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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1521281" data-attributes="member: 63">I'm just curious, and this applies to everyone else who's replying to this thread too, how old are you?  I know I was about 11 or 12 years old when The X-Files first came on the air, so I had at least a little time before that to get used to the idea of conspiracies and aliens and government cover-ups.  People much younger than me, though, I wonder how they view the show, as it might have been their first exposure to these ideas.  And even more intriguing, how familiar were older viewers of the show with these subjects?To Takyris, pretty much this entire class has been about understanding why people believe these things.  Sure, some of the theories might actually be true, maybe, but as an American I'm pretty sure my nation didn't create the AIDS virus so we could kill Haitians, and I know most tourists to the Andes don't suck the fat out of the natives like some sort of vampire, and I'm pretty sure that if all the Zionist conspiracies were actually true, the Jews would have managed by now to not be hated by it seems everyone.  (Seriously, man, they get a rough break.)So yes, belief in these sorts of bizarre things is in a way a religion, and for years I irregularly attended services each week, watching Mulder and Scully try to reveal the truth.That was one of the key things that seems to have drawn in viewers: the search for the truth.  The oft-repeated mantra of the show -- "The Truth is Out There" -- convinces viewers that, indeed, the show is not just entertainment, but that it is actually trying to reveal secrets of the world.  Combine that with the grand synthesis of so many different myths and urban legends, and the great mass of combined rumors starts to lend the entire thing a weight of believability each individual story would not have on its own.Effectively, there were so many hooks in the show that any viewer would undoubtedly have heard of some of them.  While you might not believe in the alien conspiracy, or in the Kennedy assassination theories, if you were even a passing adherent to belief in the Illuminati, when the show touched on that topic, some subconscious part of you would recognize that as something you're willing to believe in, and then the connections between that belief, and the many other beliefs in the show, would encourage you to lend a bit more credence to theories you might never otherwise have given mind to.The X-Files succeeded in becoming a cultural phenomenon for many fortuitous reasons, but one that may have been the greatest boon for the show was its wide-reach appeal.  If it had just been a show about aliens, it would have gotten boring fast (and, in my opinion, the alien plots still did end up getting boring).  Because it brought together myths from many sources, however, everyone could find something they liked.It certainly didn't hurt that, somewhere before season three, Gillian Anderson went from cute to hot.  I am proud, though, that I liked the show even before that point.</blockquote>

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