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The Paul Garson Files

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The Y Factor:
“Deep Nasal Passage” Reveals Pre-Launch Secrets of
The X-Files

by
Paul “Watch the Skies” Garson

 

You might have been there on the night of Friday, September 10, 1993 when the new The X-Files TV show broke cover, appearing for the first time on the Fox Television Network. I say “there” in the sense that you were sitting in front of your television and probably like millions of other viewers never getting up even to pee during the nine seasons of over 200 episodes. Maybe the operative word was “spellbound.” And just maybe, just maybe I had something to do with your mesmerization and the subsequent babbling of the mantra “I Want to Believe.” Why? Y? Because I was the guy that got contacted initially to make a presentation about the current UFO scene to the show’s creator, Chris Carter at Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Century City, some months before the X-Files even debuted.

Why was I the Go-to-Guy for the Out-of-this-World info? Now I am not aware personally of a deep nasal implant of an alien probe, nor have fleeting memories of floating up through my ceiling. But I have met many who have. So maybe it had something to do with a feature article that I had written for the now lost OMNI magazine, a quality publication serving up of science and science fiction first published in 1978, then having the plug pulled in 1995. My article concerned the UFO Abductee phenomena and centered around my meetings with an abductee counseling group. It also happened that for a while I was a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network aka MUFON, the worldwide organization collecting UFO data since 1969. I had also been privy to various private meetings with the leading investigators, the likes of the late Budd Hopkins and Jonathan Mack of Harvard. And, yes, I had personally seen some pretty strange stuff in my time, well, okay, X-Files-ish, stuff. So someone must have read the article and clued Chris Carter in on me, plus it also helped that I was living in the neighborhood and could easily levitate on over in my creaky 1984 devolving Volvo.

So I drive myself over to the Twentieth Century Fox studios, and successfully pass the heightened credentials check at the security checkpoint, which amounts to my name on a clipboard. Either my car or I elicit a grimace from the guard, no doubt an actor waiting for his big break. I eventually find a parking space, and remember this is all pre-retinal scan, pre-GPS, and start meandering through the multi-cloned production offices until I locate one marked with “X-Files” on a small sign. I’m quickly ushered into a room that has a certain claustrophobic feel to it, no doubt heightened by the odd, very low ceiling. Not quite a bunker ambiance, but close. Chris Carter is there to greet me, as are seven or eight other young-looking guys and gals of his “crew.” My first impression was their “focus.” It was, well, intense. Under such scrutiny did I feel like a fish or maybe a merman in a fish bowl? Well, kinda. Was I was sweating under my fingernails as I held the notes I had prepared for my presentation? Well, perhaps a little seepage. I had been asked to focus on the subject of the paranormal aka “high strangeness” goings on, monsters, UFOs, etc. Because at that time I didn’t exactly know where the X-Files was going, I had put together a smorgasbord of weirdness in my presentation from my own files and experiences.

As I began going through a litany of wacked out worldwide events, I did feel a certain deficiency in the oxygen supply in the rather close quarters. A lot of people in a little room can accelerate the carbon dioxide levels. A side effect is wooziness, even memory loss. And the X-Filers all seemed to keep leaning closer and closer as I spoke. Forget the fishbowl, I was more like the bug under the microscope. Was it a mind probe? Or were they just somewhat hard of hearing after listening to all the weird electronic X-Files soundtrack music? Who knew? But in any case I don’t remember any of them uttering a single word as I rambled on for about 45 minutes. What did I tell them? It’s a bit of a blur now. I seem to best remember what transpired during my dreams after eating cheese late at night. Especially Mozzarella. Hmmmm. Let me close my eyes for a moment and dream cheesy thoughts. Ummmm.

Okay, that’s better. Well, now I’m pretty sure I cited the case of The Eskimo Village. The report concerned an Inuit Village nestled at water’s edge that had been found devoid of any of its many inhabitants. Racks of fish still drying in the air. Pots boiling over fires. The only traces were hundreds of footprints leading out of the village and then suddenly stopping en mass, not another step taken, as if the entire village disappeared into the frigid Arctic air. No trace was ever found of any of the villagers. And looking up from my notes, I saw the X-Filers still staring fixedly at me … shall I say, icily. I didn’t see anyone taking notes. Maybe they had good memories or thought my story was uh, fishy … or Eskimo pie in the sky… or? Wait, I don’t do puns, I was now certain the oxygen level was definitely dropping, the CO2 rising. Oddly, the X-Filers seemed to thrive on the new atmosphere, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging. I looked away, back to my notes.

