In2-MeC

Oulu, Finland
26 September 2003

On three occasions, twice in Sweden and once in Japan, I was in situations where I was able to see the American television series X-Files. I believe this program has run its course of popularity and is no longer being produced. X-Files was first broadcast in the fall of 1993 by Fox Television. By 1995 it was a worldwide sensation. It starred David Duchovny as FBI agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as his partner Dana Scully. Mulder is on assignment to investigate the FBI's so-called "X-files" which contain reports of paranormal phenomena. (The real FBI denies that it puts agents on such assignments, although the show was said in TV Guide magazine to be very popular with FBI agents. ) Scully is on assignment to watch Mulder. The name "Scully" is an interesting choice: a man named Frank Scully was a journalist of the 1950s who published the very first investigative book about flying saucers.

I've forgotten most of the three episodes that I saw. One was about subliminal signals sent over television that stimulated people who had been somehow trained, without conscious memory of it, to be assassins; when their killer training was "turned on" by the TV, they went out to murder people. Another episode was about an underground military complex where bodies of aliens from outer space were stored. The third was about an alien from a crashed UFO that escaped the military and was creating havoc among the people of Earth.

These X-Files episodes were technically well-made, but I was not impressed. None of the stories were original; the first was a recycling of the very true top secret MK-ULTRA program of the CIA from the 1950s. The second and third recycled the legendary Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash story from the late 1940s.

What is certain about that Roswell story is, the press officer of the US Army Air Force B-29 atomic bomber base near Roswell reported a flying saucer had crashed and that it was under investigation by the military. Then the press release was withdrawn with the explanation that only a weather balloon had crashed. Decades later another story began to be told in a number of increasingly sensational books: a flying saucer had really crashed at Roswell, and tiny humanoid bodies had been found on board the wrecked machine. The weather balloon explanation was a government hoax. The bodies of the aliens were secretly flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where they are kept frozen to this day under intense military security. The crash actually involved two flying saucers that suffered a mid-air collision. In one of them a little alien was found still alive. A photo was circulated showing a military officer walking with with a little alien whose head was encased in a breathing apparatus. In the early 1990s a black-and-white movie turned up, printed on filmstock from the late 1940s, that showed an autopsy of an alien supposedly done by a military medical team. Even more saucer crashes were reported from other regions of the USA that were supposed to have taken place during the 1950s and '60s. All these had been covered up by the government. Then the stories bloomed into full paranoia. Area 51, a top-secret military testing ground in Nevada, is a vast laboratory where scientists are busy "back-engineering" alien spacecraft. Fully operative flying saucers are kept under guard there, as are living aliens. Not just one species of aliens, but different kinds from different planets live in a deep underground complex! The US Goverment permits these aliens to abduct Earth people for biological purposes necessary for the survival of these creatures, in return for unearthly technology!

Another reason why I was not impressed by the three X-Files episodes I saw was because as a teenager I used to watch Outer Limits.

Now that was a very, very, strange television show.

Imagine a normal family sitting at home in the evening, watching TV. Suddenly the screen goes black and then is rippled by sine waves, like an oscilloscope. A voice tells the family: "Do not attempt to adjust your television set. We are controlling transmission. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. "

This was how every episode began. It was creepy. The general theme of Outer Limits, through all episodes of the series, was that Earth people are being taken over by alien intelligences. The weekly shows were often very pessimistic. Planet Earth is just a little blue marble in the sky, Earth people are weak, foolish and their own worst enemies, and space is populated by beings vastly superior to humanity. I wonder, looking back, if an unearthly intelligence was not behind this TV show itself.

One very strange truth about Outer Limits is that it presented fictional cases of "missing time"--meaning that some character in an episode would come under the power of an alien but would lose memory of the encounter, so that those minutes, hours or days spent with the alien would be unaccountable. The character could not explain where he was for that time. Now one might ask, "Well, what is so strange about that? We've heard a lot about these missing time UFO cases. " Yes, but not before Outer Limits was aired.

