The X-Files Effect
and other UFO findings
The Mere Exposure Effect
Prior to living in Mexico for a couple of years in the mid-2010s my Spanish skills were somewhere in between basic and non-existent. I learned Spanish while in Mexico because I was constantly surrounded by it. When I returned to the United States, I was shocked at how frequently I heard conversations in Spanish everywhere I went. I heard more Latin music on the radio and I saw more billboards written in Spanish while driving. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed all of the Spanish that surrounded me before.
In Psychology, this is called the “Mere Exposure Effect.” It is the opposite of the common phrase “Outta Sight, Outta Mind.” Basically, this effect states that the more you see or hear something, you more you like and notice it. The same goes for songs on the radio, shows on television, dietary preferences, and perhaps even UFOs.
A Brief History of the UFO
Throughout the first 90 years of the 20th century, UFO sightings were rare phenomena. Up until the 1950s, the most reported sightings of an unidentified flying object in a 5-year span were only 90. It wasn’t until the year 1947 that UFOs broke into the mainstream. While flying his plane, a man named Kenneth Arnold affirmed that he saw 9 high speed saucer shaped objects close to Mount Rainier, Washington. This is how we got the term today “flying saucer.” After this famous flying saucer sighting, more movies started featuring extra-terrestrial life, and this trend continues through to today.
Extra-terrestrial life continued to find its way into pop-culture in 1953, when H.G. Wells’ famous serial novel “The War of the Worlds” came to the silver screen. During this same time, the Cold War was beginning, and the suspicion that the Soviet Union was using aircraft to spy on America led to suggestion that unidentified aircraft might be from other worlds all together. And thus the American obsession with UFOs had begun.
But even with all this going on, actual reported sightings of UFOs still remained relatively low compared to what they are today. Contrast this to what we learn from the Mere Exposure Effect. UFOs and extraterrestrial life were in the news, entertainment, and other media in the mid-20th century, but only small amounts of people were claiming to see them with their own eyes.
Below is a table that shows the count of reported UFO sightings for every 5 year span. For example, the “31” next to the year 1940 indicates that there were 31 sightings during the years 1940–1944. Pay attention to the sharp changes between 1990 and 1995, and 1995 to 2000.
The X-Files Effect
If we zero in on the 1990s, we see a whopping 1,066% change in worldwide UFO sightings during the decade. During the 90s a famous sci-fi TV series debuted: The X-Files.
The X-Files did something that no UFO sighting, political tension, or movie had done before — it told the world that “the truth [was] out there.” For further clarification, the Mere Exposure Effect theorizes that we develop a preference to things that we are surrounded by or familiar with. In the years leading up to the debut of the X-Files, the public display of the unknown and extraterrestrial may have helped people believe in creatures from outer space, but there was never any encouragement to actually go and find out for themselves. That is what separated the X-Files from all other UFO-related events.
In telling viewers that “the truth [was] out there,” The X-Files may have unintentionally created a UFO sighting craze in the 1990s by combining the outcome of the Mere Exposure Effect with the repercussions of urging viewers to find extraterrestrial truth. Later sci-fi big screen hits such as Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997) only further exacerbated this effect. By the time we entered the 21st century the curiosity for discovering unidentified flying objects had been woven into our culture.
Is the Truth Out There?
My intentions in writing this article were not to prove or disprove the existence of extra-terrestrial life. My intention is to show how exposure to an idea followed by the encouragement to seek after it has the ability to influence people’s beliefs. Truth is out there, but truth can be very easily bent and engineered to fit a set of beliefs or biases. Use caution when approaching claims of truth. Always try to learn for yourself.
Dana Scully in the 17th episode of the X-Files said it best when she observed that “the truth is out there, but so are lies.”
The data used for this project can be found here.
Analysis was done using Tableau.
