On January 24, The X-Files returns to television in the form of a six-part miniseries. As the premiere date nears, original fans of the show—those who discussed it on the newsgroup in the ‘90s, because social media did not yet exist and the internet was barely a thing—have been showing their enthusiasm in snake person ways, posting tens of thousands of tweets and Instagram posts labelled with an #iwanttobelieve hashtag.

“I want to believe,” a core sentiment of the show and its viewers, is a phrase that comes from an iconic item on the show: the UFO poster that hangs above the desk of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, everyone’s favorite socially isolated, orally fixated, paranoid insomniac alien chaser. When The X-Files became a hit in the mid-’90s, this poster was found on the bedroom wall of every self-respecting X-Phile. It was a special link to the show and Mulder’s hopeful yet tortured conviction that the truth was out there, shrouded in conspiracy, waiting to be uncovered.

#iwanttobelieve #xfiles A photo posted by @cosmo_may on Dec 27, 2015 at 5:49am PST

Within the world of the show, the origin story of the “I Want to Believe” poster is that Mulder bought it from a head shop on M Street in Washington, D.C. The poster is ever present in the pitiful basement office to which the supernaturally focused X-Files are assigned. It makes its first appearance in the pilot, and lasts the whole nine seasons. The poster also appears in the 1998 X-Files movie, Fight the Future, as well as the horrendous abomination that was the 2008 movie, cruelly also titled I Want to Believe. I want to believe that this movie was never made. But there’s no need to talk about that.



Seven years ago, while doing publicity for the movie we won’t talk about, X-Files creator Chris Carter told Smithsonian.com that the look of the poster “came from me saying, ‘Let’s get a picture of a spaceship and put–Ed Ruscha-like—“I want to believe.”’” A bonus bit of insider info for copyright infringement nerds: Carter also said that no one got clearance for the UFO photo, which had been taken in Europe by a man named Billy Meier. Years after the show’s debut, this oversight caught up with him in the form of an intellectual property lawsuit. In response, a new poster appeared in the show in its fourth season, with a slightly different photo of a flatter UFO.

The poster in the X-Files office. Flickr / Alistair McMillan

Mulder’s main quest—his all-consuming obsession—is to find out what happened to his sister Samantha, who was, as he recalls, abducted from the family home by aliens when he was 12 and Samantha was eight. Over the course of the show, Mulder and his FBI partner/soulmate/medical doctor/mother-of-his-child-but-that’s-a-whole-complicated-story Dana Scully uncover bits and pieces of evidence that point toward a grand conspiracy: that the U.S. government has been collaborating with extraterrestrials in an alien-human hybrid program. Among other things.