"C" Is For Conspiracy
I'm on to you Philbin, you alien scum!
      by Julie Ng

First and foremost, forget that evil government agenda which proves to be so popular on The X-Files. It's a trick (get an axe!). These Alien Statisticians have found our weakness. Our most beloved material possession.

Our television sets.

After all, who decides what stays and what goes on TV? Network Executives. And who controls the Network Executives? THE NIELSEN RATINGS.

I don't want to bore you with details, but here is a quick crash course in this bizarre, alien concept: Since the debut of television, Nielsen Media Research samples approximately 5,000 households (or 13,000 people) on what they watch, using TV set meters, people meters or viewing diaries. Networks then use these numbers to decide on prices charged for commercial spot time. Now, when the number-crunchers get down to it, they are sampling 5,000 households to represent the entire population of American TV watchers, which is really closer to 99.4 million households. Ignoring viewer dilution with the addition of newer networks such as Fox, WB, UPN, not to mention cable channels like CNN, ESPN, the Game Show Network, la-di-la-di-la, the Nielsen statistics represent about 1% of our TV Nation.

And what show has consistently been topping this alien method of ratings since last summer? As much as we'd like to say Buffy or The Others, it is in fact, that primetime quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. I'll attest to its appeal in its own melodramatic, cheeseball kind of way, but the #1 show on television? This cannot by humanly possible. And that's when I started to make the connections. Regis Philbin is in on it with the Nielsen Aliens. He's one of them! I mean, have you ever really looked at the production design of that set? Cold metallic structure, slightly disc-shaped, coloured lights blinking in sequence? This is how they are degenerating the human race!

Then suspiciously, Bob Barker's hair inexplicably turned completely white!

The signs have been there all along. Infiltration doesn't stop at Philbin either. I soon discovered that this expands into the entire world of TV Game Shows. Here is where my sporadic viewing of Roswell finally shows some value. I have duly noted how Michael Guerin's (Brendan Fehr's) weed-whacked hairdo simply defies gravity and all other laws of nature, and yet it is too carefully coifed to simply be messy. The lesson to be taken away from this is that clearly, aliens take great care in their locks. Apply this to my second case in point -- The Price Is Right. For an unusually long time, in fact, throughout most of my childhood and adolescence, Bob Barker rivaled Bob Hope as the oldest man I ever saw regularly on TV. Strangely though, his hair constantly remained a typical, sandy brown colour. Then suspiciously, Bob Barker's hair inexplicably turned completely white! Of course, human beings often dye their hair whichever colour they like, but in the case of the elderly, their hair always tends to end up as a tint of violent or light blue. This man's hair became uniformly stark white literally over night! Yes, the signs are subtle, but they are there.

Speaking of strange maturing processes, what about Vanna White from Wheel Of Fortune? This woman has not aged in the fifteen years that this program has aired. And let's not forget Alex Trebek. When he guest-starred on The X-Files a few years back, he played himself, as... a Man In Black, staring straight into the camera and trying to hypnotize viewers to forget that extra-terrestrials ever existed. Coincidence? I think not! The punk claims to be Canadian, but now we know better, don't we?

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