Hypernormalization

kept hidden from the American public? What is it our government doesn't want us to know? This new motion picture reveals the startling proof that the government actually has the wreckage of Appliance Saucer and the bodies of alien astronauts. You will learn the incredible story of the most startling government cover up ever conceived. See a story of the UFO Covered up Hanger eight D. I'm Toby Ball and

this is Strange Arrivals Episode twelve. Hypernormalization in Pearson's Magazine in Great Britain and Cosmopolitan Magazine in the United States serialized H. G. Wells The War of the World's It was published in book form the following year. It is one of the first stories of humans confronted with beings from outer space, and its inspired movies, comic books, in orson Wells famous radio broadcast. It's safe to say that most alien related popular culture doesn't engage to directly with

the UFO folklore. Classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Day the Earth Stood still common on larger social issues of the time. Abduction accounts have led to movies like The UFO Incident and Fire in the Sky, which addressed those particular stories, but not the broader UFO context. Even Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which borrows some from the UFO folklore of the late nineteen seventies, does not concern itself much with broader themes of government complicity

beyond the security around Devil's Tower. The most significant piece of popular culture to use the UFO folklore was the iconic nine nineties television show The X Files. I had an idea way back in the eighties there was a show on that I loved when I was a kid called cold Check The Night Stuck, and it was the scariest thing I've ever seen on TV. So I thought, there's nothing scary on TV one, and I try to do a show that is as scary as that one.

This is Chris Carter, creator of The X Files. So I sat down and came up with the characters of Molder and Scully FBI agents. I was inspired, especially you can see Scully's red hair by Silence of the Lambs. That was an early inspiration. So I came up with these two characters, and I kind of turned the tables on what would be the stereotypical believer in skeptic Maiden Molder the male the believer, and Scully the female, the skeptic.

I wanted to make her not only a doctor, but a scientist, so she could refute Molder's claims with her hard science. It's a take on another iconic duo, the Kirk Spock partnership from the original Star Trek, a way for the issues of the show to be reasoned through the two lead characters. The show is fictionalized, scripted storytelling vehicle for these characters, Molder and Scarlet looking for the truth.

And I said to them, you know, they wanted to wrap up the episodes at the end kind of in a neat bow with an explanation for what Malder and Scully had seen. And I said, that's exactly what you don't want. You don't want to have the answers. You want to be left with wonder, you want to be left with ah. You want to be left with your own opinions at the end. And it took me a real hard sales pitch to get them to understand that. With this initial conception in place, Carter brought together writers

to help develop the show and write episodes. I was really lucky to hire two teams of smart guys. Glenn Morgan and James Wong were a writing team, uh, and then a writing team of Howard Gordon and Alex Gonza, who were also too smart guys who went on to create Homeland together. I'm glad more gonna it's one of the exact producers of The X Files and you're one two for. And then the last time Morgan wrote with a partner named Jim Wong, who had been friends with

since high school. We were gonna go on some other show, a romantic comedy that was the hit pilot of that season, and Peter Roth, who was the head of Fox TV, had said watch his pilot I demand that you watch his pilot, and so sort of career politics, we go, well, we'll watch this pilot the X Files and tell Peter thanks for thinking of us, but we're gonna go do this other hot show. And uh, Jim and I watch

Exiles pilot, We're like, WHOA, I want to do this show. Carter, along with the two writing teams, developed the Molder and Scully arc through different types of stories. Depending on the week, it could be a horror, suspense, thriller, or paranormal episode. So The X Files from the very beginning was not just going to be an UFO alien show. It was

going to be more than that. And I had actually created a marketing package before any of these people came on when I turned the pilot and originally to twenty Century Fox, spelling out what the show was. So it just happened that I was able to pair with the right people to bring the idea of making it a horror show, a suspense show, a thriller, what have you, that it became. Really three fifths of the time it was something other than aliens and UFOs. The shows can

be broken down into two types. The monster of the Week shows that are primarily standalons, but which also advanced the Molder Scully dynamic and the mythology episodes which run throughout the length of the series until the ongoing UFO story. We did, I think six mythology episodes typically per season, a two parter, three two partners actually, and that kind

of became our formula. The way modern Scully coached the other typically sixteen to nineteen cases was by taking positions, by taking hard edged science versus a obdurate and determined belief in the paranormal on Moulder side, And it became kind of competitive, and it became a really a long uh nine years flirtation between the two characters and a seduction of sorts. These episodes required the writers to be able to articulate both a skeptical and a paranormal explanation

