too many questions of Ray Santilli. “Cut the Perry Mason act and finish the show,” is what he says that Robert Kiviat told him. “It was made clear to me that, if the footage was exposed as a hoax, the ratings would suffer,” he elaborates. (Kiviat denies that these exchanges ever took place.)

In place of a hard-hitting interrogation of Santilli, an expert from Kodak testified that the film stock  appeared to stem from 1927, 1947, or 1967 (it turned out that the geometric codes were periodically reused); a former military cameraman who had worked during the same era as Jack B. testified that the film was consistent with the equipment and shooting techniques he had employed; the prominent pathologist Cyril Wecht testified that the men seen performing the autopsy in the film were, judging from the procedures they followed, “either [themselves] pathologists or surgeons who have done a fair number of autopsies”; the Hollywood special-effects guru Stan Winston testified that “my hats are off to the people who created it — or [to] the poor alien who is dead on the table.”

Like his fellow Star Trek alumnus William Shatner before him, Jonathan Frakes wasn’t one to look the gift horse of a paying gig in the mouth. “Patrick Stewart turns all this shit down,” he told journalist Emily Nussbaum decades later. “Because I’m such a whore, I took this, and the producer hired me for another couple of jobs.” He even became an executive producer and occasional guest star on a scripted television series called… you guessed it, Roswell.

The program proved every bit the cultural bombshell and ratings bonanza Rupert Murdoch had thought it could be. It became the most-watched show in its time slot that evening, a major achievement for Fox, which normally still lagged well behind CBS, NBC, and ABC, the older “Big Three” American networks. From one day to the next, the water-cooler discourse in the country switched from such comparatively prosaic matters as the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson murder trial to aliens and UFOs and Roswell, Roswell, Roswell. The demand from those who had missed the program’s first airing was so enormous that Fox showed it again a week later, with three precious additional minutes of footage from the film appended onto the end. Even more households tuned in to watch this encore.

Meanwhile Murdoch was using his far-flung media empire to bring the same show to other markets, with much the same results. The buzz eventually reached all the way to the ears of the most powerful man in the world. On November 30, 1995, during a state visit to Northern Ireland, President Bill Clinton was asked by a twelve-year-old boy what he knew about Roswell and the alien-autopsy film. Cracking an awkward smile, he answered, “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it.”

Skeptical voices had a hard time cutting through the excitement. Even they had to acknowledge that, if it was a fake, the film wasn’t an entirely inept or thoughtless one. For example, the clock and the telephone that could be seen on the wall of the examination room, even the metal tray used to hold the doctors’ saws and scalpels, were period correct.

All the same, there were some serious discordances to be espied as well, discordances which only became clearer once it was possible to view all nineteen and a half minutes at once on the inevitable home-video release. “Ufologists” wondered why the aliens in the film didn’t fully agree with the eye-witness accounts of people who had supposedly seen the bodies after the crash at Roswell; their aliens had no ears and four fingers, whereas these ones had small ears and six fingers. Scientists wondered at the strange suits worn by the doctors, which could have protected them from neither radiation nor biological contaminants; the one useful purpose they did seem to serve was to conceal the faces and thus the identities of the doctors themselves. And then, you didn’t have to be a ufologist or a scientist to wonder why an historic event such as this one would have had only four witnesses including the cameraman, why the autopsy was done as if everyone involved had someplace else he urgently needed to be in an hour or so, and why the cameraman was so gosh-darned bad at his job, allowing his camera to go out of focus and stay that way every time he zoomed in for a closeup.

For that matter, where was the cameraman anyway? Even if Ray Santilli himself refused to share any further information — thus honoring, so he said, the promise of anonymity which he had made to the old man — couldn’t any competent private investigator track down a man in his mid-eighties who currently lived in Florida, had formerly lived in Ohio, had contracted polio as a child, and had been drafted into the Army during the Second World War and continued to serve until 1952? Many investigators tried, but none could locate him.

To make matters worse, the details of Santilli’s story kept changing, much to the dismay of those who craved just one set of facts to check. For example, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, sometimes it was 1992 and sometimes 1993 when he first encountered the film. His story wasn’t even internally consistent when you really stopped to think about it. Why was Jack B. worried about taxes when he expected to be paid under the table with a proverbial unmarked envelope full of cash?

