20 Truths About the “X-Files”

Jennifer M. Wood and Mental_Floss present 20 Truths About the X-Files.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE IDEA FOR THE SHOW ORIGINATED WITH A PUBLIC OPINION SURVEY.
Chris Carter’s interest in the paranormal was piqued when he read Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/psychiatrist/Harvard Medical School professor John E. Mack’s analysis of a 1991 Roper Poll survey, which stated that at least 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens. “Everybody wants to hear that story,” Carter told Entertainment Weekly. “[Abduction] is tantamount to a religious experience.”

6. IN REAL LIFE, SCULLY IS THE BELIEVER.
In a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Anderson admitted that Duchovny was a skeptic and she was the believer. “Psychokinesis appeals to me,” she said. “ESP, telling the future, I love that stuff.”

10. CARTER DIDN’T THINK OF THE SHOW AS SCIENCE FICTION.
“I actually resisted the ‘science fiction’ label in the beginning, because the show is actually based in science,” Carter told WIRED. “If it weren’t for Scully, I think the show could be just kind of loopy. So the science and the accuracy of the science is all-important to the success of the storytelling. I think Steven Spielberg called Close Encounters of the Third Kind ‘speculative science’ and I would say The X-Files, for me, has always fit more into that category.”