The X-Files  was the breakout science fiction phenomenon of the 1990s. No other program captured the zeitgest of conspiracy theories, big government paranoia, alien abduction mythology, Gen X individualism, and post-80s seriousness as well as creator Chris Carter’s show, that on paper, probably looked like a ridiculous blend of The Silence of the Lambs and Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

So when FOX announced at the end of March that  The X-Files  was returning to television 22 years after it debuted, it was big news.

As two people who experienced  The X-Files  the first time around, Mike and Wendy talk about their experiences with the show (Mike was a true believer, hosted  X-Files  parties, and even read the comics.) We go into detail about Mike’s love of the show. Here’s a picture of Mike and his wife at a costume wedding in 2013 – note, Mike’s X-Files Division badge is something that he bought at Gen Con in 1996 (when he played  The X-Files Collectible Card Game with Langly and Frohike of The Lone Gunmen!)

And to celebrate the return of the show, Mike and Wendy picked 4 real X-Files that inspired the paranormal stories.

They first talk about the episode, “Field Trip”, which is based on the idea of hallucinogenic fungus and shared hallucinations and Mulder and Scully get trapped in a giant cave with a fungus that’s slowly killing them while indulging them in fantasy . Mike and Wendy discuss the episode and a little bit about how madness can be passed from one person to the next.

Next up is stigmata, which is where someone exhibits the wounds of Jesus (perfect for an episode on Easter Weekend!), the real X-File behind the episode “Revelations” is based on reports from all the way back to the 13th Century with the famous St. Francis of Assisi being the first recorded stigmatic.

The alien/human hybrid is a theme that runs through the real X-File of the alien abduction narrative. Female abductees have claimed that they’ve been impregnated by aliens, run through an accelerated gestation process, and then the baby is taken from them. They remember this trauma through hypnosis and  The X-Files  used the idea of an alien/human hybrid in the form of a child chess prodigy, Gibson Praise, who was wanted by the US Government as well as the alien invasion force.

Finally, Mike and Wendy talk about the strange history of sin eaters, a tradition from the end of the Enlightenment, where families would pay someone to “eat the sins” of a loved one who had passed, so that the sins would transfer to the eater and the loved one would be free of sin to enter Heaven.  The X-Files  episode, “The Gift”, deals with a sin eater who can eat the diseases from sick people and take them unto himself.

Then they finish up with a song inspired by the news of the return of  The X-Files , a comical warning to Chris Carter and FOX – “Don’t Mess This Up”.

Real X-Files Links

Official FOX announcement about the return of The X-Files

“Reopening  The X-Files:  ‘Field Trip””, Tor.com

“Shared Hallucination?”, shroomery.org Forum Discussion

Wikipedia entry on Folie deux (shared dementia)

“11 Odd Facts about Magic Mushrooms”, Livescience

The X-Files , “Revelations” (Watch on Daily Motion)

Stigmata, Catholic Encyclopedia  

The X-Files wiki, Gibson Praise (alien/human hybrid)

Alien/Human Hybrid, Arturi Extraterrestrial Community

The X-Files , “The Gift” (Watch on Daily Motion)

“The Weird But True History of Sin-Eaters”, io9

Welcome to See youe on the Other side, where the world of

the mysterious collides with the world of entertainment,

a discussion of art, music, movies, spirituality,

the weird, and self discovery. And

now your hosts, musicians and entertainers

who have their own weakness for the weird. Mike and

Wendy from the band Sunspot. Wendy. It's

springtime here in

Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it is absolutely gorgeous.

The spring things are coming back to life. It's

beautiful here in Madison, Wisconsin, as well. I mean, I wish I could open a

window, but then the chirping birds will be heard on the podcast and

we don't want to do that. No, I wanted to open the window, but every

time I do, it's sirens. Oh, gosh. So that's the one.

That's the one nice thing about living downtown is you get to enjoy sirens

and. Oh, and a thunderstorm last night.

I got so shaken by one of the lightning

blasts, I fell off the couch.

Wait, it actually literally shaken or

startled you? Well, the spring rains have come, and so

last night I'm doing some writing. I'm sitting on the couch, and I'm kind of.

I'm almost laying. I'm doing the thing. We got the computer on your lap, and

you're kind of laying down with my head against the window, and it

starts raining, and it's nice. And I leave the window open. You hear the soft

patter of the rain, and you hear the thunderclaps in the

distance. And then there's a lightning strike that looks like it's coming

straight at me, and it's so loud that I'm just like, ah.