More information emerged from Kodak, revealing that the film they had examined had consisted only of five frames of blank leader, a tiny snippet of celluloid which could have come from anywhere: “Sure, it could be an old film, but it doesn’t mean it is what the aliens were filmed on.”

Arguably the most devastating criticisms came from a legion of pathologists, who, in marked contrast to their credulous colleagues on the Fox special, saw all sorts of oddities and inconsistencies in the footage.^[1]It turned out that Cyril Wecht, Fox’s chosen pathologist, had a penchant for conspiracy theories long before the alien-autopsy special was aired. In 1978, he was one of four pathologists who were allowed to reexamine all of the material gathered during the John F. Kennedy autopsy; he was the only one who insisted that the president’s wounds were inconsistent with the conclusion of the Warren Commission that there had been only one shooter. He went on to write several books on the subject, and served as a consultant to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which pushed the theory of an inside job by the CIA. They said that the doctors held their instruments awkwardly and seemed to have no method whatsoever to their madness, making random slices and scooping out the aliens’ organs willy-nilly. Speaking of which: the aliens themselves seemed more like grotty Halloween piñatas than formerly living organisms, mere sacks filled with amorphous lumps of viscera. “I cannot fathom that an alien who had external organs so much like ours could not have some sort of definitive structural organs internally,” said one pathologist by the name of Ed Uthman. Similarly, special-effects experts — the ones not contacted by Fox — said that, while the film was not a terrible fake by any means, these dead aliens were nevertheless well within the scope of their craft to provide to a filmmaker of even modest means. Based on testimony like this, even many ardent ufologists became convinced that the film was a fraud, possibly deliberately planted by a government that was eager to discredit their avocation.

Finally, there was the central absurdity that always dogged all of the talk of Roswell: that these aliens had made their way to Earth over distances of which the human mind can scarcely conceive, avoiding meteors and black holes and all sorts of other cosmic perils that are equally far removed from our capability to even imagine, only to get a stray pigeon or something stuck in their spaceship’s engine grille and wipe out in some farmer’s field. It could happen, one had to assume, but boy, did the odds seem stacked against it.

Despite all of these commonsense objections, the public consensus that the film was as likely real as not held for quite some time across much of the Western world. Interestingly, the one outlier here was Germany, a country which had lived through another embarrassing hoax at the beginning of the previous decade, when a rogue journalist from the respected magazine Stern and an underworld document forger had produced a set of purported diaries written by Adolf Hitler that had equally entranced the world. Call it a case of once bitten, twice shy; both Stern and its arch-rival Der Spiegel came out stridently against the film’s authenticity from the start. Obviously relishing the chance to pour a bit more salt into an old wound, Der Spiegel explicitly called the alien-autopsy film the 1990s equivalent to the Hitler diaries. Stern didn’t go quite that far, but it did roundly chastise the film’s peddlers. “If you want to fool us, you have to try a little harder,” it wrote with the hard-won wisdom of experience.

The Germans and the other skeptics were right, of course. The origin story I passed on to you at the beginning of this article — at least everything after Santilli’s acquisition of his footage of Elvis Presley in concert — is a complete lie. Facing increasing pressure to explain the many aspects of his story that didn’t fully make sense, Santilli committed a blatant self-own in 1997, when he showed pictures of the canisters in which, so he claimed, the film had been stored when he acquired it. (He was still refusing to provide the artifacts themselves for forensic examination.) The canisters were neatly labeled, “Property of the Department of Defense.” But, sadly for him, no agency of the American government had yet existed under that name at the time the autopsy was supposed to have been conducted.

And so the fever dream broke. Switching tacks without missing a beat, Fox in 1998 included the film in a television special called World’s Greatest Hoaxes, as if they had had nothing to do with this hoax’s dissemination. The producer and mastermind of that show was… Robert Kiviat, the man behind the original alien-autopsy special. You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2004, long after the cultural moment that had produced the alien-autopsy sensation had passed into history, Ray Santilli finally came clean — partially, at any rate. He admitted to the British television presenter Eamonn Holmes that he and a few friends had faked the film in a vacant London flat, using “aliens” that had been made out of plaster and stuffed with sheep brains, chicken entrails, and other assorted offal picked up at a local butcher shop. (The smell in the apartment, the hoaxers said, was “horrendous.”) After the filming was complete, they had cut what was left of the aliens up into small pieces and dropped them into dumpsters all over the city, as you do when you’re looking to hide the evidence of a crime.

