[MUSIC - "X-FILES THEME"]
MIKE RUGNETTA (VOICEOVER): This episode
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On September 10, 1993, The X-Files premiered.
Dana Scully, a young FBI upstart and medically trained doctor,
is partnered with Fox Mulder, an Oxford-educated psychologist
who has developed a consuming devotion to FBI cases
involving the paranormal, the mystical, the metaphysical,
the alien.
It is heavily implied by Dana's boss
that her function, as a rational, science-minded
doctor, is to debunk Mulder's work.
Now, alongside the relationship between the show's two main
characters, the show's tagline, "The Truth Is Out There,"
and the iconic "I Want to Believe" poster,
prominently displayed in Mulder's basement office,
announce a theme of tension-- one exhibited by both the show
and its cultural moment-- one concerning the paranormal,
extraterrestrials, and a popular relationship to those things
at the time-- a kind of uneasy acceptance,
an anxious curiosity about what may truly--
X-FILES NARRATOR: The truth is coming.
--be the case.
The X-Files ran for 202 episodes, concluding in 2002.
And now, 14 years later, in 2016, it's coming back.
And I can't help but wonder, why?
I mean, beyond the obvious answers-- doop.
Why us?
Why now?
Is there something about our time
that signifies we may benefit from a similar conviction
or anxious curiosity?
And I think the answer is yes.
But, to get there, let's work our way from 1993.
When The X-Files premiered, it was arguably both band member
and maestro of a particular collective fascination.
And that was no mistake.
Creator Chris Carter has said that The X-Files capitalized
on a "present paranoia," one regarding the paranormal,
aliens, and the potential cover-up
of those things by vague yet menacing government agencies.
Area 51, the back gate of which is only about 200 feet
behind me, is arguably the most enigmatic symbol
of such menace.
A place deep in the Nevada desert
alleged to house proof of extraterrestrial life,
alien spacecraft bodies and artifacts.
It's so seriously guarded that we've
been told to not even take video of the signs instructing people
to not take video.
These are all images pulled from the internet.
It's patrolled by armed guards, and rumor has it,
if you get too close, they send helicopters-- and maybe
Will Smith.
So we're not going to mess.
We're going to keep a safe distance.
Area 51 factors really heavily into The X-Files mythology.
And, interestingly, almost exactly a year
before the show's premiere on September 23, 1992,
the Nevada Test Range, of which area 51 is a part,
performed it's final underground nuclear weapons test.
In a way, this is sort of prefigures
that paranoia that Chris Carter was attempting to harness.
Because it helped signal the end of the Cold War,
a long political and arms standoff
between the US and its allies, on one side,
and the Soviet Union and its allies, on the other.
The Cold War was defined by hostility
between communism-slash-socialism
and democracy-slash-capitalism, as well as
nuclear proliferation.
With each superpower stockpiling arms to the point where,
if one were to attack the other, each could respond in kind.
Thus, guaranteeing something called, mutually assured
destruction.
It was a tense nearly 50 years.
But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall-- a functional
and a symbolic border between the Eastern and Western Bloc
countries-- finally fell, and was forcefully
smashed and dismantled, and is now for sale on eBay.
The US and the Soviet Union began
dismantling their respective nuclear stockpiles.
And, in 1992, right around here, near Area 51,
that last nuclear test.
But this new-found sense of post-Cold War peace
created a weird kind of vacuum.
For so long, the danger was clear and present-- communists,
secret agents, nuclear war.
But, by the mid '90s, with the Cold War over and economies
booming, what was there to be afraid of?
Well, a lot of things, actually-- AIDS,
loosening moral fabric because of video games and rap music,
an environment in slow decline, the state of social welfare.
But no single, concrete enemy with, like, their finger
on the button.
And so, in place of a direct hostility,
a kind of pervasive paranoia developed.
It stands to reason that aliens became
one symbol, one object of this difficult-to-direct anxiety.
And, I mean, as The X-Files always depicts,
aliens are going to come to Earth,
circle your crops, implant stuff in your body, steal your time,
and so on, and so forth.
Of course, the idea of off-world guests
existed long before the '90s.
Stories of strange visitors are about as old
as stories themselves.
The path that got us to the 1990s style of obsession
with aliens begins in 1947.
A 13-hour drive south of Area 51 in Roswell,
New Mexico, where an oddly shaped craft
crashed at a ranch.
A brief newspaper article about a respected and reliable
citizen's eyewitness account claimed
that the nearby Roswell Army Air Field possessed, quote,
"a flying saucer."
The very next day, the same newspaper,
it was reported and confirmed that the craft was,
in fact, a weather balloon or weather device.