And I just. So it startled you? It didn't actually strike so close that it,

like, vibrated the. The couch? Well, it looked like it

struck the tallest building in the city. Oh, my gosh. So, I mean,

that's still. I mean, it's still, whatever, 10 blocks away, but

it just. You're just like, oh, my God, it's. It. Anyway, I almost flew off

the. So spring rains. You must have gotten

all the lightning there, because we didn't get any. Holy crap. No, it was

a good one. It was a good one. And. But spring means

things are coming back to life. Sure does.

We love things that come back to life here on this podcast.

And, you know, one of the things that was exciting that

we heard about when we on our way back from Texas was that

the X Files are coming back to life. That's right.

That was a big, big announcement that kind of got a lot of people

excited. Yeah. Well, especially for everybody. Our Age.

Yes, definitely. And X Files

was something that I didn't. I didn't watch it religiously. You know, I'd catch an

episode here, there. But you, Mike, I know you had a group of

friends that, like, would gather and watch together in the

dorms and Every Friday. Yeah. So it was like a

cult type. A cult. Community.

Community activity. We sacrificed the chicken, and then we watched the X

Files, but it has. That cult kind of following. The. The people who

were religiously watching it. And this is before DVRs, so you actually. If you wanted

to see it before the spoilers came out, you actually had to watch it at

the time it was on television. That's right. Or broadcast, or. You had to

tape it. And that's how I saw that. So the first episode came

out September of 1993, and I

was just a junior in high school. And

actually, I saw the ads for the X Files, and it looked okay, but that

wasn't the TV show I was excited about. Oh. Because

premiering before the X Files was a

show called the Adventures of Briscoe County Junior. What?

Yeah. Okay, so you know who Bruce Campbell is, right?

Yes. Okay. Army of Darkness. That's right.

That's right. And so the year earlier, I'd seen Army of Darkness, and I'd seen

Evil Dead 2 sometime when I was a kid. And anyway,

love Bruce Campbell. And all of a sudden, Bruce Campbell's starring in a TV show.

And I was like, holy crap, Bruce Campbell's gonna be on tv.

And I was all excited about it. And in fact, when I was doing research

for this episode, when you read about the Fox network,

they were all excited about it. They were like, this is gonna be the next

big show. The president of Fox Entertainment says, if

Bruce Campbell is not the next big TV star, I'll

eat my desk. And he says that, and they go out.

It's a full publicity craziness. And I was

all excited because Bruce Campbell's gonna be on tv. So

I taped Briscoe County Junior

because it was a school dance that night, and I didn't want to miss the

school dance. And I could drive, too, which means I could drive a girl to

the school dance, which was even better.

Anyway, so.

So I taped Briscoe County Junior, and then I taped the show afterwards, which

ended up being the X Files. And Briscoe County Junior was. It

was a cool idea for a show, and we'll have to do an episode on

that sometime because it mixed science fiction with the Old West.

That was a really cool thing about it science fiction in the Old West. But

the humor was pretty corny. And it just.

It seemed like a show of a different time. It just wasn't, you know, it

wasn't what we were hoping for. And so when I came back that night from

the dance or whatever, I'm gonna watch the tape. I

taped it. And my dad, who was going to bed at the time, after I

got home, was like, well, Briscoe county, that was

okay. But this show afterwards, he's like,

now, that was really good. So your dad liked it? Oh, yeah,

yeah. So. And then I stayed up, you

know, till all hours, and I would have for watching the first episode. And that

was it for me. Like, I thought it was the coolest. It was that

X Files, man. Yeah, it was really different from anything else that was on at

that time. Yeah. And it was the whole zeitgeist of

like, I mean, government conspiracy stuff, too, was

huge at the time because we just had these, you know, you had all

these revelations of what, you know, some

experiments the government had conducted on people in the 1950s and

60s. You know, we talked about the mind control experiments with

lsd. We talked about the pollution of, I mean, the

plutonium clouds over Seattle, like little things like that. And

then, you know, and it wrapped into the whole alien

abduction thing. It just was at the right place at the right

time. That's correct. And it ties in very nicely

to our podcast here because it is a television

show that had, you know, was very prominent in pop culture

and. But the themes for the different episodes

relate to actual. Actual things that have

either been rumored or reported on or found in

our culture, so. That's right. I mean, a lot of. A lot of what the

X Files took from was,

you know, real life, quote, unquote, real life. I mean,

paranormal stories and things like that.

