SUBJECT: X-FILES FILE: UFO2807
BY DAVID BISCHOFF for OMNI
At the UFO conference, the alien presence lurks . . . At the Hyatt regency
Airport Hotel, it walks among people with almond-eyed extraterrestrials
emblazoned on their TV shirts . . . Among UFO sculptures, passing a painting
of a UFO hovering by a Brontosaurus . . . Among L.A. casual Newagers wearing
exotic jewelry and hard-nosed investigators scribbling in steno books . . .
As it hears Budd Hopkins speak of abduction trauma, it absorbs. As it observes
a panel on covert U.S. government activities, it takes notes. As it listens to
Richard Hoagland talk of alien structures on Mars, it calculates. As it passes
the display table for UFO magazine, it decides to decline a subscription and
continue picking up the occasional issue from the newsstand.
Los Angeles. Early June. UFO Expo West. No sightings. No contact.
Anecdotal evidence.
"Yeah. I was there," confesses Chris Carter, crator and executive producer of
Fox's X-Files. His voice is relaxed and friendly on the phone. Carter is 37
years old and success has apparently not spoiled or hardened him. I've seen
his picture in TV Guide. Blond. Slender. Handsome."I attended incognito. I had
a great time. I spent a whole day there in the gallery area."
He was? I didn't know that!" says UFO magazine's editor and publisher, Vicki
Cooper, her no-nonsense reporter's voice softening. "I would have loved to
have met him."
I'm calling around, trying to get a fix on this aerial phenomenon called X-
Files, and its paranormal show satelites. One of its two featured characters,
FBI Agent Fox Mulder, claims to write articles for Omni under pen names Omni
wants to know about him, and his show.
Vicki Cooper is only too happy to give her opinion.
"The X-Files is very entertaining. The concept that Chris Carter came up with
is intriguing not just to people who have greater info on and involvement in
the UFO field, but also to audiences in general. Most episodes are good
mysteries, and the mysteries are paranormal. I think there's a greater
interest in that sort of thing these days."
The Fox network seems to think so. It has renewed X-Files for another full
season of 24 episodes. Its other shows, Sightings and Encounters, put a
documentary spin on the subject matter of the outre, from flying saucers to
crop circles to ghosts. UFO books from the serious (Dr. John Mack's
Abductions) through the ethereal (Embraced by the Light) to the ridiculous
(The Celestine Prophecy) are levitating of bookstore shelves.
Not since the advent of spiritualism and H.P. Balatsky in the nineteenth
century have so many Americans been so interested in the possibility that the
bizarre is real.
These vibrations seem to emanate mostly from Friday nights at 9:00, as
synthesizer music sharmbles from TVs and the bastard child of the Twilight
Zone and the F.B.I. grabs millions of viewers by their lapels and gives them a
good, creepy shake.
The X-Files, for the uninitiated and the frightened, deals with a brilliant
psychologist named Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) whose excellent criminal work
with the FBI has given him license to take on the unusual cases the agency
receives. Mulder is a driven man. His sister disappeared when they wre both
children. Regressive hypnotherapy makes him believe she was abducted by
aliens, and event he watched helplessly while she called for help.
The button-down Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.-types are getting irked by "spooky"
Mulder's activities. They assign Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a medical
doctor with a specialy in forensics and at stron faith in the rational, to tag
along, help, and report back. However, Mulder is a loose cannon. The Truth is
out there, and Mulder means to get it, by hook or by crook.
The duo butt heads, bicker, wisecrack, argue, and debate. Mulder has seen
Scully in her underwear, but there's never been more than a whisper of sexual
interest or romance. Ultimately, after a season of firestarters, alien threats
to mankind, UFOs, genetically warped serial killers who eat human livers, evil
clone children, and of course--alien abduction galore, they trust only each
other.
Each episode is dead serious, often ending in ambiguity.
In "Ice," an excellent variation on John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There"
(filmed twice as The Thing), they thwart an alien menace in the Arctic Circle.
In "Ghost in the Machine," they must deal with an evil Al computer. In "Deep
Throat," they discover an Air Force base where the government is secretly
testing captured alien technology.
The direction is atmospheric, the scripts are tight, the dialogue is crisp,
the tone uneasy and grim.
How can anyone not love this show? Chris Carter used to be a journalist. He
wrote pieces on sports, mostly surfing. In 1985, one of his screenplays caught
the notice of Jeffrey Katzenburg, boy genius of Disney's film divison. Carter
found himself developing for Disney. A detour into sitcoms led to a
relationship with Twentieth Television, brainstorming TV projects.
Or so the Carter and the Fox press releases claim. Difficult to believe that
something so dark and moddy as the X-Files bubbled out of such a whitebread
background.
Perhaps Carter stumbled across that cryogenically frozen body of Walt beside
chained skeletons of animators in the Mouseswitz dungeons. Or he heard
whispers of ancient voodoo cabals in the halls of the Writer's Guild? Or one
night, surfing, he was picked up by a UFO!
Alas, all lof the above are emphatically false.
"I've never had a personal experience with the paranormal," Carter aserts.
"I've never seen a UFO. I've never been contacted by anything or anyone. My
personal opinion? Well, I should preface this by saying that I'm a natural
skeptic. My tendency is to discount most of th stuff because my personal
experience doesn't include it."
So just where did Scully ;and Mulder come from?
"Right out of my head. A dichotomy. They are the equal parts of my desire to
believe in something and my inability to believe in something. My skepticism
and my faith. And the writing of the characters and the voices came very
easily to me. I want, like a lot of people do, to have the experience of
witnessing a paranormal phenomenon. At the same time I want not to accept it,
but to quesiton, it. I think those characters and those voices came out of
that duality."
Are the names significantly metaphorical?
"No, not at all. Just co-incidence. I liked the sounds. They trip off the
tongue. And I grew up in L.A. where Vince Scully was the voice of God."
Do the stories have any roots in science fiction?
"I was never an SF fan, oddly enough. I resisted the SF label for the show
because of that, but I found that by having it called SF, it brought people to
the show that might not have bothered. Now I think it's not a bd label."
Still, wild as it may get, it's a here-and-now show--so much so that a recent
tour of the FBI offices by actors and staff brought lectures by FBI agents on
errors in weaponry and procedures.
Eerie things happen as well.
"Just last weekend I had aperson whom I've seen on a social basis come up to
me and say, 'You don't know how right you've got it.' And then he continued to
tell me for the next two hours about his experiences as well as his reaction
to them. A very strong personal reaction. Seeing those kinds of reactions
makes one believe that there are things that are affecting people out there,
whether they are real or imagined. There's too much evidence to dismiss it out
of hand."
Evidence is what the UFO field seeks. It has quite a bit on its subject.
Vicki Cooper is a journalist who's also been observing the media lately.
"TV programming--movies and documentaries like Sightings, for instance, with
ghosts alongside UFOs --dilutes the information base just a tad. There is a
database that can be based strictly on observed phenomena--stories that talk
about craft, stories and reports that are based on landing traces and physical
scarring and people who've had encounters with alleged UFO occupants. There is
additional reported information that does have a distinct paranormal aspect,
but most UFOlogists resiste this."
How is X-Files viewed among the UFO experts?
"Although the material is greatly fictionalized, the basic premises of many
episodes seem to be based on stories that have gotten a lot of attention in
the UFO field. Mulder's government source--Deep Throat. Some of what he says
mirrors the suspicions UFO researchers have had for years. But because this
has been cloaked in secrecy, there's no real way of telling what is real and
what isn't. There is seemingly a cover-up. What is being covered up and for
what reason hasn't been defined to everyone's satisfaction.
"I've been greatly amused and gratified to see how Chris Carter apparently has
really studied the UFO database. The show makes passing references to cases
that everyone in the UFO field recognizes, such as the Gulf Breeze case and
Area 51. He and other writers obviously very cleverly filtered into the
scripts real UFO info that we look at here in the UFO research field."
"We generally don't use consultants," says Carter. "There is no real Deep
Throat. Now that the character is dead, he has no counterpart working on our
stall. All of our research is done from diverse materials, wherever we can
find it. But I have to say that we take the information, but don't use it in
any kind of literal or verbatim way. We use it as a jumping-off point."
I pointed out that even the scientific research was well done, the dialogue
ringing with authentic phrasings.
