After inconclusive government UFO report, The X-Files creator Chris Carter still Wants To Believe
It's almost like he's invested in the the truth being out there, or something
TV News Chris Carter
For whatever reason, possibly because life on Earth has steadily been getting shittier and shittier, the federal government has started to display a sudden interest in aliens… or at least UFOs that have been spotted over the years by pilots (who refer to them as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, even though the other name is pretty much synonymous). The previous presidential administration requested that a UAP report be released publicly, which makes sense since the previous presidential administration certainly had nothing better to do, and 60 Minutes dedicated an episode to UAPs earlier this year. A few days later, former president Barack Obama even revealed that he has seen “footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are” (but, again, they’re UAPs and not UFOs), and he says there are “people” who are taking these sightings seriously and trying to figure out what they are.
The government’s new UAP report came out on Friday, but, unfortunately, it didn’t end up having much convincing evidence for either side of the “are aliens real?” debate—the people who don’t want to believe will continue to not believe, and the people who do want to believe will find just enough information to convince them to keep going. That brings us to Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about the resurgence of UFO/UAP talk. Carter is practically an expert in whether or not The Truth Is Out There (or at least in the discussion surrounding it), as he lays out in the Times essay, and he doesn’t think this recent UAP chatter is really going to mean anything in the long run. Basically, the fact that nobody seems to care about the government admitting it has investigated potential flying saucers is very telling, but he also points out that nobody should ever really trust the government anyway.
Carter points out that government conspiracies were a major theme on The X-Files, and he says this is “X-Files territory if there ever was any” because this UAP report involves the Department Of Defense spending $22 million on a secret investigation that nobody knew about (an investigation that hit a wall when sponsor Senator Harry Reid couldn’t even get access to certain things). At the same time, though, if the government thinks there might be other life in the universe, even as a remote possibility, why only spend $22 million? And if there’s some deeper secret layer to the government’s UAP knowledge, why has there not been “a Deep Throat of the UFO world”?
Then again, Carter himself steps around the answers to these questions by pointing out that a lot of people are afraid of being ridiculed if they confess to believing in aliens, because a lot of the people who believe in aliens are insistent that the government as secret moon bases full of lizards. Maybe there is a Deep Throat of the UFO world, but nobody listens because the “truth” is so outlandish? Carter says that people can’t even get together to stop climate change or to wear masks during a global pandemic, so why would we all agree to believe anything we hear about aliens? Carter isn’t really arguing here that he thinks aliens are real and everyone’s lying, or the inverse, that government has inexplicably been telling the truth for once. It seems like he just wants everyone—the government and us regular people—to try and little harder and find a good answer either way. He even closes the piece with “I want to believe,” which puts a better point on it than we ever could. That’s the thing from his show!
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In retrospect, I don’t know that Chris Carter or David Duchovny were really all that essential to the success of The X-Files
Urgent Areola Peeking
Universally Fapped Over
That pic is fake.
That pic is fake.You mean she & Nicole Kidman aren’t twins from the neck down?!
Mother of God…(and don’t sell short Duchovny’s appeal with the ladies (or anyone who swings toward that preference))
Exactly, Soylent Green — Duchovny was, and remains, a very handsome man in the “Hunky Jewish Intellectual” kind of way….
Okay, the other kind of Hunky Jewish Intellectual.
Yep, Duchovny was the hotness!
Those cherry red briefs, rawr!
Yes! He was FIT!
I was gonna say, DD was THE reason I first started watching the show. I didn’t care at all about the scripts, I used to watch it with the sound turned off. Man was foine.
Even a straight guy’s gonna give David Duchovny a second look.
As a straight guy I don’t see what the appeal about Duchovny is, but without fail every single woman I’ve encountered who knows about him thinks he’s gorgeous. Even when he popped up in a dress on Twin Peaks, my girlfriend said “that’s a handsome man.”
Guess now we know why Mulder read so much porn — it was his way of getting deeper into Scully!