Plainly worried about his legal exposure for perpetrating this fraud that had made him a millionaire, Santilli hedged his bets by insisting that he really had bought an alien-autopsy film from Jack B. in Florida, but that the reels that held it had literally crumbled into dust within a few days of being exposed to the air in London. (Was pollution particularly bad that year?) The film he had sold to Rupert Murdoch had been a “reconstruction” of what he had seen on the original reels. “It’s no different from restoring a work of art like the Mona Lisa,” he insisted. This might be true — if, that is, an art restorer’s job involved painting from scratch a new version of a work he had once glimpsed briefly, then passing it off as the original. As it is, this process goes by the alternative name of “forgery” in most circles. Even Santilli could hardly keep a straight face as he spouted this nonsense to a wide-eyed Eamonn Holmes. His tell is his smirk.

The reason Santilli suddenly decided at this late date to share even this much of the truth is equally plain. A new scripted cinema film was in the offing, entitled simply Alien Autopsy, telling a heavily fictionalized, comedic version of his story. There was now more money to be made from the truth than from the lie, in other words.

Since then, the forgery that made Santilli rich has well and truly passed into history as a classic piece of 1990s kitsch. Der Spiegel was correct; the alien-autopsy film did indeed become the 1990s’ closest equivalent to the Hitler diaries, complete with the same “what the hell was everyone thinking?” quality when looked back upon from the perspective of posterity. Unlike the two main perpetrators of that fraud, both of whom did time in West German prisons, Ray Santilli and his partners have never suffered any legal or financial consequences for their actions. For all that far worse criminals have gone equally unpunished, one still can’t help but feel that there is some injustice in this. The fact is, however, that Rupert Murdoch’s operation had no reason to pursue the matter. They had gotten many times their purchase price out of the film, whose authenticity had never been of any real concern to them. Only the rubes were duped. Ah, well… at least the 2006 cinema film was a flop. Its subject matter felt as outmoded by then as grunge music and Britpop.

Today only the most committed of UFO evangelists still believe in the original alien-autopsy film. Getting the burden of proof hopelessly muddled, these folks now demand that Santilli substantiate not his old claim that the film is genuine but his new one that he faked it. Naturally, his ongoing failure to do so demonstrates that he must have been intimidated by shadowy government agents into concocting the bogus tale of forgery. There’s something touching about people who want to believe so very, very badly, people for whom aliens have become a sort of religion.

To the jaded eyes of the rest of us, on the other hand, the conspiracy theories of the 1990s now seem charmingly quaint. We might even be tempted to see them as proof of an axiom that, when we humans lack sufficient stuff to worry about, we invent worries to fill that space. In a time when North America and Western Europe were at peace, were as wealthy as they had ever been, and seemed to have definitively demonstrated that liberal democracy and free markets were political perfection achieved — “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama so infamously put it — what else was there to satisfy their citizens’ need to worry than alien abductions, alien technologies, and a myriad of equally improbable government conspiracies surrounding it all? Then, as soon as September 11, 2001, showed that history just keeps marching on and that we actually had had something substantive to worry about during the previous decade, if only we had recognized it, all of that stuff blew away like tinfoil hats in the wind.

For all that this point of view is inevitably oversimplified, I do feel like there’s a kernel of truth there. More unnerving, however, is the structural pattern of 1990s conspiracy theories, a pattern which has proved more enduring than their content. Like the tabloid-news outlets which did so much to feed them, they blurred the lines between entertainment and information. People believed them mostly, it seems to me, not so much because they needed something to worry about as because they were fun. It was fun to speculate about what the next layer of the onion might be, fun to feel oneself to be privy to so many secrets and lies. For many people, it was fun as well to have a longstanding suspicion that “the system” had always been out to get them confirmed. Despite all their nefarious deeds and actors, conspiracy theories, then as now, were a sort of comfort food, keeping the truly difficult questions in life and politics, which don’t tend to have such bright neon lines separating good from evil, firmly at bay.

