When the X-Files is onto something

I am obviously no bibliophobe.  I just occasionally enjoy a television show.

When someone eventually comes to their senses and creates a cable channel geared solely to my tastes (JTV), The X-Files will most certainly be on heavy rotation.

The show's deep ties to the UFO mythos had its immediate appeal, but that's not what kept me coming back for more.  It was the moody atmosphere created by a combination of music and cinematography.  It was the writing.  It was the paranoia of factions against factions within our own government.  It was the wonderful and deep characters.  It was the hotness of Gillian Anderson.

I caught an episode of The X-Files earlier today.  The title of it was "Wetwired" and it really got me thinking about...possibilities.  The plot went something like this:

A downright weird series of murders takes place in a community in Maryland.  One of the killers says he believed his victims was a war criminal he saw on TV.  Mulder and Scully come to suspect that people are being manipulated to commit murder by signals coming through television sets.  This line of thinking is furthered when Mulder finds a mysterious device inside the cable box mounted on a telephone pole outside a house where one of the killings took place.  The Lone Gunmen analyze the device and tell Mulder that it is indeed adding signals to the cable line.  These signals flash at the viewer 50 times in a second but are so fleeting they're imperceptible to the naked eye.  But the brain is being manipulated to feel sensations of paranoia and left susceptible to suggestion.  Scully becomes the next one to fall under the influence of this experiment, believing in her induced paranoia that Mulder is colluding with the Cigarette Smoking Man.  Mulder is left to stop this government charade...before Scully kills him.

Sound crazy?  "Our government would never do something like that" you say?

They already have.

Are you familiar with Project MKUltra?  It was a CIA operation centered on mind control.  Several U.S. citizens became unwitting participants in experiments involving hypnosis, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and especially LSD as methods by which to control someone's behavior.  The project came to an end in 1974 after Congress, then President Ford, and the Supreme Court got involved at one point or another, calling the whole thing what it was: illegal.  Dark, conspiratorial corners of the Internet suspect that both Sirhan Sirhan and Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski are products of MKUltra conditioning, but the evidence on that is scanty (as it would have to be.)  Others maintain that the entire Jonestown Tragedy was a CIA mind control experiment.

The logical, 21st Century extension of these experiments would seem to be control through mass media.



Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets