Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D audio for full exposure listen with Headphiles. In November, I spoke with Glenn Morgan. Glenn is a prolific screenwriter and producer involved in writing and producing, among many many others, the Lord television show, the Twilight Zone reboot, and, most notably for Strange Arrivals, The X Files. I talked to Glenn about the genesis of the show, how episodes were written, and much more. Why don't you start by introducing yourself.
I'm Glenn Morgan, was one of the exact producers of The X Files and the M one two for and then the Last Time And how did you you know, how did you become involved in The X Files? How did that start? Well? I worked with my partner Jim Loong, who are high school buddies from alcohol in California. Um, we're probably many people have been abducted, and um, 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, you know, he had he had helped us out a lot when we worked on twenty one Jump Street at Stephen Kettle and he was like, you gotta watch his pilot. I demand that you watch his pilot, and so kind of 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 Jim and I watch Exiles pilot and we're like,
whoa and I want to do this show. And everybody said we were insane because we left the other show, and um, but it was just something that I really liked, and we met Chris and we hit it off. And we're all coming from the same place from which I expect we're about to talk about. So, so were you interested in in sort of the paranormal and and UFO
stuff before working on the show. I was really not trying to make this about me, but I think that in what we're talking about, I feel I come from a place where probably a lot of Americans or representative the kind of mil America. I grew up in Syracuse, New York, which is upstate New York. I grew up in Manlis. Oh okay, well I was there till it was fifteen. And you know that this digressing. But I've read that they call that it's like a highway. It's a mile swath from Albany wide three hud a mile
long from Albany to you know, basically not Buffalo. Yeah, and there you had like the Shakers, the Fox Sisters, the Mormon uh Origins kind of, and so there's a lot of that haunted places. And my family, my great grandparents were mediums and all that, so there was always like having seances and stuff. My brother and I are like watching TV, but we're familiar with that. I was always interested in that. I you know, I can't remember if I knew about the Hills before um, Sharings to
the Gods. I almost had Food of the Gods, just a great movie. But Charings to the Gods, it was like reading all that, you know, and I was into that. And as a kid whose family was doing that, there was no skeptics, so I just like bought into it totally. All that stuff, I just bought into it, and um,
it has always been interesting. However as a kid too, my great love was you know, Nasa Apollo while they asked your nots and so the true science of that, and I felt that they both merged the goal to go to the moon, to go to space, the poetry of that match the wonder of what else is out there and that kind of you know, UFO paranormal area, they have something in common. And then you know, going getting older, you know it's an horror movie and everything.
But just like just life changing was Close Encounters, which is like the greatest thing I went to when it came out, you know, as I was just starting to drive, and my dad was like, don't you go to that movie. You can't go drive on the freeway to see that movie. And I did. I was driving home on the freeway. My dad was exted me Mike busted, that's how much I needed to see that movie for the second time,
and so all that stuff. I just loved it. Um Now, when I get older and you start getting introduced to some skepticism, and 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 this story? Because you always had to have Mauler'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 ground, a little more skeptical. So I hope that makes sense that I think that's where it comes from. But I think you can see this sort of mirrors what was going on a lot with the culture. I was taking look at some suffarious people have written and it's like the Monster of the Week episodes and then their Mythology episodes. So was the mythology?
Was that thought of as being sort of a multi seasoned thing to start off with? How how what was the genesis of that? Like the pilot was UFO and the second episode is UFO, and I think it introduced the deep throat, deep background and the conspiracy part of it, and the network being the network, they're a big goal was modern Scully should help people, you know, every week they should help people, which is like as lame as it gainst. And but also they did not want UFO
every week? What else could it be? And so sitting down, um, the first year was Chris jim and I, Howard Gordon, Alex Gonza who went on to do Homeland, and Marilyn Osborne was there as a sort of junior writer, and we would get together in the room and go what
can we do? And I think Alex and Howard became more comfortable with doing sort of weird science and you know, I just I grew up on universal monsters, and you know, I love monster movies, and so Jim and I fell into that not all the time, but for the most part. And so 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 first it really wasn't a couple of things. What happened was and January of the first season, Jillian became pregnant, and so she was going to have her baby in September, and so there was like, well, she wasn't gonna be able to work on the first few episodes that we were filming for a year two, and so we all came up with like Scully's gonna disappear, and that really began the mythology, the need to tell multiple stories near
the end of the first year. So I don't believe my memory is not that we set out to go from the beginning, We're gonna be this groundbreaking serialized because that wasn't around then. A little bit maybe, but um, we never set out to be the serialized show. There was necessity due to Julian's Julian'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. So can you talk a little bit about about the mythology through story you know that was established by Chris. You know that Maulder's sister had been abducted, and what the background was with Maulder, 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 the room. Nowadays you have to
have the whole show figured out for five years. 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 go on, what can it be? Um, who's you know? Well, we're gonna introduce a government conspiracy deep background. So you bring a deep throat and you bring up more UFO stuff.
Say I'm struggling here, because that stuff doesn't kick into gear really until the end of the year one, year two, where the beginning of year two we did this episode Little Green Men, I think shows his sister's abduction. Right, So it wasn't really if you look at that series, it wasn't until again necessity brought it up and it really kicks into gear in the second year. Okay, and so you just go, well, what happens we do we bring Maler's mother back to we is she alive? And
she didn't? You know, it's just like a bunch of writers getting together trying to figure it out. But again, for the most part, nowadays they'll talk about a writer's room. We didn't have that. You know. We would come in and go, hey, I got an idea, what if there's a stretchy serial killer of the crawls to the event, Oh oh, all right, you do that. You know, we weren't really sitting in a writer's room working things out together. We're very much a team. Nowadays, you would say, okay,
episode one, we talked about mauler sister. Episode six, we're gonna show that she's abducted. Now, I guess skipping forward
and you know, how is she gonna be abducted? I think we start with a lot of what the accepted myth wise that it was at night, that there was a bright light you know, um, 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 the week right, I think with James Earl Jones and the closing owners is like so huge everybody knew, you know,
the the Barry being abducted is just one of the great scenes and sham and what can we do different? You know? And you had read some things where people had been taken out their window or um, so well let's do that, or let's make something up. How can we make it fresh? 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 that makes sense? Yeah, yeah, was there you know, were you reading like UFO books or or doing other kinds of research into you know cases, Oh I had I had done that. I knew the Hill books. Your first season brought back a lot of childhood memories. Um of reading the book, not being abducted, just to make that clear. But what happened. What I didn't know was the community of uthology and so, and we didn't have
the Internet like we do now. I think it was all and you know, but I still when I wrote scripts, I had to write stuff down and go to the Beverly Hills Library and or U C l A and look it up. It wasn't like when I'm writing I just pull up Google or so. I was not aware of that. I became aware of it. I went to a UFO show L A X with Marilyn Osborne on the show, and it was just like, blew my mind
what was going on there? Um, you know, the lectures, the level of what the Hill experience had turned into basically have you know communication, you know, we're in community ation with being storm everywhere it was it was WOA was is way beyond what I thought. I remember there was a table and they'd have like color coded papers and this was abductions. This was and I don't know, this is State Orange with space Shuttle Green was abductions.
Was like an entire conference table of different pieces of paper with conspiracy and all kinds of stuff for every topic you can imagine. And the three guys behind there. One guy had a suit, one guy was kind of slobby guy with a rock and roll shirt, and another guy he just kind of somewhere in between. There was exactly alone gunman, which you know, becomes part of the myth. There exactly the guy, the guy with a suit. There's all these people around him. He's like, give me. He's
he's lecturing people. He said, give me, give me a twenty dollar bill. We're while watching he's like. This guy gives the guy his toy dollar bill out of his bucket and he holds it up to the light and he goes, look at that magnetic strip. And I think none of us knew about him, this magnetic strip in a twenty dollar bill. And everybody's like, oh, this is how a track you through the airport. This is how they do. This is how do you do that? Man? He rips it, He rips the guy's twenty and pulls
the strip out. You know, the guy's bummed out because this twenty dollar bill he's gone. But all of us are like whoa. And so that was just mind blowing to me what an industry was out there, and so I just like started taking from that, and Jim and Howard and Chris and everybody became introduced to that. I would go to like a hotel and motel out in Burbank and I sat there for presentation on UFO ideas and stuff, and I gotta say a lot of it I felt was just too far out from what we
were doing. We're there s secific things that you ended up served going deeper on, uh as, you know, research
or inspiration or whatever for the X Files. I think a lot of I think that would be a lot would be Chris because as the creator and exact producer of the show, people would reach out to him and he might get some info on stuff, or he might interview people that we're deeper into these things than my I like to research by sitting amongst all this stuff and watching it, you know, just like observing what's going on. I would get um 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 there might be a bigger article and just like go through 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 core. I don't know, want to remember a mile or whatever. And they pulled out this stuff that had not seen the light of day for two fifty thousand years. You know
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 D year's 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 the next while. 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 think, oh no, no, no, I read that in the natro Geographic. I'm 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 core 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 are floating around, now you can see where are there's bullshit that our people are believing. And 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 you know that. I you know, um, 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, then 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. That's really interesting. Your your point about people coming up to you and saying that they've read about stuff that you've made up. Um and it it reminds me a little bit of a Season one talking to Elizabeth Loftus where she was talking about experiments that she did where you know, just by mentioning something to somebody, they incorporate that into their memory so if
they talk to them again. I saw. I don't think it was one that she did, but there was a special on PBS where they interview college kids and they and they would bring up this incident. I think it was something about like you got, you know, arrested at the mall or something, and and they'd be like, no, you know, no we did. She's like, oh yeah, and then they kind of give some details and that the college kids would say now, but then when they talk to them, you know, six months eight or and would
bring it up. I guess it wasn't It wasn't quite getting arrested. It wasn't like that big, but it was it was some like you know, you spilled you spilled a drink on a police officer or something. It was something. It was something like that. And then when the when they talked to them again, the the a certain percentage of the college students would talk about that episode it actually happened, right, so it didn't It didn't even take much.
You don't have to really convince people. You can just sort of tell them and then they kind of internalized it. It becomes, you know, part of their their lived memory without actually having experienced it. And I think it becomes you're absolutely right. And there's been some good My brother did it an excellent X Files in the last season.
It was called the Lost Start of Forehead Sweat, which is all about memory and a lot of them Indela effect and and I know, you know glad Well had that thing on visionist history about memory, and um, I think with the bulk of information particles, with the Internet, with crossing cable news, with Twitter, you just get particles and they all get jammed together, and I think, like, Babe, weeks later you're like, oh, yeah, I know I heard something.
It's just a mess. It's just really colliding and we've lost the ability to go and what's your source or no, that was debunked. Here's how it was debunked. And you know a lot of the skeptics are debunkers become like the party poopers because going back prior to my writing for the X Files, if you were saying the hills you know saw the ski lift, don't you just don't want to believe it, you know kind of thing. But it may be a thing we were never taught, you know,
I don't know. I think that's the that's the big problem is that we're not coming from a rational How do you think about the X Files as sort of a cultural influence or or or the X Files lasting cultural influence and and how people think about things, Because I do feel like more than of shows, like I think the X Files, um, you know, can can kind of change the way you look at things that are
happening around you. Um, And I think and part of it, I think it's a conspiracy stuff, But I think there's also you know that the interactions between Molder and Scully I think kind of model a way of thinking about about things in some ways that I think affects the way people. Uh, I mean I wish it would affect them more, but but affects the way people sort of evaluate things. Um. Have you have you thought about that at all? Have you have you experienced moments where where
that's become sort of clear? Um, that's that's I think it's beyond all of us that worked on that show. You know, I text a lot with David Coomny, and that's like, we're still trying to figure it out in a lot of ways. You know, we're the last to be able to figure it out because you weren't trying to be this thing. You're just let's be cool, you know. But for me, there's a couple of things that would answer.
I think the most brilliant thing that Chris did was I want to believe, even you know, Carl Sagan, very rational, science based, I think you'd want to believe there's other life, And so that answers both sides of the coin. Everybody wants to believe, and they can find the answer of what special relativity is out what's the next whereas in all that, you know, there's the other dimensions and all that stuff. And so if you're that was the brilliance and why this show could be so popular because it
appeals to everybody. I think everybody wants to believe. My feeling about the whole you know, it's it's twofold for me. One I grew up, you know, Love and the Monster Moise and Psycho and The Exorcists, and Alan Bicola, paranoid movies of Clute and all the President's Men, Parallax View and certainly Close Encounters, and so all those came before us. You know, It's like you can say, oh Nex sounds great, you have it. All those Twilight Zone, oh Man, all
came before us. So when Doug Hudgson, who played Eugene Tunes in the first season, who's the notorious serial killer, and Dougs not too far off from that character, he said that he was in a like a department store bathroom in New York City and he was washing his hands and he looked over and there was a dad and a little kid, and the little kid was just locked in on Doug. And when they're going out, the kid grabbed the father and goes, hey, dad, it's the
creepy guy. And the dad looked at him and they both just leave. And so I feel like, okay, for all those Hitchcocks and Spielberg's that got me. I you know, that was you know, playing forward. However, the second thing is more disturbing that if we played any part in the proliferation of this conspiracy stuff, I'd have great regrets because I think it's like ridiculously out of hand. You know, when we're doing that show, it was primarily for entertainment.
You know that town. You know, there had been conspiracies, it's a skegeek experiments and Watergate, I guess, But for the X Files is for the most part of entertainment. And if you've opened up the door to acceptance of things that are going around now, I'd really feel horrible.
I that saddens me. Well. I think that was what when I said before about Mold and Scully sort of modeling, and that I wish people would sort of internalize that a little bit more because I think, I mean, I thought that was what was so great about the show as being coming from sort of the skeptical side myself, was was that there was I mean, it was like this this constant sort of evaluation. I think of them
as sort of like Kirk and Spock. It's sort of these iconic two sides of the argument, uh type of people. So I guess I'm just saying that because from from my point of view, like if you only had you know, Boulder running around, you know, buying into everything that he's that he saw her ran into her or seeing seeing
the worst possibilities would be one thing. But but I think what made the show so great is that is that you see both sides and and it's you know, thinking critically and even when things seem to be real. It's the reason why that's coming forth is because they're sort of interrogating it in a way that I don't think people do. So what are the things that we haven't talked about that you think are sort of important for people to to know? Just sort of based on
what you know about what I'm what I'm doing. And in this season, you know, I I think you know, I really I think there's you know, I think you go into what you said a minute ago. The interesting thing, you know, Scully after a while was not you know when we started the show, No, Scully never sees an alien. Ever, by show twelve, she was seeing the ghost of her father because human nature or American nature, whoever may be. It's like she's just person, says no, male, there's more fun, Well,
there's more interesting. Male, there's see and weirder stuff. And so as the show goes on for ultimately eleven years, Scully bends towards him, you know, because otherwise the show becomes Scooby Doo, right whether that you know, just like you know, you just pull off the mayor the mask on the monster or the mayor whatever. So that's the thing that you forgot, is that she did experience these
things and leans more towards mall. There's experience, you know, And I think that's the benefit of the necessity of a TV series who keeping conflict and the momentum going. But you know, I wish that people the fun of being Scully going. You know, that's just that's great. Those guys that you had it said, oh is the ski lift. I'm recreating the position of Venus. All that stuff is fun too to go. You know. It's like you're not trying to prove anyone's That's the great part about the
Hills as well. And I think a lot of the characters are trying to do X files. Was they didn't ask for it. They were going out in mind in their own business and and this thing happened to them, and they love an explanation whatever it may be, you know. Um, And so you know, the the fun of trying to be Scully. In the first two seasons. And also I think you asked, you know, that show to really try to find out to think about, you know, where we are now. You look at the mythology and therties because
that's what I grew up. Frankenstein was a scientist. He's bad. The villagers burned him down, burned down the castle, and they got the monsters. Scientists bad, invisible man. He died. You know, they always come back, but that was like he's bad. Um in the fifties, the scientist is creating the trouble, but he was also solving the problem, usually by going to the military, because that's what the fifties
was like, your trust and government. The sixties, you know, you start getting into Andromeda strain and you had Vietnam and so then it's bad. And then in the end of the seventies science becomes close encounters and you made nice communication with aliens and you had star wars and stuff, and like where are we now? Where what's our own mythology that we were creating a myth about this pandemic?
Its storytelling wise, wherever you stand, storytelling wines. If you're doing a pandemic, you had never come up with the head of a country is obstructing it. So what is it about science and conspiracy and everything we're at now? What is it telling us? You know? And I think if if you can use exiles as engaged as to try to where were we? Then what does that type of show tell us where we are now? Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart, three D Audio and
Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. 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. 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. H