So we thought we go over some of the X Files,

some of our favorite X Files episodes that were inspired by

real life kind of paranormal stories

or themes that had run through the

UFO conspiracy community and stuff like that over

the years. And. And so I don't know what's going to happen with the X

Files return. Like, you know, is it going to be good?

The first movie was great. The second movie I still liked, but a

lot of people didn't. Did you see the second movie, Wendy? I don't

believe I did, or if I did, I don't remember. That was about it.

Okay. That was the one that had the. The second teacher, the Scottish guy from

Head of the Class is like a pedophile priest. Gosh. No, I remember that one.

I remember the bumblebee one. Bump. Yeah. Well, that was great. That was the first

movie Fight the Future. And, like, we even had a big. Like, I think a

big party. No, a big group came. You know, like, went out to go see

the movie. That's cool. When it, you know, when it was happening. And that was

super fun. And I had, like, X Files T shirts and hats. Like,

I just. I lived it because I went, oh, my God.

My wife and I went as Mulder and Scully to a Halloween wedding last. Just

last year. Should post that picture. Just like, we'll post it. That was a good,

great costume. And we'll post that picture. And it was funny because I even

had a. I had a little, like, X Files FBI

badge that I bought at Gen Con. And Gen Con used

to be held in Milwaukee before it was held in Indianapolis. That

I bought at Gen Con when I met the Lone Gunmen, who were

at Gen Con promoting the X Files card game. And then I

got to play the X Files card game with the Lone Gunman. That's

awesome. And, like, nobody was hanging around them. I'm like, it's the Lone Gunman. At

least would you not want to play cards with them? It was two of them.

It wasn't Byerly. It wasn't the guy with the beard. It was. It was the

guy with the long hair and the little guy fro Hickey and Myers, and

there was nobody hanging out with them. And I'm like,

do you read that people not realize the Lone Gunmen are right here and you

could play a card game with them? Okay. It's one of my

favorite convention stories. I don't have that many convention stories because I stopped going conventions

in the 90s, but that's pretty cool one. Yeah, it's my favorite.

So when I was doing some research for this article, too,

I was looking up to see if anybody else had written about

X Files episodes that were inspired by real life.

And, Wendy, this is the example of the Internet at its worst.

Oh, boy. Okay. Well,

so like, last November, Yahoo did a little

blog about it, and they picked four episodes that I wouldn't

have picked, and they picked Phenomenon that

were weak sauce at best. But they posted this

and then, like, three other blogs. Oh, no, I

just ripped them a month later. Really? They just

posted, like, the same article with some of the

words changed around. And it was like they were hired

to find content and just reword it. Yeah.

Copy that content and put it on their own site for clickbait. It really

was pathetic. And I'm like, this is. I mean, they could have done more in

an hour just for research of a cool episode, you know,

a thing and made a cool article and instead they just, you know, they just

copied it. So anyway, so if you find, if you. The probably

the SEO keywords we're gonna use for this episode, when you're looking around

around this episode, you might find similar stories. And

let me just tell you, they're crap. You don't even have to read them. They

are. It's just somebody didn't even put the effort in or

sad or gave a damn. All right, so that's too bad. That is

too bad. But since you are an expert on the X Files,

I would say expert. I know more than most. Yeah. So I have

a hat. I'm interested to hear what your, how your suggestions

compare to those, those terrible, terrible Internet fake

news word repurposers. Clickbaiters.

Right. So should we, should we dive into the episodes

and the issues? Well, okay,

we should start with a personal favorite of

mine called Field Trip. Okay.

Now, in Field Trip, Mulder and Scully go to North

Carolina and they're investigating the disappearance of a couple.

You know, they were like hikers, cave explorers, and they're

disappearing. I mean, they're investigating what happened to them. And

in the process, just to sum it up quickly, in the process,

they end up inside of a cave with a giant

fungus that's giving them hallucinations

and slowly eating them away.

That's nasty. You see, and they would do

episodes like these every once in a while that, that have hallucinations

and. Or they'd have dreams or alternate realities or things

where they could do the stuff that they couldn't do in the regular show.

Like Mulder shoots his boss in this episode, you know,

and then that's something they would use in the trailer to say next

time on the X File. And then you see him shoot his boss. You're like,

no. How did that happen? Or you see Mulder and Scully kiss

and you're like, what? What are they kissing for? What's happening? And it would

just end up being like a dream episode or something like that. And that would

just pull you in like it's going to be a game changer. And it really

wasn't. Yeah, right. But in Field Trip, they have these

first, first they're having separate hallucinations, and then in the

end they have a shared hallucination. And

so, number one, that's based on the real life phenomenon

of hallucinogenic fungus. Okay.