Three years after Outer Limits started suggesting this missing time phenomenon, the press began reporting "true" accounts of it, the first being the Betty and Barney Hill case. The Hills, husband named Barney and wife named Betty, reported seeing a UFO in 1966. Seeing a UFO was not so unusual by that time. Many UFOs were being reported in the mid-60s. However the Hill case took a new twist when investigators probed into Barney's missing time, which had never been reported before. A "repressed memory" was uncovered that revealed he had actually been taken on board the spacecraft and had interacted with the aliens up close. Following the Hill case, so many missing time reports with repressed memories of abductions were made that it is by now a typical feature of UFO-alien mythology. But the idea was introduced into the public imagination by a number of episodes of Outer Limits.

Subliminal suggestion? Brainwashing? By whom? And why?

It gets much stranger.

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan promoted the so-called "Star Wars" military space program in a number of speeches. During a 1984 speech for re-election, he spoke of "Star Wars" as a "protective umbrella" and as "an anti-weapon. " These exact phrases were originally spoken by an alien in an Outer Limits episode entitled "The Bellero Shield", broadcast 20 years before. In another speech, Reagan stated that warring nations on earth would quickly unite if confronted by an enemy from outer space. This became a theme of a stupid science-fiction film of the mid-1990's, Independence Day. But the idea was originally presented in an Outer Limits episode called "The Architects of Fear. " Scientists of a secret government intelligence agency surgically and genetically turn one of their own men into an alien "invader. " They give him an oversized head, bug eyes, and long arms (which is how the aliens found at Roswell were said to look like), and secretly rocket him into space so that he would return and terrify the earth and thus really unite the United Nations.

Speaking of secret intelligence agencies, in the early 1960s, the National Security Agency (NSA) was unknown to the public. It was created in 1952. As the intelligence of the American intelligence agencies, the NSA breaks codes and listens in on worldwide communications. It is far more secret than the CIA. It first came to light in 1966 when it was mentioned in a book called The Codebreakers by James L. Kahn. Even today the NSA is so secret that it is jokingly referred to in Washington as "No Such Agency. " Though nowadays its existence can't be denied, still the US Goverment will not reveal what the exact purpose of this agency is. Anyway, in an episode called "The Children of Spider County," two years before Kahn's book was published, Outer Limits presented an agency called NSSA: the National Space Security Agency.

The forerunner of the NSA was the US Army Department of Signals Intelligence. During the early 1940s, Signals Intelligence broke the secret Japanese military signals code; thus the Americans knew in advance the Japanese would attack Peal Harbor. (Why the Americans did nothing to oppose the attack is a whole story in itself!) In the later '40s, Signals Intelligence broke the code the Soviet Union was using to communicate with its agents. The executive producer of Outer Limits was Leslie Stevens. He had served in the Army Air Force during the Second World War as a captain; for three years he worked in Army Intelligence while stationed in Iceland. Steven's father was a vice-admiral in the US Navy and held an important role in a major intelligence assignment.

Bruce Rux, author of an interesting book titled Hollywood vs. The Aliens: The Motion Picture Industry's Participation in UFO Disinformation, writes, "The Outer Limits was the only show of its kind, unique in the annals of television history. It provided a weekly exploration of man's place in the universe, in varying degrees of fear and optimism, in such a way as to engage its audience's thoughts and emotions. . . Whether or not the show was connected to any official government program of dissemination or preparation on the subject of contact with visitors from beyond Earth, that was certainly the personal mission of Leslie Stevens. . . "

We know that beings from other planets take birth on Earth. Srila Prabhupada, who arrived in America nearly at the same time Outer Limits was on the air, said that his disciples had especially taken birth from higher planets to assist him. Is it not likely that beings from other planets were also taking birth for a different mission? Was Outer Limits unconsciously, or perhaps even consciously, announcing the arrival of intelligences from other worlds to this planet?

Leslie Steven said of himself that he was "into the absolute quintessence of the emerging new mythological age. " He actually believed in the possibility of the themes presented by Outer Limits. From what I've read about The X-Files, none of the persons who were involved in the production were "believers" in the theme of the TV series. They were just making money by exploiting an interest in the paranormal that had become big in modern imagination. . . partly as a result of the unquestionably powerful psychological impact of Outer Limits.

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