If she’d looked like that on the show, I probably would have watched it more often.
I want to believe.
I really don’t see how it’s surprising that the US government, or any government, would be investigating UAPs.
The one thing I do know for sure is, Googling “deep throat aliens” unequivocally results in some very unexplainable phenomena.
I want to conceive.
After reading this article, I want some Aleve.
Googled it. Was not disappointed.
There was an interesting article (at Slate I think) from someone working at SETI, who described why this sort of UFO research is so uninteresting to them. Reason being, SETI works on the reasonable principle that aliens are subject to the same physics and physical constraints as we are, while UFO research always seems to involve impossibilities. I’ve no real idea obviously. But it’s telling that even as our ability to record everything around us has grown by many magnitudes in the past 50 years, the aliens are still just out of reach – and the same amount out of reach. I frankly find it easier to believe in bugs in radar software than aliens who must, at this point, if they exist, just be messing with us.
My hypothesis has always been that the UFO aliens are just as rednecky as the people who spot them, and they’re only buzzing the planet because they think it’s funny.UFOs are basically the personal watercraft of blue-collar trans-galactic aliens on summer vacation
Come to think of it, Soylent Green, that might explain some of things that happen to people who claim to have been captured by UFOs — they’re just pranking them!
You just know The Predator does most of his shopping at Intergalactic Cabela’s
There have now been four military/government investigations of UFOs, and the reported results are always the same. The real unsolved mystery is why people keep expecting the next report to be different from the others.https://www.buzzsprout.com/1361605/8733907
Exactly. I know I’m old, but in the 1970s, long before the X-Files, there was a series called Project U.F.O. based on the actual 1950s-1960s Air Force Project Blue Book. Are people who are excited about this new study just unfamiliar with Project Blue Book?
Very short-lived series — done by Jack “DRAGNET” Webb, of all people!C’mon, you know the answer — people hope that this time the report will prove aliens are real, they’re visiting us in flying saucers to frag our cattle and do butt stuff on unsuspecting victims, and that the government’s been covering it up for reasons undoubtedly nefarious.
I watched that too.
The thing about Project UFO, as I recall, was that every week they proved it was a weather balloon, or swamp gas, or a guy in a bee keeper suit or something.
I like how every single time, the best available evidence is always fuzzy/grainy photos or video with little to no verifiable context.
Maybe it is like how the late, great Mitch Hedberg described Bigfoot: “I think Bigfoot is blurry — that’s the problem. It isn’t the photographers’ fault. Bigfoot is blurry and that’s extra scary to me.”
Nothing Chris Carter has done since about the 2nd season of the X-Files leads me to believe he is someone to be listened to on any subject.
1.) When you’re talking about pictures snapped or witness accounts from planes going hundreds of miles per hour, of objects they weren’t looking for, it would be far more suspicious if the government claimed it could identify all of them with absolute certainty.
2.) If there really were proof of alien life on earth, there’s a near-100% chance Trump would have used the evidence of them to distract from his many scandals or bragged about it to impress a crowd of visiting dignitaries or 9-year-olds.
3.) I love space and space research, but this “look for an answer” to every UFO sighting is quixotic. If there are two possibilities, a mundane one that involves things that happen every day and an extraordinary one that involves new sentient life forms fucking around in the atmosphere, it’s both technically accurate and faintly dishonest to suggest that we don’t know what’s going on.
We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.
There has to have been a second spitter.
Since it’s apparently not OK for aliens to say hello in public, it doesn’t make much sense that it would be OK for so many of them to be buzzing around in our atmosphere.
No alien would be interested in us because we have proven lately to be appallingly stupid. There is no conspiracy to cover up anything. Its all a waste of time. You think if aliens were real, a Republican could keep that under wraps without leaking? I can barely manage three people without things going wrong. I liked the show but… come on.
I always loved the South Park idea that the Earth is just an intergalactic reality show for aliens and that is the only reason they would be interested in us.