Magic mushrooms. Like, that's.

We've discussed hallucinogens before, at length. In the LSD

episode. That's right, yeah. And psilocybin and the active

ingredients that make people see things that maybe get

people to see a bigger reality than what we have.

But hallucinogenic fungus is kind

of. AI mean, that's a real life phenomenon, people seeing

crazy things. But the other thing would be the shared

aspect of it, you know, the shared hallucination. And

that's kind of. That's something like when you have a group of people see a

UFO or a group of people see

some kind of miracle occur. I mean,

that's kind of what they would refer to as a, you know, a shared hallucination.

Because. Because if it's something that you think, that can't possibly be real.

Well, unless it is real. The only other explanation for it is

that people are seeing something in their head,

but they're seeing something in their head together, which

is a phenomena in its own right. Now,

the French have a word for it, and you

are better at pronouncing French than I am. I don't know about this.

Let's hear Frenchie. Falie a deux. Falie a deux,

yes. Also happens to be the name of a Fall Out

Boy album. Oh, okay. I didn't know

that. I didn't know that. So a madness shared

by two, which is. I mean, I guess that's the people that. Like Fall

Out Boy. No, but

it's a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief

are transmitted from one individual to another.

So a syndrome shared by more than two people, and then they. A Folia

Troi, a Folia Quatra. Like, it goes through the whole thing.

And shared psychotic disorder,

induced delusional disorder. The idea that

a dominant person who has a delusional belief. And this is probably

something that you can apply to with cults and things like that.

A person that has a delusional belief and then

can make other people believe it too. Okay. So it sort of

like transfers between people. Yeah,

it's. It's. I mean. I mean, you've heard of the idea that ideas can

be viruses. You know, the idea virus memes. The idea of a meme

passing or a belief passing on from one person

to the next. And so

that kind of thing, like. So one person believes

something, convinces another person to believe it, and then when they go their separate

ways, they both believe it. So a mass,

you know, a mass hysteria or mass kind

of thing that can happen with this. And so

also, this is interesting. So there is a

military incapacitating agent bz.

And that's, you know, that

it's like a, like a gas or things like that

that people use to knock people out or stuff like that.

Anyway, that's been shown to

make it easier to induce dementia in

another person. Also,

anthropologists in South America have found that

whole same thing when consuming the hallucinogen ayahuasca,

which some people think of as. I mean, a lot of people think of as

a sacred. It's used in a lot of sacred rituals and everything. Like,

so the idea of sharing

hallucinations, sharing dementia influenced the X Files.

And of course, hallucinogenic mushrooms in the field report or field

trip is the name of the episode. And funny enough,

at the end, it even gives you a fake out ending.

They're like, oh, they figure out that they're hallucinating in the cave and then they

go off and then they do something else and then they realize, oh, no,

they're still hallucinating. And then that's the moment they really wake up.

Okay, so even gives you the classic horror movie fake out in the

episode field trip with hallucinogenic mushrooms

and shared hallucinations. And that was the first one I thought of when I

was thinking of X Files episodes based on real life. First of all, because I

haven't seen that episode since it was on in like 1999. And second of all,

because that seemed like they were

going for a plausible explanation instead of something extraterrestrial or

crazy. Now here's something that's a little more.

If you're Catholic, you might know about this particular

real life phenomenon. I'm not Catholic. Okay,

so you're gonna have to explain stigmata.

Now, stigmata is where you express

the same wounds as Jesus did on the cross.

Okay, yes, I have heard of that though. So I mean,

stigmatics. Stigmatics. I don't know the right way to say it

because I don't talk about this actually to normal people where we're just like, yeah,

that's stigmatic. It doesn't just come up in conversation every day. No, it doesn't.

But you'll have wounds from your feet and your hands

that will bleed and then also from the side.

And one of the interesting things about stigmatics over

time is that it doesn't specify which side

in the Bible that Jesus was crucified on. I mean, that

the Romans stuck a spear in. Okay, so

stigmatics have been. Have bled from both sides. I see.

And also, the whole idea is that

they bleed from, like, their palms of their hands.