for each phenomenon investigated by Molder and Scully. For Morgan, who had grown up very open to the reality of the paranormal, writing from Scully's perspective opened his eyes to a new viewpoint. Certainly, working on the X Files, the Need to be Scully is the first time that I started looking at what's the other side of the story, Because you always had to have Muhler's explanation. You have to have Scullies explanation, and many times you'd have to

have an explanation was down the middle. So it was the X Files and having to write for Scully that I started getting a little more grounded, a little more skeptical. Movies, books, and television shows that are inspired by or reference purported actual events make a claim on some relation to reality. When shows are prefaced by, based on a true story, or inspired by actual events, the implication for the audience is that what they are consuming is not mere fiction.

It is given a stamp of some sort of factual legitimacy. In a note to open The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown famously wrote that while the characters and plot of the book were fiction, the history it referenced was factual. This was, to put it mildly, a ratch. Carter had to contend with how close he wanted to hue to actual cases and the stories that were out there. When we first started this show, there was something interesting that happened. Fox had bought my pitch, they had liked my outline,

they had liked the pilot script. We had begun casting, and we had filmed the pilot. We had shown the pilot to the network. They were very happy with it, but they wanted me to put a disclaimer up before the show, saying that for the viewer that these are all based on actual events. It was as if we were creating a kind of documentary in the network's mind for the pilot episode. I went along with it, but then it's like, I realized that's not what the show is.

I was trying to create a sense of awe and the idea that science doesn't have all the answers, and that religion doesn't have all the ans ers, and that there are things beyond the pale. I liked all that, but I also have to say I come at this from more Scully side than Moulder's side, with a science bias. I really have a kind of prove it to me philosophy, and so really it was me. The thesis was my own troubled perspective on what is true and what is not.

While there were more episodes that were not concerned with UFOs, the mythology is what many people associate with the show. The X Files did pull from the line of UFO folklore that we've been examining centered around government conspiracy and cover ups, but it also took from another strain of UFO folklore, alien abductions. We looked at alien abductions in Season one of Strange Arrivals, and the X Files was

created during the late evolutionary phase of that narrative. For Carter his collaborators, this was the cutting edge of UFO studies at the time. There were two things I've been reading about UFOs and alien abductions. But also I was given just my chance a survey called the Roper Survey, which was done by Dr John Mack, who, in the

UFO afficionado will know well. Mac was a highly regarded professor of psychology at Harvard who came to believe, along with Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people had been abducted by aliens. Back to the Roper Survey, and it said that millions of Americans believed in the UFO phenomenon, some millions less believed they had actually seen a UFO, some millions less believed they had had contact, but that there was interest

in the phenomenon. And so I thought the first thing, and I would like to do is play with that in a personal way Molder, making moulder sister an abductee, which is what his entry was into the world of the paranormal. I had kind of three go to guys was Dr John mac David Jacobs and Bud Hopkins. Those were the three people that I read mostly and I had I really developed my sense of all things UFOs

and abductions through reading their books. This is Carol Rainey Bud Hopkins ex wife and former research partner, talking about how Hopkins changed the alien abduction narrative from what had been developed over more than two decades, starting with the alleged abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in the mountains of New Hampshire. He is writing added to it was that nobody was safe anywhere, that aliens could enter your bedroom at night, coming straight through the walls, coming through

the windows. I mean his view of alien beings in the world was that they were godlike. Really they I mean ordinary physics did not prohibit them from doing whatever they wanted to do to take advantage of people's helplessness, and they were the abductees were used in Budd's thought in the same way that we observe, you know, wolves out on the in the wild, and we experimented on them to some degree from afar, and that's what he

felt the aliens were doing to us. They might put tracking devices in us, what's called an implant these days. And you know, many of his people came up with those implants, partly to add credence to Bud's narrative and because that was the story that was becoming increasingly popular

in mainstream media during the nineteen eighties and nineties. Carter had established that a key point in the X Files mythology would be that Mulder's sister was abducted by aliens, and he had taken the Hopkins mac Jacobs books as the source material for alien abductions. So the question was how to portray the actual events in the show? How is she gonna be abducted? I think we start with a lot of what the accepted mif was that it

was at night, that there was a bright light. You know, it's it's real monster movie stuff, really the mythology, and then you go, well, people know what it is by now because of the Hills story that you know, that was a movie of the week. This was the made for TV movie. The UFO incident about the Betty and Barney Hill story and then Close Encounters is like so huge. Everybody knew, you know, the the Barry being abducted is just one of the great scenes. And so and what

can we do different? And you had read some things where people had been taken out their window, or so, well, let's do that, or let's make something up. How can we make it fresh? And it's here that the writer's creativity pulled the story a little bit away from the abduction narratives that had served as their source material. And I think actually that's where the damage to the mythology, because you made stuff up because you needed to have

something different for a TV show. And so people who saw this episode came away with a slightly different conception of an abduction that had been in the books at the time, and the folklore subtly changed. The childhood abduction of Molder sister is the er moment of his obsession with UFOs. From that event, Carter Morgan and the other

writers built out the X Files mythology. I had what I would consider to be the kind of foundation of the mythology that was based in things that anybody could read about alien abductions and kind of classic scoopmark stars, the triangular shapes, it kind of shape that appeared on Scully's back and the pilot episode. So I had the ideas that I had taken from all of the accumulated science and background on alien abductions, and I created a

world with the episode. Actually, if you watch the first and second episode of The X Files and the season finale, which is called the erlen Mere Flash, you really get a foundational view of the X Files mythology that was established by Chris. You know that Maulder's sister had been abducted, and what the background was with Malder, you know. And I think those are things that you you have and when you're selling a pilot, especially back in those days,

it's just kind of red meat for executives. And and then you get in a room. Nowadays you have to have the whole show figured out for five years. But back then you gave a piece of paper and this is what six episodes we could do, and they okay, So it just becomes a process of sitting down and going what can it be. Well, we're gonna introduce a government conspiracy deep background. So you bring a deep Throat,

you bring up more UFO stuff. The conspiracy is a critical part of the mythology, and in follows iconic characters such as the Smoking Man, Deep Throat and the government agent Alex Krycheck. I've always been interested in conspiracies, I think because I was a child of the Watergate era. You know, I was a disbeliever in what our government was telling us, and they believer that they were keeping

things from us. So they fit in perfect with the UFO literature, which is all about government, you know, black budget, secret operations, and all the reasons there are for the government to keep the truth about extraterrestrial life from the American public and those who you know, things that are you know, scientific, cultural, religious. Uh, it would upend a

lot of the institutions in society. There's this idea that the government has been keeping all this stuff quiet secret for their own purposes, and that one day somebody will get them to disclose, or there will be reason to disclose the truth. I think that's where the Expiles mythology took flight from the accepted X Files mythology, and so we were imagining the world before disclosure and modern Scully as the people seeking to learn the truth. Of course,

the best laid plans and all of that. No matter the amount of planning in foresight, there's always the potential for circumstances beyond the creator's control to complicate things. If you look at it the first year, there wasn't a lot of mythology. I think on the twenty two episodes

five maybe it wasn't a conscious thing. And January of the first season, Jillian became pregnant, so she was going to have her baby in September, and so that was like, well, she wasn't gonna be able to work on the first few episodes that we were filming for a year two. We scrambled because we didn't know what to do, how to if she was going to be pregnant for the whole first part of the second season, how we were

going to do modern Scully. And we figured I had a clever way to do that, a way that actually played into the larger storyline. But I actually had a network executive saying, I mean, you've gotta get rid of her in no uncertain terms, and so you have to fight against that. You know, you can't establish these two characters and then just break him up because he uh

doesn't want a pregnant woman working on the show. And so we all came up with like Skully's gonna disappear, and that really began the mythology, the need to tell multiple stories near the end of the first year. We never set out to be the serialized show. There was necessity due to Jillian's pregnancy that we sort of shaped it in the end of the first year to go into her disappearing for the first few episodes. In the

second year, strange arrivals will return after the break. During our conversation, Glenn Morrigan told me about one of the Monster of the Week episodes that he wrote, and talked about how a fictitious story seeing on a television show could come to enter people's consciousness as something real. It's an example of the larger folklore producing dynamic of popular culture. I would get a publication every Monday. It was called

Science News. It was really a pamphlet, no more than ten pages of findings in the world of science that week. And so, for example, one week I saw they had an article that I think they've broken the record for drilling into the greenland ice cores I don't remember a mile or whatever. And they pulled out this stuff that had not seen the light of day for two fifty thousand years. That had just happened. That was a fact. And then I go, well, what could be in there?

