The Common Good May-June 1995  Going to X-Tremes  by Danny
Duncan Collum | May-June 1995   It's tough to be a conspiracy
nut these days, because the conspiratorial worldview has gone
positively mainstream. Nobody's sure anymore who's a nut and
who's not. So it is no accident that the best new TV show of the
1990s is The X Files.  Related Reading  The "files" of the title
are a grab bag of unexplained phenomena tucked away in the
basement of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C.
On a weekly basis, the "X" agents, Scully and Mulder,
investigate Satanists, unknown life forms, corporate criminals,
bovine growth hormone, and, especially, the ongoing cover-up of
America's alien abduction epidemic. It is thrilling stuff, all
dedicated, right there in the opening titles, to the proposition
that "The Truth Is Out There."  The popularity of The X Files is
telling. Perhaps it tells us that people from outer space really
are snatching up our citizens and using them in a massive DNA
experiment of some sort.