"I did consult with a virologist to make sure that the genetic science in the
last show of the first season was correct. Beyond that we do it all
ourselves," Carter explains.
It took a little digging to discover some of the related books that Carter has
read. He never finished Whitley Strieber's Communion. He's read Howard Blum's
Out There. He was familiar with the work of John Keel, but only after I
mentioned some titles.
I admitted that Warner published my UFO fiction trilogy called The UFO
Conspiracy, and that I had done extensive research on the subject. What struck
me the most about X-Files was how dead-on the show had caputred the flavor and
tone of UFO and paranormal literature.
Carter chuckled mischievously.
While reading from my Warner UFO books, I found the focal part of my studies
in a Whole Earth Catalog book published by Harmony Press in 1989 titied The
Fringes of Reason.
I can't help but suspect that it sits on Carter's office shelves, wellthumbed.
Whether or not it is, anyone interested in the paranormal or UFOs or areas of
thought and theory and experience that tilt amazingly and amusingly off the
plane of the quotidian should know about this book.
Among the entries in a list of the nature of its contents on the back cover:
"Channeling. Psychic Powers. Crystals. Bigfoot. Shamanism. UFOs. Perpetural
Motion. Conspiracies. Flat Earth. Reincarnation. Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Weird Phenomena. Atlantis. Alien Abductions."
If it's not the Bible of the X-Files, then it makes a very fine substitute.
Fringers editor and contributing writer Ted Schultz is now a graduate student
in evoutionary biolory at Cornell University, studing entomolory--
specifically, species of ants that grow elaborate fungus gardens. He worked
with the Whole Earth people for years and, because his interest in the outre
was known, was invited to edit a special issue on the subject. It was one of
the most popular issues that Whole Earth ever did. An expanded version became
the book.
What a reader gets from The Fringes of Reason is the same thing that viewer
gets from X-Files: This subject matter is bizarre, it's creepy,it's
fascinating, it's wacky, and yet it is also very human.
It also expands the mind.
"In my childhood," says Schultz, "I was told that everyting had been figured
out. My job as a grade-school student was just to learn it. Then in fifty
grade I discovered an underground genre of literature. The Strange bu True
books, like Frank EDwards' Stranger Than Science. Thsi was a comic-book
frontier universe where things weren't known, where the rule was 'we don't
know what's going on, and it's not what the authorities tell us it is.' Ghost
books and flying-saucer books were big. Ivan Sanderson's Abominable S n o w m
a n books blew my mind. I discovered Fate magazine and started reading that.
"Along the way I believed in almost all these things. As an adult I got into
Eastern religion and psychic phenomena. Net effect: With the sheer vastness
and internal inconsistencies of the material, all of it can't be true. The
occult systems were mutually contradictory. There had to be some standard by
which they were judged. Ultimately this led me to a more rational standard. My
enthusiasm for the material has not diminished, but I now have an
anthropological or sociological outlook. I'm not sure what these belief
systems are telling me about the real world, but I think that psy;chology and
neurobiology are the fields best equipped to delve into this."
Could this be explosions of shamanistic needs from a culture cut off from a
rich aboriginal psychospiritual tradition that we still see, say, in American
Indians and other older groups?
"I think so. I don't believe in the paranormal, but I think there's an
entirely different dimension of the mind that we're only beginning to
understand."
Jay Kinney is publisher and editor-in-chief of Gnosis magazine, known as the
"Journal of the Western Inner Traditions." He helped put The Fringes of Reason
together and wrote articles for it. He voices a view from another side.
"In our materialist, scientifically based societ where people are only willing
to believe something they are able to prove with hard scientific fact, UFOs
are something like a tantalizing reminder that the universe is bigger than our
day-to-day philosophies allow for. In that sense, UFOs give an opening for
people's spiritual urges. Whether its an ultimately useful direction to take
those urges, I'm a little skeptical. Moretraditional religious and spiritual
paths can serve just fine. I'm not sure that aliens add all that much.
"Carl Jung viewed UFOs as a sort of eruption of archetypes out of the
collective unconscious. There's a new book out from Viking called Daimonic
Reality, by Patrick Harpur. He's positing that all this paranormal phenomena--
be it Bigfoot, UFOs, or Fairies--are outcroppings of the same category of life
which is basically in between the physical and some high spiritual other
reality. An in-between zone. A zone of tricksters like Pan. The Little People
the Celts talk about. Visions of the Virgin Mary. Contacts with aliens.
