Season 1
If you had seen me as an eighth grader, you would have thought I was a loner. Back then I sat by myself at lunch, reading The Outsiders or the Bible. Or if I didn’t feel like reading, I doodled in my assignment book a series of Arabic numbers and Roman numerals—my secret code. (If you had asked me what I was writing, I would have told you I was translating Scripture.)
If you had asked me, the eighth-grade loner, if I were lonely, I would’ve told you no. I had friends, tons of them. Their names were Agent Mulder, Agent Scully, A.D. Skinner, Krycek, the Well-Manicured Man, Langly….
I remember curling up on my mom’s lap as she watched an episode of The X-Files. I was in elementary school—seven or eight years old. I had a blanket wrapped around me, half covering my face in case the episode scared me. I always watched shows with Mom, on her lap like that. On sick days, we’d watch noon-day soaps. On Thursday nights, we’d watch Friends. That’s probably what got me hooked on The X-Files to begin with: my mom loved it. I t wasn’t for another five or six years before I started watching the show on my own.
I watched The X-Files secretively. I don’t know what embarrassed me about it so much. Maybe I didn’t want to be seen as an X-Files fanatic, something like a Trekkie. Or maybe I wanted to keep it private, sacred, the same way I kept my crushes a secret until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
I do remember that my love for the show started late at night, during the summer before eighth grade. I was at my dad’s house for the week but he and my stepmom went to bed so early that I, who was used to staying up until 2 or 3 a.m., got bored with the quiet, empty house. One night I idly flipped through the TV channels until I landed on SciFi and an episode of The X-Files. The rest of the week, and the rest of the summer, I stayed up late to watch it. It pacified my boredom, and soon got me hooked.
Season 2
I became a Christian a year before my X-Files craze. My parents raised my sister and me Lutheran, since my dad grew up going to Lutheran school and church, and my mom was a secular Jew who couldn’t convince Dad to raise us any differently than he. I found our Lutheran church particularly boring, so it was no wonder that when my dad remarried Kelli, who insisted on going to a contemporary evangelical church, my interest was piqued enough to really figure out who this Jesus guy was. I had several “conversion experiences” between six and eighth grade. I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart whenever someone invited non-Christians to do so, just in case I wasn’t yet saved. I wasn’t about to take my chances. When I became an evangelical Christian, I was the only one in my family. For about half of middle school days, I was the only Christian of my group of friends. The other half of middle school, I didn’t have many friends at all.
I made up for this by getting absorbed in my three loves: God, The X-Files, and history.
Season 3
Miss Hendricks was a fresh-out-of-college teacher, who had the energy of one of us. She insisted on making American history fun. We acted out battles with crumpled paper balls. We sang the preamble to the Constitution together in class. We drew pictures of the Native Americans sharing food with the pilgrims. But sometimes we had to sit and take notes. There are a lot of names in American history, too many for me to have remembered by mere memorization or word association. Instead, I imagined each historical figure as a character from The X-Files.
King George III was The Cigarette Smoking Man.
John Adams was Mulder.
Sam Adams was also Mulder.
Abraham Lincoln was John Doggett.
My favorite episode has always been “Triangle,” where Mulder gets tossed into the Bermuda Triangle and ends up on a 1939 cruise ship. Everyone on the ship thinks he’s a Nazi, including a 1930s Scully, Skinner, Cigarette Smoking Man, and Agent Spender. It’s Mulder’s job to keep the ship going in the right direction, away from Germany, lest the Axis Powers win the war. Mulder gets the ship to go the way it should and prepares to jump off of it right before he’s caught or shot. But before he jumps off, he kisses Scully. All good episodes of The X-Files end like this. I had a crush on Mulder (of course—who didn’t?) and I thought I was Scully. It worked out well this way.
Season 4
Her hair was a dark red, straight, and it curved around her chin. Sometimes she pulled it back into a ponytail, but most of the time it hung around her face. And that face— it was pointed, thinner in later seasons, but still distinctively triangular even from the first episode. Scully’s nose, tiny. Her eyes were light blue. Sometimes she wore glass—big round things, in style only in the early 90s. She used them whenever she typed on her glowing, blue computer screen.
Scully was short, more than a head below Mulder. Every time she was on duty she wore a pantsuit. Every time—even if that meant a putting a jacket on over a T-shirt while on vacation. She carried a gun with her, and her badge. She’d flash that thing carelessly sometimes, assertively other times.
When Scully wasn’t at work, she was at home reading read or taking care of her dog, Queequeg. She spent the holidays with her family: her mom and her brother who was married and in the marines. She went to Mass occasionally, in the later episodes more than the beginning ones. Sometimes she even went to confession.
I liked Scully because she was a Christian, or at least she grew up as one. She had a pretty extensive back story, about her being a strong Catholic until she became a doctor or got cancer or something—something that made her trust stats and logic over faith. The writers of the show reminded us of this by giving Scully a cross necklace. Throughout the series the audience saw her clutching it, with the camera zoomed in on her hand.
For Christmas that year I asked for a cross necklace like Scully’s, only the one I got was silver. I found myself clutching it like she did. I’d sometimes even set my jaw the way she did, to make myself look like her. In my head it worked.