And in the actual crucifixion, like, the nails would not

have gone in the palms of the hands, because that's soft tissue. Okay? So

if you got. If you're being hung by the. By nails in the palms

of your hands, it's just gonna rip out, and you're gonna fall off. Like, you

can't. Yeah, I know. Like, you can't support yourself

being crucified like that. So they would have had to do the nails into

the wrists. And so,

like, stigmatics over the centuries, like, a lot

of saints in Catholicism have exhibited

stigmata wounds. Okay. St. Francis of Assisi,

who's one of my favorite saints, he's the patron saint of animals,

and he didn't want to hurt creatures so much. He became a

fruititarian, which means he'd only eat.

Good for St. Francis. And everybody loves St. Francis. He has his own order

named after him, the Franciscans.

And he was one of the first reports of. Of

stigmatics in the Catholic Church. And so

the blood. He exhibited the wounds of Jesus.

And stigmatics, when they have that happen to them,

they have what's called ecstatic experiences. They get all emotional,

they speak some crazy stuff, like, the whole deal.

And stigmata deserves its own episode. I would love to interview one and

investigate and check out the wounds and.

And get more into it, like, somebody who actually does exhibit the

wounds. I would love to have a chance to check it out and be like,

you really bleeding, or did you just dip your hand in some ketchup?

Right. So the X Files had a whole. Episode

devoted to someone who was killing stigmatics.

Okay. Creepy. And, I mean, I'd say the

main thrust of that one is it kind of.

Now, Scully was introduced as a Catholic, so she was

introduced as somebody who used to be religious, and now she wasn't. And

she was always the skeptic while Mulder was a believer. And

so her lapsed Catholicism made for

a good deal of episodes where she was dealing

with that. Challenging. Yeah. And she was dealing with her belief

in things. And so.

But what I always thought was funny was that whenever they would

investigate things with Scully's Catholicism, it kind of

always implied that it was real, you

know, so in the stigmatic episode, like, well, something weird is happening.

The stigmatics aren't frauds. In another episode where she's got to

protect somebody, it's kind of showing

that, you know, what the Church was saying was real and that

there were supernatural things happening. So one Thing about the show

was that no matter how much doubt Scully

had in the beginning of it, by the end of it, she was always like,

yeah. I mean, she wouldn't, you know, buy it and stuff like that,

but it would always be she was wrong. Like, Mulder was always right.

And that's how it felt when you would watch the show. Like, yeah, she's gonna

be a skeptic, but it's not gonna be much of a show if the skeptic

is right. Yeah, that's true. It's not too much fun that way

anyway. Right? It's gonna be the Boring Files, and I live the book

Boring Files, so I don't need that. Yeah, we don't need to watch TV for

that. But, like, at the.

Like, at the end of this episode, you know, she

goes into the confessional booth, and for those of you who

aren't Catholic, I'm sure you've seen confessional booths in movies. You go in, you say

your sins, the priest tells you to say a few prayers, and then God forgives

you and you can take communion again. But she goes into the confessional booth

at the end of the episode, wonders if God is

speaking, but no one is listening. So there she

is. Re encountering her faith. At the end of Revelations is

the name of the stigmata episode, and that's a pretty good one. It's not tied

to the mythology of the show, so people don't really remember it

a lot. They usually tend to focus on either the big monster of the week

episodes that were shocking, like the one with incest and stuff, or they

focus on the alien. Alien. Yeah, alien conspiracy

episodes, which I think we should talk about

next. Okay. And, you know, so this is something

that was in several episodes, but the. I'd say that the

main episode that it was featured in is one called

the End. Okay. And that's

about alien human hybrids who. That's

right. And so they find a

chess prodigy named Gibson Praise

who has alien DNA. Cool. And so he's an alien

human hybrid, and they gotta fight to protect him. And that's how I'm so good

at chess, because he's got the extra alien intelligence or something. Right. He's

brilliant. He's, like, wise. You know, he's just one of those

wise alien kids. You know what I'm talking about? They're all over the place.

No, but either way. So they've

got to protect Gibson Praise, and people are chasing him, and aliens

are chasing him, the government's chasing him, the whole thing. And

what made that extra exciting was. It was the season

finale before the movie. Oh,

cool. So it was like a lead in almost a little bit. It didn't. They

didn't really continue the episode in the

movie, but they were kind of leading the elements that would be featured in the

first film. Fight the Future. I see in the Alien Human

Hybrid episode. And I just remember being all excited about

it because that was. I mean, really with X files, like 1998 X

files fever at its peak. Like, David Duchovny hosted

Saturday Night Live. Oh, man. And just

for a little down the nostalgia train. So David Duchovny is hosting Saturday Night

Live. And who's the musical guest? Jimmy Page

and Puff Daddy, who are playing their

song from Godzilla.