The only successful project the guy has ever done is the X-Files(which has aged horribly, in my opinion). If he can drum up more paranoia, he can trot out more of his paranoia fiction. Why would anyone pay attention to the guy? I mean, aside from using it to fill up more Newswire space.
How has it aged horribly?
The mythology stuff seems pointless in retrospect since we know it went absolutely nowhere. A lot of the case of the week episodes hold up pretty well though I think, especially the Darin Morgan and Vince Gilligan ones
I agree with this take. When it first aired I thought the long-arc episodes were the most important and the monster-of-the-week episodes were filler. Now I’m strongly in the opposite camp, so much so that if I ever decided to re-watch it I’d try to exclusively watch the one-offs and skip the deeper lore (as excellent a character as the Cigarette Smoking Man is, I feel like once you’ve seen his schtick two or three times, you get it). I do think the show deserves credit for popularizing the concept of longer season and series-long arcs; but it just didn’t stick the landing itself.
The conspiracy episodes were important to establishing the overall sense of dread and mistrust that enhanced everything else. They weren’t nearly as good, but I would argue they didn’t really dive off a cliff until about season 5.If the show had been nothing but MoTW episodes it would have just been Kolchak the Night Stalker. That’s not bad necessarily it wouldn’t have been the pop culture phenomenon it was.
I recently watched some Kolchak. It was very formulaic.
Recently I went back and watched the first one I can remember seeing, Darkness Falls, and thought it was great. I just stick to the monster of the week eps. Humbug, also great.
Darkness Falls was the first X-Files episode that I really loved. Humbug was great too
Titus Welliver in that ep., who I wouldn’t have known then. Darkness Falls may have been the first X-Files I taped on VHS, or I started taping them shortly thereafter, and I still have all the original airings on tape in a closet. All of NewsRadio too.
“Humbug” is the first episode I remember being funny.
The other season one ep. that I went back and watched again that was part of the reason I became a fan was Ice. That one also held up well. Humbug may be overall my favorite X-Files.
The drive episode with Bryan Cranston that Gilligan wrote is a genuinely great episode and it holds up.
“Be thou not afraid! No harm will come unto thee!”
Ha as a kid I thought that would be an important mythology episode and just got so confused.
Hmm. I don’t know what fandom’s general take was, but that was mine. Monster of the week was fun, and the mythology was made up as they went along, so all over the place.By the time something like Fringe came along—for me the closest in spirit, it went the other way. The mythology was decently mapped, but tv had gone away from self-contained episodes.
I actually thought one of Fringe’s biggest strengths was its ability to do standalone episodes in the midst of long-term arcs that could’ve derailed any possibility for episodic storytelling.
I think they did them well, for the most part, but the overall focus seemed to be the mythology.In general, I think Fringe was a stronger show on average, though that’s with the benefit of not building the boat as it went along. And evolution and not a rival, let’s say.
I started a casual rewatch about a year ago and I am finding that I forget a lot of episodes a couple of weeks after I see them. I only saw it sporadically when it aired (I was a bit young) and I am enjoying some of them, but a lot just seem kind of flat. I am planning on stopping the rewatch after season 6, but sometimes I am not even sure I am going to make it that far. I was so excited for Home (which was legit creepy when I saw it the first time) and the rewatch was good but not nearly as good as I remember.The mythology episodes do seem interesting early on, but I just started season 4 and even at this point you can see that they had no idea where to go. X is a character who seemed like a mysterious unknown, but I now know is just a convenient plot device. One episode seems to more or less posit the existence of an actual God and that gets glossed over. Season 1 has about 15 different aliens and Mulder even gets to see a UFO (even if his memory is wiped) so the whole thing become less “government using the specter of UFOs to cover up terrible things” and more “UFOs exist and we’re going to be colonized”. I know they are going to get to rebel aliens at one point, but really, for a show that worked at its best when science was driving the supernatural, this show has a lot of wacky elements.