That year I got my hair cut like Scully’s too. In my favorite season of the show, season six, Scully had her hair cut short in a bob. Even though that season came out in 1998 and it was late 2003 by this time, I still got my hair cut like hers. Timeliness had nothing to do with it. I knew my hair would lay the same way as Scully’s. It did. I was a pant suit and gun away from being Dana Scully.
Season 5
One of the first Bible passages I memorized—certainly the first in the King James Version—was John 11:25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” I memorized it because in a season seven episode of The X-Files, cult members repeated the verse over and over again—fast, as if it were one word—to raise bodies from the dead. I wanted to say it as fast as they could, not to raise bodies from the dead, but to feel cool. It took me a few days, but I got it down. Under my breath, I mumbled, “Iamtheresurrectionandthelife….”
Season 6
I got my first credit card that year. Well, it wasn’t a real credit card, it was a Visa gift card, but it worked like a credit card. I used it to buy X-Files merchandise on eBay. I bought a simulation computer game with pixilated graphics. The game froze all the time, but it made me feel like a real FBI agent. I couldn’t get past a certain level, so I gave up on it. One of the first things I had bought with that card, however, was a copy of the 1997 X-Files blockbuster movie on VHS. When I saw the package on the front porch after school, I grabbed it and did what I always did when I got home from school: I ran up to my room and shut the door. I didn’t watch the movie until the rest of my family went to sleep so no one knew what I was doing.
Season 7
With a love for The X-Files came the inevitable love for alien conspiracy. I figured that there had to be some truth to Mulder’s sister’s abduction, and Scully’s cancer and her mysterious conception and birth of her daughter Emily, and the human-alien hybrids in the later seasons. There had to be. So in eighth grade I tried to prove it.
Mrs. Clinkenbeard, my English teacher, told us we could write our research papers about “anything unknown.” I chose aliens. My thesis statement was something like this: Aliens do exist. I used all the best sources to back me up: testimonials; books on Roswell, New Mexico; and my favorite source, Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book is a series of government files about unidentified flying objects and Area 51, available for download on the FBI website. Huge chucks of the document are blacked out. I used that fact to back my point: the government doesn’t want us to know the truth.
If proving aliens’ existence wasn’t enough for me to tackle as a 13-year-old, I decided to add another layer to the study: the connection of aliens with spiritual beings. Using verses on the Nephilim in early Genesis and passages about Satan as the “Fallen Morning Star,” I concluded that aliens and demons are one in the same, both hailing from the planet Venus, also known as the “Morning Star,” also known for its lake of fire. I also used the verse in John 10 about Jesus mentioning “sheep not of his sheep pen.” I figured He must’ve meant people from other planets. I didn’t know He meant the Gentiles.
Season 8
In the bottom floor of the FBI building, in a back corner, behind some storage units is the door to Agent Mulder’s office. Open it and you’ll see a messy desk, a ceiling acting as a dartboard for pencils, videotapes of alien autopsies, a Windows 1995 computer, and piles and piles of papers.
Hanging on Mulder’s office wall, right behind his desk, is a poster. It’s a grainy, black and white photo of a UFO and underneath the flying saucer are words in a thick, white sans-serif font: “I WANT TO BELIEVE.”
Season 9
By spring of eighth grade, I made a friend, someone who loved conspiracy as much as I did. Her name was Caecilia Anne, a girl who always wore smudgy black eyeliner and wrote to-do lists on her half-finger-polished hands. Whenever we were together, the conversation drifted to aliens, Bigfoot, or brain-sucking amoeba (from a first season X-Files episode when after Mt. Saint Helen exploded, chemicals in a nearby lake gave amoeba the ability to suck brains).
Caecilia and I had science with Mr. Clinkenbeard, Mrs. Clinkenbeard’s 24-year-old son, in the afternoons together. Mr. Clink, unlike his eccentric mother, was charming. He had dark hair and a muscular body. Caecilia and I were both secretly in love with him; we still haven’t admitted it to each other. But like all middle school kids with a crush, we treated him like dirt. We made fun of his clothes, his jokes, his teaching method. We pretended to hate his class to get attention. Every day while Mr. Clink taught us about volcanoes and rock formations, Caecilia and I wrote notes to each other and eventually started writing stories. Inspired by a documentary on tsunamis we had watched in class, we began writing an extensive, co-written play starring Caecilia, me, and of course, Mr. Clink. Everything that happened in our story was fantastical, a conspiracy.
Our love for conspiracy theories carried over into high school. For some reason Caecilia and I were convinced that our vice principal was doubling as a secret agent or was half-alien or something. I don’t remember what our story was completely. I think it had something to do with the fact that she looked like Monica Reyes, an FBI agent from the last few seasons the show. I do know, however, that during my freshman year my attitude toward The X-Files dwindled from obsession to just a healthy appreciation.
Caecilia and I were friends through most of high school. We joined show choir together, went to ninth-grade semiformal together, and hung out with the same group of girls. After a while, and I really don’t remember how, our conversations changed from aliens to boys and what we were doing that weekend, and when we were going to get our driver’s license, and what we were going to do for summer break. This worked out well because our friends didn’t care about aliens or The X-Files at all. They cared about the boys and the driver’s license and the other “normal” stuff that teens care about, the stuff that kids in middle school were already talking about while I was eating alone with a pencil, paper, and my secret code.