I remember that. That was a good song because Godzilla. Came out that summer,

and it was. They did a version of Cashmere that Puff Daddy

rapped over, and it was huge. It was on the radio all the time. Oh,

yeah. No, that. I mean, the Godzilla soundtrack. Between that and the

version of. Oh, the

Green Day song. Oh, that's right. Brain

stew. Brains. That's right. They did Brainstorm. They added it to the Godzilla

soundtrack, But the only difference is that they had Godzilla

screams. It was like,

yeah, some guy in. The studio like, okay, right, We're. Put a Godzilla scream on

this guy. Okay, here we go. Put it on the soundtrack. It's the band doesn't

even have to go in. We're going platinum and.

Okay, so that little 1998 nostalgia for everybody. So you can kind of

get. So, I mean, come on. David Duchovny's the X Files

had gone mainstream. You got a movie in the theaters, you got David

Duchovny on snl. You know,

X Files fever was at its peak. I wore a shirt and a

hat, I think, to the premiere. I was all excited about it. I could totally

see that. Yeah. Loved it. Loved it.

Fanboy. So what were they doing with alien human hybrids?

Like, where did that inspiration come

from? Well, that one came from alien

abduction stories. And so the late 80s and

early 90s, there was

Bud Hopkins and John Mack started studying alien abductions

in a more serious way. I mean, those guys were psychiatrists. They

were regressing people to get memories. And

a lot of the women who had claimed to be abducted

said that they were impregnated by

the aliens. Right.

I don't know how they did it. You know, I mean, it's

alien science. So they can impregnate them however they do it,

but they are impregnated with an Alien

human hybrid. And then they were

abducted again later and the baby was delivered. The

baby was taken from them and then goes off to

be in space. Or whatever for their experiments. Right. And

a lot of the theories revolve around how the gray aliens. And I don't think

we need to explain grey aliens to the audience at this point. No. If we

do, then you need to go back a few episodes and then you can get

the primer. But so they say that the grey aliens

can't reproduce on their own, so they're using humans

to reproduce. And the other big theory about the alien

human hybrids is that they're

introducing those hybrids to the planet

and creating, like, a separate group of them. So then when the

aliens finally come, it'll be a more peaceful transition.

I see. Yeah. Because there's a link in between the two cultures. And they can.

We already have, you know, they already. Have people that

we're attached to, people like family and people that are, like,

attached to us that we don't want to just kill or something. Because they're right.

You don't just. You're not just going to shoot them because it could be someone,

you know, could be an alien human hybrid. Makes sense. And

I mean, that was a. That was a big story. And, you know, these women

get very emotional, obviously, because they said they were, you know, obviously raped

by aliens, impregnated, and. And then the baby was taken from. Them

because it was like a double violation. It was an

accelerated. It was an accelerated story. Accelerated

pregnancy. And they would say that

all these women had pregnancy reports, and they went to

the doctor, and the doctor showed them that it was a positive. And

alien implants was a big thing at the time. And they

brought the whole alien abduction thing of women into the show

in the second season when Scully got abducted. Okay,

Now, Scully got abducted because she was having a baby herself.

Interesting, right? So she was having a baby during the second season, and some of

the Fox executives were just like, well, forget it. We can just recast the part.

But they said, like, no way are we going to recast the part. Like, really?

This is fried gold. Like, look what we found here. And

so you mean Scully, like the actress Gillian Anderson was pregnant? Yes,

yes. Gillian Anderson. They got. Created this episode, like, incorporate

that. Like a whole thing where she could be in space for a while

and, you know, and have her baby and then come back,

you know, that she did. Well, that's creative. It was, you know, it was a.

Good way to do it. So they even brought that alien abduction aspect into it

so that Gillian Anderson could have her kid. And

human alien hybrids became a theme to the X Files throughout. And it's just. It's

a theme in alien abduction stories throughout.

And, you know, 20 years later, now, 25 years later,

on with this, on after the alien research that these

guys were doing into abductions and stuff, we know more about

suggested memories that, you

know, people can have memories suggested to them that they

believe just as much as

things that really happen to them. Truly true memories. Yeah.

So there was research done into memory by Dr. Elizabeth

Loftus, who actually our friend Robin used to do research

for. And I always thought that was cool because she was doing research

and, you know, talking about alien abductions. That is cool. And.

