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The X-Files Creator Chris Carter Says He's More Scully Than Mulder About Forthcoming Government UFO Report

The truth about UFOs may be out there, but the man who created The X-Files isn’t hopeful that a buzzy new report will get us any closer to finding it.

In an opinion piece he penned for The New York Times Friday, X-Files executive producer Chris Carter notes that the United States government’s recent study on unidentified aerial phenomena — an unclassified version of which is expected to be released to Congress today — reportedly does not contain conclusive findings of unidentified flying objects or their origins.

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“And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories,” Carter writes. “This is X-Files territory if there ever was any. But it’s also cause for some important questions.”

Carter explains that, while making Fox’s sci-fi drama in the 1990s/early 2000s, he “became a magnet” for people’s stories of UFO sightings and alien encounters. And that made sense, given that “The plot of The X-Files was built on a conspiracy theory: The government is lying to you about the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials,” he writes. “Do I believe the government lies to us? Absolutely. I’m a child of Watergate. Do I believe in conspiracies? Certainly.”

However, he continues, “Will the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers? I’m as skeptical now as I’ve ever been.”

The X-Files followed FBI agents Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (played by Gillian Anderson) as they investigated alien and supernatural phenomenon. Mulder was the believer of the pair, a brilliant criminal profiler who’d devoted his career to solving the mystery of his sister’s apparent alien abduction when they were children. Scully was the skeptic, a forensic pathologist whose own apparent alien abduction in Season 2 wasn’t enough to convince her of the existence of extraterrestrials.

Read Carter’s commentary in full here, then hit the comments: Do you want to believe?

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