What could be in that two? It's like, okay, it's a creepy show. What's creepy? Like? I find worms, creepy worms, snakes, they don't have arms, they have too many arms, like a millipede. Forget it. I don't want to near me. And so I'm like, okay, oh, there's these worms. And then without two years of evolution, what would that do to us? And then that part I would make up. I don't remember what it was. It gets into your brain and makes you paranoid or some stuff like that.

So that's how you make an next him. You take that science truth and another truth and you try to fit them together by making stuff up. Inevitably, people would go I read about worms and make it crazy, and I'd say, no, no, I made that up, and they no, no, no, I read that in a nastro geographic like I know you didn't because I made it up. It isn't even a thing. It lodged in my head, I just flat

out made it up. And it always fascinated me how often people would say not I read about the ice or from Greenland, or the evolutionary traits of these worms. I heard about the stuff you made up, and it's true. And so when I look at these abduction myths, where some of the conspiracy theories that are floating around now you can see where there's both that are people are

believing in fact. There's an X Files where a deep throat specifically says a lie is the best delivered sandwich between two truths, and I just I'm sure I didn't make that up, but that's to me, I always thought the best way to go about the mythology. So if you know that aliens come at night, and you might take some other scientific fact the position of the moon or something and make something up, that's that's how you did it. That's how I went about it, and I

see that approach and other myths contemporary. There have been other shows that focus more directly on the themes that we've been looking at during this season. The History Channel, for instance, has a show called Project Blue Book, which features a more action ready version of Alan Heinek leading UFO investigations. Another show focusing on a highly fictionalized blue book style program was Dark Skies, which ran on NBC. In its tagline was history as we know It is

a lie. The show was launched based on the popularity of the X Files. It was created by Brent Friedman and Bryce Sable. Zabel in particular, is active in the UFO scene. I think in the case of Bryce especially, but Brent as well, uthology was something that very much

interested them. And I think that between the two of them, and Bryce having done a lot of the table reading as it were, and Brent having had one or two experiences that he was, that between them, they and it came together and figured out this is what they wanted to do. I'm Matthew Cressell. I'm the author of the Silver Archive Dark Skies on the television series from the

ninet nineties at the same name. The series follows two agents, John Loane Guard and Kim Sayers as they investigate and try to foil the activities of the Hive, an alien race already among us. The government knows about the aliens and is involved in a massive cover up to hide from the public their presence and the fact that we are actually fighting a kind of covert war against them.

The show presents an alternative history, with major events such as the Kennedy assassination the result of actions taken by the Hive. The series begins, perhaps not surprisingly with Roswell. Obviously Roswell is the big one, but you know, Roswell is uthologies, Jack the Ripper. It's this big thing that everybody knows what it is. You can say just that word and it evokes imagery. You know, if you say Jack the Ripper, people are gonna think, you know, fog

shrouded London streets, guy walking through the shadows. You say Roswell, people think soldiers in the desert, crashed flying saucer, little gray aliens thrown across the ground, weird debris. So it's I think if you're going to write anything since we'll say probably the mid eighties that deals with the UFO topic in a big way, Roswell is going to be

your touchstone. I think what Bryce and Brent do that's interesting with Roswell in terms of what Dark Skies does with it, is it becomes the starting point of sorts for their history in sort of engaging with the phenomenon. The other thing that Dark Skies does it's interesting with Roswell is in a couple of episodes it brings Jesse

Marcel It as a supporting character. Remember, Marceau was the major at Roswell Army Air Force Base who went to mac brown Ussele's ranch and was later photographed with the debris he found there. In the nineteen seventies, he was tracked down by UFO researcher Stanton Friedman and by then his story had changed. It became the foundation for the new Roswell narrative that emerged in the late nineteen seventies in early nineteen eighties and that continues to evolve today.

They turned him into a supporting character, which is really interesting for them to do. So they used Roswell and him to sort of set it up. But it's almost in some ways the original sin of the series. It's at this point that Freedman and zabels alternate history diverges from the one we know. It's made everything wrong in that in some respects, at least at the beginning, John loewen Gard and Kim Sayers are trying to set right.

