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It’s the alien stories that always fly

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Mulder and Scully in “The X Files”.

Columnist NICK OVERALL says it’s hard to resist the intrigue of aliens and UFOs – and don’t the streaming platforms know it!

EVERY so often Netflix will release a UFO documentary that will never fail to hover around the website’s top trending shows.

Nick Overall.

This time it’s “Top Secret UFO Projects Declassified” and it’s chock-full of wonky special effects, nutty narrators and apparent alien encounters.

Shows like this are pure fodder for Netflix. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and yet they still work wonders in absorbing large audiences.

For other documentaries on the world’s leading streaming platform production value this shabby wouldn’t fly, but for the ones about little green men people seem to overlook it, eager to get caught up in a mystery. 

Some of the most successful of these shows in the last few years include “Ancient Aliens”, “Chasing Conspiracies” and last year’s highly popular revival of “Unsolved Mysteries”.

What the demand of these docos reveal is that UFOs and conspiracy theories continue to hold sway over popular culture, even 80 years after the craze first emerged.

While the idea of apparent alien visitors itself may be fascinating, the real events that entangled rampant speculation with the public consciousness is the true intrigue.

It’s birthplace: America in the ’40s emerging from the shadows of World War II. Nuclear weapons were more than ever in the minds of civilians, the Soviet Union was quickly rising in power, and the Doomsday Clock, a timer that measures humanity’s proximity to annihilation, started ticking.

Paranoia and speculation was at an all-time high and, in 1947, it would tip over the edge when the town of Roswell’s daily newspaper reported that a strange flying disk had crash landed on a ranch. 

Defence forces had released a press release announcing the discovery of an “unidentified flying object”, one they shortly after retracted in favour of a “crashed weather balloon”.

But the damage was done, conspiracy exploded and transformed Roswell into the UFO capital of the world, a title it still very much holds today, with a UFO museum and a main street that’s littered with alien merchandise.

Some 30 years later the Roswell incident would resurface when a retired lieutenant colonel claimed the weather balloon was a cover story, causing a new frenzy of speculation.

It’s no coincidence that the surge of interest happened during a decade where movie making was stretching audience imagination to new levels through films such as “Star Wars” and “Alien” (both on Disney Plus).

And even today, people can’t help but be hypnotised by a good mystery.

Take last year’s alien monolith craze, where strange, silver 10-foot towers similar to the ones from the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” started ominously showing up across the world.

The eerie silver blocks were placed thousands of kilometres away from major highways and human populaces just to help sell the bait that bit more.

Speculation has run rampant about their cause, from extraterrestrial beings to rogue street artist Banksy, and while no answer has yet been forthcoming, it’s the unsolved nature of it all that people seem to find so engaging.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that something like this takes off amidst a global crisis, the same way the UFO craze broke out in a frenzied 1940s America.

With decades of conspiratorial momentum behind him, in 1993 TV producer Chris Carter would catch lightning in a bottle with his creation of the pop-culture touchstone “The X Files”, which still holds pride of place today on Disney Plus.

Do they need an introduction? It’s the tale of two FBI agents Mulder and Scully who throughout 11 seasons and two films explored all things paranormal.

So impactful was “The X Files” that it ushered in a new age of government mistrust, an embracing of conspiracy theories and popularised the famous catch-cry “I want to believe”.

“Mulder and Scully came right out of my head: a dichotomy,” Carter explained to “Omni” magazine in 1994 in an article that, at the time, dubbed “The X Files” as “TV’s hottest show”.

“They are the equal parts of my desire to believe in something and my inability to believe in something.”

In 2016 “The X Files” got a revival that, even 14 years after the series originally concluded, still made a splash in the entertainment landscape.

Gillian Anderson has now moved on from the show, so while Mulder and Scully may not be paired up ever again, Chris Carter still believes there’s more X Files to be explored yet, especially with how popular the conspiracy shows continue to be.

Streamers, it seems, want to believe.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Nick Overall

Nick Overall

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