As Evil Lincoln says, the mythology stuff goes nowhere…But the overwrought dialogue of The Smoking Man, the over use of the xenon flashlight all the time and the act breaks are laughable now. I agree that the Morgan/Wong and Gilligan eps are fun, and there is still fun to be had, but it’s all pretty silly seeming now.
I don’t know, I liked the idea of The Smoking Man because he really thinks he is doing the right thing for the country even when he is doing evil. It may be “overwrought”, but I think a lot of people in the NSA, CIA, etc. are like that — they think the ends justify the means even if the means are immoral and/or illegal.
What I liked about him as a villain is he seemed genuinely indifferent to other people hating him, which is what I think Trump badly wants other people to think.
It used to be we could kind of blow off the conspiracy cooks as harmless oddballs, now they’re trying to lead insurrections and shit
It is kind of unsettling that the nearest IRL equivalent of fan favorites The Lone Gunmen would be injecting bleach into themselves and storming the capitol and telling people Derek Chauvin has been replaced with a body double and Trump will be “installed” as president in August.
There was a lot of fear of right-wing groups back then too.
Especially after Oklahoma City. But then at least Republicans denounced McVeigh and didn’t try to claim he was a patriot for doing what he did.
It was a boom time for them IIRC. What with Waco and Ruby Ridge and the fear of UN black helicopters swooping you off the street, the rural compound real-estate market was on fire!
Tim McVeigh and all that, yeah. But until April 1995 they were pretty under-the-radar
Yeah conspiracy theories aren’t remotely fun anymore. Its no longer the Lockness Monster or Bigfoot, its Qanom and trumpism.
Back in the 90s, conspiracy theories were a mostly quirky and harmless hobby. Now they inspire dangerous inssurectionists, cause populations to turn their back on science and are pushed by malicious actors (both domestic and foreign) to bring about the end of democracy worldwide.
The show is pretty dated now, but it was a pretty unique show at the time (at least from what I was watching at the time). I would say that it was a great example of a show that was at its best in the middle of it’s run while it is airing. Before attempting to explain too much, before the mythology kind of spun out of control. But on another hand, has the obvious conspiracy nuts these days made us forget that whoever you want running the country, the government is likely still up to a lot of shady stuff we don’t know about? I’m very pleased that we got ourselves a change of leadership, but some questionable CIA policies and methods have been going on while lots of leaders have come and gone, for example.
The unsolved mysteries of…Unsolved Mysteries!!
The Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia!
“Keep watching the skies!”
“IT’S BRINGING LOVE!”“BREAK IT’S LEGS!”
They’ve been here for a long, long time.
Neil Degrasse Tyson recently said something along the lines of “In all my years, I’ve never seen a piece of hardware or software without glitches.”
So, Occam’s Razor time: aliens visiting in spaceships or human error…
Not really much of a question.
Really, it’s particularly stupid because people working in the fields of optics and sensors, who also happen to be on the internet, were quickly able to deduce the likely causes of what were being seen in those Navy videos right away. A big part being combat infrared radar can badly misinterpret slow moving objects if the right setting isn’t chosen. Particularly if you try to lock on it. It will throw you ridiculously bad airspeeds. The report does mention sensor artifacts or errors as a possible cause but it understandably doesn’t dwell on that much.
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There’s an interesting vid on YouTube that pondered various reasons why alien life wouldn’t bother giving a shit about us.One, obviously the ridiculous infinite vastness of space.Secondly, if they were looking for resources, our planet has nothing the rest of our galaxy doesn’t already have.Third, if they were real and advanced enough to visit us, would we really be that interesting to them? All they’d see is a bunch of upright flag-waving monkeys in clothes with weapons yelling at each other in a race to destroy each other and the environment.
“Third, if they were real and advanced enough to visit us, would we really be that interesting to them?”
The only other intelligent life in the universe? Yeah. I reckon that might be a tad interesting to the other beings who have figured out space travel.