When all was said and done, did their adherents during the 1990s really believe aliens were everywhere? From the outside, it was hard to say for any given individual — and maybe from the inside as well. Following the tales about Roswell and crop circles and human abductions and all the rest became a form of fandom, not that far removed from the fannish dissection of each new episode of, say, Twin Peaks — or of The X-Files.

Yes, we have finally arrived at the real elephant in this particular room. While the alien-autopsy film was only a blip on the pop-culture radar, grist for the mill of Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit in the decades that followed, The X-Files, which likewise aired on Rupert Murdoch’s young Fox television network, became a veritable way of life for its most committed fans. Its first episode was broadcast in September of 1993, two years before the alien-autopsy special. By popularizing the ideas of alien visitations and government conspiracies to conceal their existence — ideas which it did not invent, but which were largely confined to the cultural fringe prior to its arrival on the scene — it laid the groundwork for Ray Santilli’s hoax. Then it continued on for years after that bit of excitement had come and gone, to become not just a footnote to but an enduring icon of 1990s pop culture, guaranteed to appear on any top-ten list of the decade’s biggest hits.

“The X-Files is that rare show that seems to exist both in the time it aired and in the present,” notes Emily St. James, the coauthor of a recent book about the series. “It is, beyond all reason, timeless, despite being perhaps the ultimate TV show of the 1990s.” The X-Files changed the nature of television, the nature of popular entertainment writ large — and, for good or for ill, it also changed us, as people and as a people. A poll conducted by Time magazine and the news channel CNN in 1997 found that 64 percent of Americans believed that aliens were in the habit of visiting Earth. Absent The X-Files, the number would surely have been a small fraction of that size.

The story of The X-Files as a cultural phenomenon is something of a postmodern Gordian knot. The show borrowed much of its central mythology from fringe conspiracy theories. Then it went on to popularize such theories to such an extent that they could be introduced into the mainstream real-world discourse via organs like Ray Santilli’s film. And then, the show’s ongoing fiction began responding to the very same real-world currents which it itself had set in motion.

On November 24, 1995, just three months after the alien-autopsy special, Fox aired the X-Files episode “Nisei.” In it, FBI Agent Fox Mulder, the more credulous by far of the show’s two protagonists, has purchased an alien-autopsy film via mail order, prompting his more skeptical partner Dana Scully to complain that it is “even hokier than the one that aired on the Fox network.”  (Her skepticism is ill-founded: in the universe of the show, the footage is real.) To provide the final dollop of irony, the real-world Fox network ran commercials for yet another repeat showing of the alien-autopsy special during the episode in question. The world had never seen a feedback loop quite like this before. It was an early example of a weird hyper-reality that has since become commonplace, such that mediated experiences of all descriptions have become more subjectively real to many of us than the objectively real people and places around us.

Another example of postmodern hyper-reality, from the grandiosely titled International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. The biggest single exhibit in the place is a diorama which proudly depicts the scene in Santilli’s film, despite the fact that the latter has been so widely dismissed even by most ufologists. Is the museum meant to get at the truth of what happened in Roswell in 1947, or is it really about reveling in all the fantasies that have been spun from what was almost certainly a fallen espionage balloon? One senses that even the proprietors of the museum aren’t quite sure anymore. One thing only is crystal clear: that the museum and the town of Roswell make a lot of money from being the UFO capital of the world.

Next time, then, we will delve into the origin story of this other 1990s media artifact, whose influence was so pervasive throughout the decade — including in computer games, my usual beat around here. Take heart, for I can tell you that the truth is sometimes out there: this origin story will actually be true. Would I lie to you?

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Sources: The books UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There by Garrett M. Graff; “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell; Beyond Roswell: The Alien Autopsy Film, Area 51, & the U.S. Government Coverup of UFOs by Michael Hesemann & Philip Mantle; The UFO Diaries: Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness by Martin Plowman; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards, The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum, and Selling Hitler: The Classic Account of the Hitler Diaries by Robert Harris.

Online sources include Ray Santilli’s story of his acquisition of the alien-autopsy film at Aquarian Age Information Central and “How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World’s Imagination for a Decade” by Nathalie Lagerfeld at Time. Video sources include the 2004 episode of Eamonn Investigates in which Ray Santilli and friends finally come (partially) clean, the original Fox alien-autopsy special, and the full nineteen-minute alien-autopsy film.