The X-Files and Roswell
Over the course of nine seasons, the FOX drama The X-Files constructed a sprawling mythology centering on a government conspiracy and the existence of aliens. What began as the personal journey of FBI agent Fox Mulder to discover what happened to his sister turned into a much larger narrative involving a pending invasion and recolonization of the Earth, a deadly virus, human-alien hybrids, black oil, alien bounty hunters and super soldiers. All of the events depicted on the series, however, have at their roots an actual event that occurred close to five decades before fellow agent Dana Scully joined Mulder in his investigation—the supposed crash in 1947 of a UFO in the small town of Roswell, New Mexico.
“We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race,” the mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man, one of the chief members of the cover up, explains in season six. “Aliens who were coming to reclaim this planet and destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion. To create for them a slave race of human-alien hybrids. They were good plans, right plans. Kept secret for over fifty years, ever since the crash at Roswell.” While the events in New Mexico served as the catalyst for the narrative of The X-Files, they also mark the starting point for contemporary investigations into the UFO phenomenon. Although many believe that Earth was visited thousands of years earlier by “ancient aliens,” and unidentified objects in the sky were reported well before the infamous “incident,” Roswell remains the true beginning for the majority of UFOologists.
In their book Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-Up (New Page Books, 2009), Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt utilize eyewitness accounts and secondhand reports to offer a detailed description of what actually happened in Roswell. “In early July of 1947, something crashed to Earth in the high desert of eastern New Mexico during one of those severe thunder and lightning storms that occurs in the region every year during monsoon season,” they write. “A few days later, the U.S. Army Air Forces electrified a nation and the world by issuing a press release announcing that its 509th Bomb Group at the Roswell Army Air Field, located just south of the sleepy New Mexico town of Roswell, had ‘captured’ a flying saucer that had crashed nearby. Within hours, however, a press conference was hastily convened at the Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to announce that it was all a big mistake. The flying saucer was nothing more than a misidentified weather balloon.”
Carey and Schmitt go on to make a very credible case that it was not a weather balloon after all but an actual UFO instead, and that the true events of the Roswell Incident were kept secret in a far-reaching conspiracy that rivals the fictional X-Files itself. Civilians were intimidated to keep quiet over what they saw in the fields surrounding Roswell—including death threats to not only themselves but family members as well—farms were ransacked for any parts of the wreckage that may have been kept as “souvenirs” and a few select individuals were even paid off with bribes. “I knew that he worked on a top secret project, word gets around, but Bob was always a patriot first,” the wife of an air force colonel tells Fox Mulder during the initial season of The X-Files. “He took loyalty to his country as an oath.” As Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt learned while researching Witness to Roswell, the same could be said of the actual military officers at Roswell Army Air Field who remained silent for decades afterwards.
“Ellens Air Base, the same base that we’re at right now, the same base that for some strange reason doesn’t appear on your US government map, is supposedly one of the six sites where parts from the wreckage were shipped,” Fox Mulder explains to Dana Scully in the episode “Deep Throat.” While the Idaho locale is obviously fictional within the realms of The X-Files, Carey and Schmitt have been able to piece together a short list of possible destinations for the actual Roswell debris. Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, has always been considered the primary location but Edwards Air Force Base, CIA headquarters in Langley, Area 51 in Nevada and White Sands, New Mexico, are also mentioned by the authors.
Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus is a government-funded research facility located near Wright Air Field. According to the first and secondhand accounts described in Witness to Roswell, a key component found at the crash site was a “memory metal” that could be crumpled in one’s hand only to return to its original shape afterwards. The thin, foil-like substance also could not be cut, burned or even pierced by bullets. Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt relate the story of another Roswell investigator, Anthony Bragalia, who discovered “progress reports” generated from Battelle Memorial Institute in the late 1940s that relate to the development of a comparable new substance known as Nitinol.
“Nitinol, an amalgam of nickel and pure titanium, displays ‘shape-recovery’ properties similar to those described by Roswell witnesses,” Carey and Schmitt report. “Nitinol ‘remembers’ its original shape by returning to that shape when crumpled. It possesses a high fatigue strength, is lightweight, is aluminum-like in color, and can withstand a blowtorch.” In the minds of UFOologists like the authors of Witness to Roswell, Nitinol is the result of secret experiments conducted on the Roswell wreckage.
Fox Mulder makes his own claims on The X-Files in regards to scientific advancements that relate directly to the UFO crash in New Mexico. During the season one episode “Deep Throat,” for instance, he maintains that clandestine aircraft flown in Idaho actually contain alien technology and cause mental breakdowns in the aviators who pilot them. “I think that men like Colonel Budahas are physiologically incapable of dealing with the stress of flying the aircraft we saw, of doing those maneuvers at those speeds,” he tells Dana Scully. “I mean, we’re talking about technology so sensitive and advanced it’s taken almost fifty years to make it work.”
The following season, Mulder insists that the World War II program known as the Philadelphia Experiment, which was attempting to “render battleships invisible to radar,” continued long after the war and likewise utilized information recovered at Roswell. “Less than nine months after the crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, the USS Eldridge did more than just hide from radar screens—it disappeared altogether from the Philadelphia Naval Yard, only to reappear moments later, hundreds of miles away in Norfolk, Virginia,” Fox Mulder explains. “The physicists may have been trying to manipulate wormholes on Earth. Actual portals where matter interferes with time at a relatively decelerated or accelerated rate.”
Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt maintain in Witness to Roswell that debris was not the only item recovered in Roswell, as a small number of dead alien bodies—as well as one living specimen—were also discovered. The descriptions offered by those interviewed by the authors are eerily similar to the alien creatures seen on The X-Files. “The being’s head was proportionally larger than a human head,” Carey and Schmitt write. “The being had two large, round eyes, though one source did suggest the eyes were ‘Oriental or Mongoloid, deep-set and wide apart.’ Its nose was vague, with only a slight protuberance. Its mouth was a small slit and opened into a slight cavity. The mouth apparently did not ‘function as a means of communication or as an orifice for food ingestion,’ and there were no teeth. The neck was thin, as was the torso. The arms were long and thin and the hands reached close to the knee.”
The fate of the sole surviving alien from Roswell is uncertain. Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt have gathered conflicting reports regarding its trail following the events of the crash, including evidence that it was transferred to White Sands, shot by “panicky sentries” while trying to escape and even surviving as a prisoner until as late as 1952. All accounts, however, suggest that it was accidentally killed at some point following its capture. On The X-Files, meanwhile, the future of any alien discovered on the series meets with a more immediate and intentional outcome. “After the Roswell Incident in 1947, even at the brink of the Cold War, there was an ultra-secret conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Britain, both Germanys, France,” the conspiracy informant known as Deep Throat explains to Fox Mulder. “And it was agreed that should any extraterrestrial biological entity survive a crash, the country that held that being would be responsible for its extermination.”
In Witness to Roswell, Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt quote Dr. Thomas E. Bullard of Indiana University, a folklorist who suggests “that most legends are derived from some basis of factual occurrence. Cult figures are often composites of true-life individuals, and classic fictional stories typically evolve around genuine historical events and people.” The FOX drama The X-Files may be a work of fiction, but many of the events depicted on the series reflect actual events that have been investigated and studied by contemporary UFOologists. Just as modern alien studies begin with Roswell, the same is true of the mythology that surrounds The X-Files.
And for the likes of Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt, the truth is as much “out there” as it was for Fox Mulder.
Anthony Letizia (March 26, 2012)
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