What else did I mention? The Farmer in the Field story. It went something like this. One day this farmer, way out in the middle of nowhere, maybe Kansas or Iowa, walks out into his field and doesn’t come home for dinner of meatloaf and squash. His wife spends days looking for him in the fields, the meatloaf long grown cold. Then one day she hears him calling her name as if he’s nearby. Which he isn’t, because she can’t see anyone, not even a scarecrow in sight. But she returns to the spot for several more days, his voice there, but growing weaker, fainter … until one day it’s gone altogether. Then I go into the story about the guy back in the 1960s that shoots something tall and hairy and keeps it stuffed in a freezer at his cabin in the woods, photos of it showing up in a magazine, and people writing in about maybe it was manslaughter, and then zip, gone, all mention disappearing. I follow my presentation with the mass sightings of UFOs over Washington, D.C. in 1952, then the records concerning Alexander the Great and the Persians about to do battle when three huge “flaming shields” that drop out of the sky and scare the bejeesuz out of the war elephants which promptly turn tail and stomp their own troops. I seem to remember reeling off a litany of lunar anomalies and probably a mention of the Belgian UFO wave, plus a dozen more “vignettes” of things “not of this Earth.” There were dates and names and details to all these stories as I related them, but still not a pad and pencil in sight from the X-Files crew. What in Hell’s Bells name were they waiting for?

Finally I get to the end of my discourse, and there’s a long, what you might call pregnant silence. Then I think it was Chris Carter himself who finally says something. “Do you think there is a government cover-up about UFOs?” Now it’s my turn to be dumbfounded. I stutter a bit, then finally say, “Well, yes, of course.” Those were the last words out of my mouth. Then it was wham, bang, thank you ma’am, can you find your way to your car?”

I never hear another peep, much less a high-pitched humming sound, back from The X-Files production team. But I do watch once the show debuts. I think there was one episode about an Eskimo village. Yes? No?

Now, years later, and after this now public “confession” about my own “lost” X-files episode, I feel I have the right to make some comments about the newly resurrected X-Files show in 2016. For starters, Mulder is just bit more Muldery around the edges, while Scully, really trimmed down, is looking good some 14 years after the airing of the last of the originals. I can’t say that much for the “revised” story line, this whole schamoogle about UFOs being a secret U.S. government conspiracy. But then I gotta remember all the giant triangles floating blimplike and silently over hill and dale and the fact that U.S. aircraft technology has already advanced 20+ years beyond what we see, including the present day and virtually old hat stealth aircraft. State-of-the-art stealth is now probably totally invisible. Anything’s possible, right? Even Trump as President. So UFO’s from secret U.S. bases, no problem.

Then again I remind myself that the history of strange flying objects wobbles back literally thousands of years and that human knowledge has always been constrained by a combination of ignorance and ego compounded by panic stricken blind fear. So I say, nah! to the U.S. government owning UFOs. I remember that people got roasted at the stake for stating the earth was not the center of the solar system, and that until about 1920 scientists declared there was only one galaxy and we owned that. Now how many have they tallied … 10,000,000,000 … that’s ten billion galaxies of over 100 billion stars each. Do the math. And factoring into Drake’s famous equation about planets with advanced civilizations and your head starts buzzing. Wait a minute … what is that buzzing … do you hear it? Do you?!

 

 

BIO

Paul GarsonPaul Garson lives and writes in Los Angeles, his articles regularly appearing in a variety of national and international periodicals. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and USC Media Program, he has taught university composition and writing courses and served as staff Editor at several motorsport consumer magazines as well as penned two produced screenplays. Many of his features include his own photography, while his current book publications relate to his “photo-archeological” efforts relating to the history of WWII in Europe, through rare original photos collected from more than 20 countries. Links to the books can be found on Amazon.com. More info at www.paulgarsonproductions.com or via paulgarson@aol.com

 

 

 

 

 

The Paul Garson Files

The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

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