But the story had launched.
And the idea that on Earth, in America, in the American West,
specifically, there exists insight
into the existence of extraterrestrials
and UFOs hasn't flagged-- nor has
the idea that the government is somehow involved.
The moon landing is implicated here, too, and not
just because of moon aliens or government cover-ups.
But because the Space Race encouraged an infatuation
with the sort of astro-futurism, during the Cold War,
space exploration was established
as a marker for progress, order, technological advancement,
functioning society.
For the US and the Soviet Union, and much
of the rest of the world, space became
and bounty representing societal and political success
for whichever national power reached it first.
But even so-- or maybe for exactly that reason--
sci-fi stories and our collective imagination
began filling space with otherworldly threats.
Over the next 30 years, UFO sightings and reports
of abductions would wax and wane alongside their representation
in media, and discussion by UFOlogists
in kind of mutually reinforcing parallel.
The X-Files came at the end, towards the peak,
of a series of media that treated space
as both final frontier and a closet in which monsters might
hide.
And that complex of media had a great effect on the public.
In a really controversial and well-known study
called the Roper Poll, it was claimed
that between one and four million Americans
had been abducted by aliens.
But, in 1998, writing for the Skeptical Inquirer,
Susan Blackmore countered that the Roper Poll didn't actually
show how many people had been abducted by aliens,
but how many people suffer from sleep paralysis--
a condition that is often accompanied with hallucinations
of threatening figures-- and how much television people who
suffer from sleep paralysis watch.
It seems, absent good statistics,
like claims of actual abduction have subsided--
or, maybe just aren't given the credence that they once were.
But according to several sources, belief in aliens
is at an all-time high.
And, according to the National UFO Reporting Center Online
Database, incidences of alien sightings are, as well.
And, I mean, hey, why not?
Arguably, we regard Mars now the way
that we did the moon 50 or 75 years ago.
And though the political climate might be different,
Neil deGrasse Tyson has famously said
that if China leaked a memo saying that they planned
on building military bases on Mars,
the United States would be there within 12 months.
By the way, it does feel like we stand
on the edge of some great space frontier.
Mars, specifically, the universe generally,
and contemporary space travel, all
provide some collective fascination
and a full complement of media coverage to go with it.
Cosmos got rebooted.
Elon Musk and Mars One may, or may not,
send citizens into space.
The Martian was a best-selling book and blockbuster movie.
We have sent an army of robots to, and found water on,
Mars several times over.
Space isn't just interesting in its own right,
it also provides some hope for escape off
of a deteriorating planet.
Knowledge of space and, arguably, even astrophysics
is transcendent knowledge.
If we can understand what's going on up there, then maybe
there's some hope for us down here.
Our thoughts aren't in the clouds, they're in the cosmos.
And this is the moment that The X-Files returns?
Not at a moment where we are concerned that the aliens are
going to come and get us, but at one where
we are angling with utmost zeal to figure out how we might
become those aliens, ourselves.
I might argue that ours isn't an astro-futurism
but an astro-presentism.
In the 1990s, The X-Files seized upon some paranoia
regarding abstract, unknowable threats
from a plane beyond our grasp.
How timely that it returns now to perhaps confront
some of the truth that it wanted to believe.
Today our threats are much more concrete,
and so, too, is our knowledge regarding
what is possibly out there.
We want to believe, and maybe now more than ever, we can.
Let us know what you do or do not
want to believe in the comments, and I
will respond to some of them in next week's comment response
video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding Las Vegas
and the ruins of America.
If you want to watch that one, you can click right here
or find a link in the doobly-doo.
And if you're looking out there for even more truth, Agent Joe
Hanson, over at It's Okay to Be Smart,
is examining the history of the Bigfoot legend
and why people keep looking for big, hairy forest ape species.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
So, Joe asks whether or not science can actually ever prove
if something doesn't exist.
So if you want to check that out, head over to It's
Okay to Be Smart.
We'll put up links everywhere.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And the tweets of the week comes from everyone
who let us know that they got the Idea Channel
stickers that we mailed to them in the snail mail.
It's really great to see all these Idea Channel
stickers on cars and dogs.
For everyone who missed our flash giveaway,
we're still not able to sell these,
but we're going to try every once in awhile to mail some out
to give them away.
So keep an eye on the Idea Channel Twitter,
and the next time that we have a batch printed,
maybe you will be online at exactly the right time.
But, yeah, we will figure out, eventually,
how to get these into the hands of people
who want them in a more sensical way than coincidence.
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And last, but certainly not least,
this episode would not have been possible
without the hard work of these true believers.