Entities whose existence isn't quite on the same plane as ours (UFO
researchers) John Keel and Jacques Vallee have similar theories."
Is X-Files dealing with the mythology of the twentieth century?
"I think there is some kind of correlation," says Chris Carter. "Myths try to
explain the invisible. We're playing, but we're not trying to draw any hard
conclusions. We work with the unknown, we explore the unknown, but we don't
pretend to have any hard answers."
Other journals take a different tack on these unusual subjects.
The Skeptical Inguirer is a fusty magazine filled with grumpy essays by
brilliant people. Though a vital antidote to open-minded magazines and the
more credulous of the other media, ultimately it is not as much fun.
What pray tell, do the editors think of X-Files?
"I've seen it on a number of occasions," says Barry Karr, executive director
and public relations director. "It's funny you should ask. Last week we were
taling about it at a meeting.
"CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal) is a group of individuals with different opinions. Some would have
problems with the X-Files, since it presents the paranormal as a given. I
enjoy the show. It's fiction; it's labeled as fiction. Our culture loves
horror stories, and the series is entertaining.
"There are a lot of TV programs these days coming across as true
documentaries. TV has gone crazy on the paranormal bandwagon. Encounters.
Unsolved Mysteries. Sightings. They label them as true. X-Files , though, is a
good show."
Karr voices the opinion of many concerning the other "true" paranormal shows.
They all seem to be tabloid television, far closer to Hard Copy than the
Mcneill-Lehrer Report. As "infotainment," they pander to the sensational with
only the occasional mutter of journalistic skepticism. Alas, they also
possibly feed the paranoia of the less-educated and more psychologically
susceptible. They exist more because of inexpensive production costs and
ratings hunger than any true interest in digging up the truth.
Paradoxically, by plunging into fiction, X-Files gets closer to the facts.
One such fact is that this is a paranoid age we find ourselves living to
today. The very stuff of X-Files is paranoia.
In "Fallen Angel," we discover that the source of Mulder's UFO leads, Deep
Throat, has a stranglehold on the FBI and seems to be playing them like a
violin. Or is he?
In the final show of the first season, "The Erlenmeyer Flask," Deep Throat is
killed. "Trust no one," he croaks before he croaks.
Is this a responsible message for this day and age?
"I think so," says Carter. "It's a distrust of authority coming through there.
I just think it's a personal thing I have about institutions and authority.
That's why I put it in the show."
"It's hard to get a handle on what is going on in the world both politically
and spiritually without being a little paranoid," says Jay Kinney, publisher
of Gnosis magazine. "All sorts of revelations about covert operations foster a
certain paranoia. Some of that is a healthy paranoia.
"Social paranoia is a growing niche market. There is a large portion of the
population that is primed not to believe what newspapers print or television
says. To me, that's healther than forty ;years ago when no one challenged the
official line."
After a slow start, X-Files seems to be experiencing a growing popularity.
Virtually all the people I spoke with during my investigations enjoyed the
show. HarperPrizm Bookds will be publishing a series of original books based
on the series. The first three will be written by Charles L. Grant, who
promises more background material, particularly concerning Scully and Mulder's
private lives and pasts. Comic-book versions and lunch boxes seem inevitable.
X-Files fans abound in cyberspace. Fans in the alt.tv.x-files newsgroup on the
Internet discuss each episode in nitpicking detail. Scully and Muldur find
themsleves sent on fan-created investigations in the companion alt.tv.x-
files.creative newsgroup. The agents even pop up in discussions in serious
UFO- and paranormal-related newsgroups such as alt.paranet.ufo.
There's no question that people have experienced the unusual and bizarre. The
true question is, just what is the source of that experience? Here is the
essential beauty of X-Files, and why the show's format workds so well.
Ultimately, through a fictional medium, the show takes a scary funhouse
freakshow ride through the human heart, mind, and spirit with no conclusions,
only questions as to the very nature of reality.
Questions that can only linger in viewer's minds--and lives.
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