Are We Living In an X-Files World?

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in the 2016 X-Files relaunch

Yesterday, the United States military shot down a third unidentified object in American airspace, this time over Lake Huron. (Technically it was in Canadian airspace, just barely, but stick with me.) These unknown objects invading American skies have become so common, so ubiquitous, that even I have joined in jokes comparing them to UFO paranoia and kaiju movies. Yet I find myself worried about our increasingly militant response.

After the Biden Administration waited several days and several thousand miles to shoot down the first Chinese spy balloon, members of Congress, mostly the Republican Party’s hard-right flank, went berserk. The Administration has met each subsequent one with swift finality, and they're still not happy. Unidentified objects (I’m reluctant to call them UFOs) traversing American airspace have become another rallying point of a fear-based, xenophobic American worldview, again.

When The X-Files first aired in the 1990s, I wasn’t savvy enough to notice the overlap between TV stories and current events. The narrative of extraterrestrials conducting a slow, covert invasion of Earth corresponded with fears of invasion at home. Pete Wilson ran two successful campaigns for Governor of California based on overt, undisguised appeals to racism. Demagogues stoked similar fears of refugees entering America from Haiti, Somalia, and elsewhere.

However, it’s worth contrasting the literal “invasion” of refugees and undocumented immigrants, against Chris Carter’s science fiction invasion. The X-Files depicted a categorical invasion based on strategy and fear. Chris Carter’s invading aliens cultivated allies among the powerful, controlled the media message, and used psy-ops to silence anyone calling them out. Refugees simply showed up, hopeless, scared, and desperate for food and a shower.

Watching events unfold around us, I can’t help noticing who’s using psy-ops to actually divide us. While Marjorie Three-Names and Lolo Bobo scream bloody murder about invasion, about undocumented immigrants bringing disease as biological warfare, and about the enemies at our gates, America’s rich and powerful continue finding ways to narrow citizens’ access to information. We’re busy looking for external enemies, and failing to see them at home.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s invasion is probably the most glaring, if only because it’s so ham-handed and clumsy. While he continues running one of America’s best peer-to-peer information sources into the ground, he’s had ten children by three mothers. Overwhelming human genetic codes and planting alien offspring was a literal X-Files strategy for invasion. Despite still having numerous admirers, Musk has devolved into a 1990s sci-fi villain.

Other internal enemies are less visible, but more numerous. Corporate media conglomerates like Sinclair Media and iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel) have a stranglehold on American media, and share a notoriously right-wing bent. Though it’s been a while since they did anything as obvious as submarining a platinum-selling country group, their ability to silence dissent is unmatched since the heyday of William Randolph Hearst.

It congeals into a massive goulash of influences where we can, as Fox Mulder famously warned, “trust no one.” While our political leaders hold power by lavishly identifying enemies inside and beyond our borders, the moneyed interests that bankroll their reelection campaigns continue finding ways to foment disunity and paranoia. Law and society persist in undermining the tools of community organization, and we’re left atomized, unable to defend ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand me. The X-Files showed the alien invaders’ human allies as a tight-knit cabal, so friendly that they could gather in one room and make binding decisions quickly. There’s no material evidence of such literal collusion outside a TV writers’ room. In reality, it’s more likely a sloppy agglomeration of mutual back-slappers whose needs happen to coincide. But the patterns are, if not instructive, at least illustrative.

I don’t believe, based on evidence, that it’s going too far to say that America’s rich are currently using the playbook from 1990s science fiction to overthrow the existing society and engineer one that suits their needs. Though the January 6th insurrection failed to coalesce into a coup, it didn’t need to. Subsequent years have seen us descend into exactly the bureaucratic intransigence and partisan backbiting that Mulder and Scully fought against for eight seasons.

Spotting UFOs in American airspace is, arguably, the endgame of this paranoia. It has Americans literally looking into the clouds or across the ocean to spot the enemies that have already seized the levers of American power. Our country’s wealthy and powerful have taught us to live in constant fear and distrust, which undermines our most rudimentary tools to protect ourselves against them. Flying saucers have become just another decoy for power.