![[Wizard holding up a candle]](../../images/wizard.gif)
The Friday luncheon speaker at the First World Skeptical Conference was Chris Carter the creator and executive producer of the X-Files. The award winning show, which incidentally is moving to Sunday nights, is one of the big successes on the Fox Network especially among Generation X-ers. Mr. Carter was a charming, personable, defender of his creation and he received a generally warm welcome from the large crowd of skeptics. Carter explained that he personally was a supporter of science and that he had a brother who had graduated from Berkeley with a Ph.D. in physics. In fact he went so far as to state, I am a skeptic not a believer, or purveyor of pseudoscience but I do use it in story telling. He told a long anecdote about a high school physics teacher who sent him a copy of Sagan's Demon Haunted World with the request that he consider following each episode with an epilogue, a "Why File" which documented the real scientific investigation of the paranormal based on Sagan. Carter thought it was a great idea but not consistent with the dramatic and entertainment value of the show. He also disagreed with the value of a "this is just a story" disclaimer at the end of the show.
Carter argued that the X-Files, "while not as balanced as skeptics would like, has a smart, intelligent basis in good science." Scientists were used to see that the show was "responsible to real hard science." He seemed somewhat proud that the show reached no conclusions about the truth of paranormal claims despite leaving the viewer with a strong suggestion that they may exist. The "mysticism, ghosts, and magic were necessary for the drama just as they were for Shakespeare" etc, etc. In fact he had intended that the balance between shows which leaned toward the paranormal and those which turned out to have natural solutions be pretty even. Unfortunately, "those stories were really boring. The plausible, rational, mundane answers were just bad for story telling."
Carter let his guard slip a couple of times which I believe gave a peek into his inner thought processes. He admitted to being a believer in conspiracy theories because of government actions during the sixties. That's why they have those frozen aliens up at Wright Patterson air base. More than once he made the point that people need to believe in something "beyond our temporal lives, an after life, a God." "There is, beyond the facts, a need for a spiritual life." The background message was that science by dispatching mysteries was eliminating the emotional and spiritual benefits of bad thinking. Carter left a large rhetorical question floating out there for what seemed like a long time.
"How does science create hope in the world?," he asked. The audience wondered what he wanted as Carter mentioned cancer from cell phones and other technological urban legends. He seemed genuinely pleased to have exposed the missing ingredient in science! Then he described the X-Files as fiction based on "speculative science." After listening to Chris Carter I think that's the science where you invent the facts to support your drama and present the package as a documentary. He's good at it, which isn't good for skeptics.
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