But one of the things that Dr. Loftus did was they did, like.

A. Suggested memory to somebody about being lost in

a mall when they were a kid, and it was something that never happened to

them. But this person found their brother's journal.

Part of the experiment was like they were reading their brother's journal or something, and

they were reading that journal, and it talked about the time they got

lost in the mall. And so this kid

was like, oh, yeah, well, that's when I got lost in the mall. And he

remembered it afterwards, just like it really happened,

you know, to him. That idea planted it

in his head. And, I mean, that's not

surprising because I've talked to people,

older people, and some people our age that, you know, they'll

be telling you a story from something a long time ago and like, a

brother and sister or something, and they'll say. They'll tell the story as if it

happened to them when it actually had happened to their sibling, you know,

and then the other. No, that was me. That. That didn't happen to you. That

happened to me. It's just you've heard the story so many times, or, you know,

it got ingrained in your mind all the detail so much that you.

Right. That now you believe that you. Yeah, exactly.

And. And that is so, you know, now that, you know,

were 25. Like I said, 25 years after this initial research and

everything, I mean, people are starting to question. And not that these accounts

weren't always questions of alien abductions, but also, did these

psychiatrists, when they were working with them, did they suggest

something in the beginning? Did they say something like, you know, they're known to

be the alien abduction guys, so if you're getting hypnotized by that person,

do you. Chances are you already think you got abducted by him?

Right? You know, there's some kind of experimenter effect

there where you're talking to the

aliens guy. You wouldn't be talking to the aliens guy unless something was already up.

So alien human hybrids, big in

90s UFO conspiracy culture, big in

the X Files as well. And I think

we should go one more episode. I could. We could do a list of like

20 episodes. And I'm sure we should do an episode just on the X Files

and its effect on pop culture once it comes back. I was gonna say maybe

after we watch a few of the new season two, there might be some interesting

topics to that. I really.

I really hope they do it right because I didn't think the last movie was

bad. I thought it was pretty good, but it wasn't. People, they wanted more

closure than what they got from the movie. And the last couple seasons

weren't very popular with the fans because David Duchovny had lost interest.

He'd been doing it for a long time, and they just. It

kind of was running out of steam. So last couple of seasons, while I still

enjoyed some of the episodes, a lot of people thought they were crap. And,

you know, so we just. We don't want them to screw it up. And, you

know, you're. We're seeing that now too, with TV shows kind of having

a finite run in that the creators and the

actors. I mean, think about how they did Breaking Bad. You know,

Breaking Bad said they extended it a little bit by giving

AMC more episodes. But they're like, no, we have to have an end to the

story here. And that kind of. And it ended in a

great way because of that. And we won't say anything if you're

catching up on Netflix or whatever, we want to talk about it, but Breaking Bad

ended really well. I haven't seen it yet. Okay. It's good.

You'll like it. You'll like it. It's satisfying. I'm looking forward to it. If you

like the rest of the show, then I think you'll like that. Yeah, I do.

And for sure. And having a finite ending, I think really helps

people create some kind of closure. Yeah, closure. And you

haven't, you know, you have a last act, you have a final act, and that's

something they couldn't do, you know, 15 years ago

or 13 years ago when they originally did the X Files ending. So,

I mean, like, they brought David Duchovny back for the last episode,

and it was a 90 minute, you know, supposed to be a big deal, and

then it ended up being Just. Alright, so

let's do it. Right. You're going to bring it back. You got six episodes. Let's

do this for the fans. And don't just cash in on our nostalgia from the

1990s because it's something we grew up with and we loved. If you're going to

do it, give it your best. And I really hope they

do. One of

my favorite episodes is called the Gift.

And this particular episode deals with a.

Like a weird religious custom that I

had never heard of before this episode and you know, a weird kind

of folk tale about the sin eater.

Nasty. Yeah. Sin eater slash soul eater. Like

the idea that one person can

absolve you of your sins or your sickness by

taking it into themselves. Why would you want to do

that? It's so dangerous. I mean, that's the curse.