Is bringing this out to the world Roswell is just one tiny part of the UFO mythos that Dark Sky's the sides they're going to run with. Another aspect of the folklore we've looked at that Dark Skies picks up is Majestic twelve, and while the show retains m J. Twelves role as the deeply mysterious keepers of the UFO secrets, it also takes artistic license. Here's Matthew Krazel talking about

how the show portrays the Majestic twelve. What Dark Skies does is interesting with that is, not only are they the ones covering everything up, they're at the soldiers on the front line fighting the secret war. So they're not so much a group of twelve guys sitting in a shadowy boardroom somewhere, smoking on their pipes and puffing away on cigars. They're the ones controlling the generals and what not,

fighting this whole secret war. They become the if you want to use the term for TV tropes, there, the sinister government agency, rather than just being these guys in the boardroom, and that's certainly something that separates them, the Majestic Twelve of Dark Skies from the Syndicate. For example, of the X file us. Friedman and Zabel are also much more specific in their references to the UFO folklore. One such instance involves a callback to UFO Cover Up Live,

which we looked at in the last episode. As a side note, it's interesting that Kruszel identifies Falcon from the show as Doughty. Remember Doughty denies that he was on this show anyway. There's a particular reference that Doughty makes when he's on UFO Cover Up Live in talking about the alien who's a supuzzling an Area fifty one who likes strawberry ice cream and listening to Buddhist chance aliens enjoyed music, all types of music, especially ancient Tibetan style music.

And you eat vegetables, they might vegetables, and your favorite fish or snack is ice cream, especially strawberry. And there's an episode Late and Dark Skies where they've captured one of the Grays and the Gray has a craving for strawberry ice cream, and one of the characters makes a comment about how strange that is. It becomes an almost in a way, it becomes a very kind of meta in that kind of postmodern way that you know, everything

is influencing everything. Dark Skies was canceled after just one of an anticipated five seasons. It didn't achieve the ratings or cultural haft of The X Files, but it was a primetime network show and it did put these concepts and themes in front of a mainstream audience. Things like Dark Skies make great entertainment, don't get me wrong, but I think that they add to in a weird way, add to the mudding of the waters in that once

it enters the pop culture consciousness. You know, if you say Area fifty one to somebody, they're gonna think, you know, lying Saucers UFOs. Same thing if you mentioned Dulcie Bass or Roswell, for example, And it becomes almost in a way, sort of an agent for putting those ideas out there. And I don't think necessarily through in that case, through any kind of deliberate act on anybody's part. It's just

something that's in the ether and it's out there. It's an idea that's just waiting for somebody to come and pick it up and run with it. Robbie Graham and his books Over Screen Saucers talks about hypernormalization and the idea that you things become the brain becomes so stimulated. The idea of the basic idea of it is that that the brain can't tell reality from perception. Perception becomes reality,

and you can't tell fact from fiction. And I think that that is a great descriptor for where uthology stands today. The X Files peaked in the Nielsen ratings at number nineteen. Shows above them included the blockbusters Seinfeld and e R in decades long franchises like Monday Night Football, Sixty Minutes and Dateline NBC. The group also includes the show's Veronica's Closet,

Union Square, and Just Shoot Me. Much like Star Trek, the X Files reach has extended well beyond its initial run, and it has become a shorthand for interest in the paranormal and in particular UFOs. Think about the poster in Molder's office with a photo of a flying saucer and the message I want to believe, the phrases the truth is out there and trust no one. Even the distinctive theme music signals UFOs. What makes the X Files so iconic certainly the quality of writing and acting in the

Molder and Scully partnership. But I think it also has to do with the way they kept or a certain nuance about the UFO myths in American culture, a combination of conspiracy in the sense that while things can be found out, they can't actually be known, and maybe things aren't really in control. Even if you are a UFO skeptic, it speaks to a narrative that makes sense, and because it makes sense, it indoors. I think people look up into the sky at night and wonder if the truth

is out there, if there are other civilizations. So it has a kind of human component to it, and the idea that the aliens have in many cases humanoid qualities, and that they actually seem to have some steak and humanity and they have some either good or bad purposes for being here. It's our fear of the other that is natural, and in this case, I think it's the fear of a another that has either a good or evil intent. What is the source of the fear that

finds its expression in Ufo folklore? Why does this story continue to maintain public interest when other paranormal subjects have ebbed in popularity. Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D Audio and

Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio on

archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts from my Heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Step