Yeah, well, it's like a sacrifice. Yeah. And this

whole group is based around this character that

can make people better by

eating them, you know, like eating their

sickness. And so they're trying to track down Mulder. And it

says that Mulder had a weird brain disease and he followed,

you know, he. He followed to find this like the

soul eater. Sin eater. And then he got cured

from it. And there's all these people who are surrounding

it who are like feeding cancer and

sickness and all these kind of things to the eater. And the

eater is just this disgusting mess, you know, because. Just full of

sickness, you know, full of every kind of sickness. Yeah. The worst of the worst,

everybody that he took on. Okay. And so

in the end, Doggett, who's played by Robert Patrick,

who is the T1000, he's the skinny Terminator

from the second movie. And he. He was a featured player in the last two

seasons. He gets shot

and then the. The eater eats him

and spits him out alive. But then dies because

he took. Well, no, he took on the. He took on the.

He took on the death. I see. Okay. So saved

his life. Yep. He saved his life by taking on the death

goodness. And so that was kind of like a, you know, a thank you moment

because he finally got peace from doing that. But

that actually was a custom in like 19th and 18th

century England. Wow. So somebody died.

The corpse gets taken out of the house and laid out. A

loaf of bread was given to the sin eater over the corpse. And

also a bowl full of beer or maple or things like that.

Consuming. Consuming that loaf of bread and consuming the beer.

And then they paid the eater like a sixpence

or something. I mean, something. It was like two bucks. In modern

currency, given to him for the consideration of his

taking upon himself the sins of the deceased, who now

freed, you know, it wouldn't affect them

after death. Wow, interesting. So then the person

who eats the sins, I'm assuming the rest of

their life isn't terribly pleasant. Well, I mean, in

the real world, it doesn't. I mean, sin eater was usually like a homeless

guy. So every village had some

kind of weirdo. You hate to say weirdo because I'm a weirdo,

but what I mean is like some kind of outcast character.

Okay, so Encyclop Britannica, here's In their article

from 1911, a symbolic survival of sin eating

was witnessed. As recently as 1893, after a

preliminary service had been held over the coffin in the house, a woman poured out

a glass of wine for each bearer and handed it to him across the coffin

with funeral biscuit. So

sin eating still survives. A corpse cake is placed on the breast of the

dead and then eaten by the nearest relative. A corpse cake.

Mmm. In the Balkans, a small bread image of the deceased is made

and eaten by the survivors of the family. The Dutch make dead

cakes with the initials of the deceased, introduced into America in

the 17th century. And so burial cakes are

still part of. Of the ritual in rural England.

And so people were doing sin eating all the way up

to the 20th century. Sinners. And that's the whole idea.

And so Jesus is the ultimate sin eater because he

sacrificed himself so everybody's sins could be gone. And that's, you know,

it kind of goes from there that if someone else can sacrifice

to absolve your sins, if Jesus can do it, then maybe some homeless dude

can do it for a sixpence. Sure. Yeah. So those are examples

of four episodes that took their inspiration directly from

paranormal phenomenon throughout history.

Yes. And those links will be up on the show notes, which you can

find@othersidepodcast.com 33.

All right, so let's get to the song for the week. Yes. So

we decided to whip up a song because we love the X Files

and they might be playing on our

nostalgia. Anyway, this track is

called Don't Mess this Up.

Well, they're using my nostalgia and they're trying to make

money off my youth.

Cause they're bringing back the X Files and they think that I still

care about them. Truth.

Will they make me feel so old when they dig up all the

actors. At least I'm in a demographic

that still matters. I still cuss the Lone Gunmen and their

luck. And I think I can speak for

all of us when I say don't mess this up

yeah, don't mess this. Up I'm

looking at you, Chris Carter. Well, we've been burned

before from Jar jar fakes the indy for don't you see

it's been reboots up the tail and they've all added up the

fair you just want money

so let's put on some Spice girls like it's

1997 Apple, famous surgeon, watch

your little seventh heaven don't you dare talk about

conspiracies after 911 but I think

that I can speak for all of us when I say don't mess

this up yeah,

don't mess this up.

Here we go.

Sam

how you scream and cry no, they'll never

bring back Firefly no matter

how you scream and cry no, they'll never

bring back Firefly no matter

how you scream and cry no, they'll never

bring back Firefly no matter

how you clean and dry Cuz they're using

my nostalgia and they're trying to make money of my

youth

they're bringing back the X Files and they think that I still care

about the truth

I want to believe was definitely not it

it was cool you made a second one but next time get a screen

can you even show the smoker man with a cigarette that's let

us be forever? There is something When I say

don't mess this up yeah,

don't mess this up yeah,

don't mess this up thank. You for listening to

today's episode. You can find us

online@OtherSidePodcast.com until next

time, see you on the other side.