But I can't prove Chris Carter has ever seen any of the previously mentioned productions. He has certainly never mentioned any of them. He's never mentioned Quatermass at all, in fact, or Kneale. Not in print, anyway. I've checked. Repeatedly.

One question that seems to get asked of Chris Carter nearly every time he gets interviewed by the press is "Where did you get your ideas for The X-Files from?" His answer, which varies little from interview to interview is always "I've always been fascinated by the paranormal but have a scientific logical side. I have issues with trust. I liked The Twilight Zone, I was strongly affected by Watergate and the movie All the President's Men, and I loved The Nightstalker as a kid, and wanted to do something that would scare people the way it scared me. But other than that, I was never into Sci-Fi/Horror, and I don't really know much about it."

And that's all he has to say on the subject. Carter has gone out of his way to portray himself as being rather uninterested in the genre he has cast such a large shadow upon, and largely unfamiliar with it (so we should assume the Sci-Fi elements in his writing are the product of his protean imagination?). This is probably true overall, and explains some of his weaknesses (and strengths) as a writer who found himself working on a show that has undeniable Sci-Fi/Horror elements in it.

Carter has mentioned his brother, a research scientist, being a serious Science Fiction buff, so he might conceivably have been exposed to Quatermass movies back then. I tend to doubt it. For one thing, they have never been shown very often here in the U.S., and wouldn't have been available on home video back in the betamax era. Nowadays, between online video stores, ebay, and other sources, you can get virtually all the surviving Quatermass programs. Back when The X-Files was in pre-production, it was a bit harder, but tapes were available. And Quatermass has never been very well known in this country. The great majority of Americans have never heard of him.

But I'm sure many 11th Hour readers have at least some familiarity with the tumultuous career of Professor Bernard Quatermass (pronounced KWAY-TER-MASS), pioneer rocket scientist for the British Experimental Rocket Group, who seemed cursed to have his work interrupted by malevolent alien beings threatening humanity. Played by six different actors over 26 years, Prof. Q is one of the first great characters of Sci-Fi TV, a man who triumphs by virtue of intellect and intuition, but whose victories always come with a price. You rarely see the aliens in Quatermass, and more often than not, they have a human face -- due in part to the very low budgets the original stories were produced with, and in part to Kneale's very British version of 50's paranoia. He remembered all too well the infamous Kim Philby spycase, where a respected British civil servant was unmasked as a double agent. "Who can you trust?" is certainly a frequently asked question in his fictional universe.

The differences and similarities between the 1950's Quatermass BBC serials and the 1990's FOX franchise The X-Files are worthy of detailed examination, simply because they show how much (and how little) our cultural preoccupations have changed over the last few decades. But for our purposes, the story begins when Brian C. Boerner, a former art director on the X-Files comic book, posted these charges to a website featuring spoilers on the soon to be released Fight the Future:

http://corona.bc.ca/films/details/x-files.html
(towards the bottom, page 11 of 14 on my hardcopy)

Just a brief description of the similarities, but Boerner is the first Quatermass Conspiracy Theorist I know of, and I was pleased (and slightly disappointed) to learn I wasn't the first to notice the similarities. I wasn't the second, either. (I probably wasn't the hundredth for that matter -- Kneale does have his fans here in the States, and deservedly so). Dan Craft, a sharp-eyed film critic apparently cursed with a photographic memory, published this online review shortly after the film opened:

http://www.pantagraph.com/ent/movies/xfiles.html

Boerner the artist, you will note, is indignant. Craft, the critic, is mildly amused. He's seen this kind of thing a thousand times before. He didn't think The Blair Witch Project was all that original either. But he liked it much better than Fight the Future. Only gave the latter two and a half stars. Which was generous of him.

Not that long after I saw Fight the Future, I happened upon a copy of Quatermass 2 which I later learned was a filmed remake of Quatermass II the original BBC serial version of Kneale's story. Q2 may very well be the first instance of a writer adapting his own TV show for the big screen. Kneale co-wrote the movie script with director Val Guest (he had no input in the first Hammer Quatermass film, The Quatermass Xperiment). Quite recently I learned that Kneale has partial ownership of the rights to Q2. He very nearly took it out of circulation because he hated Brian Donlevy's performance as Quatermass. See below:

http://www.horroronline.com/db/quartermass2/

Here are the salient details:

Quatermass 2 (originally released in the U.S. as Enemy from Space) has Quatermass discovering that aliens have infiltrated the British government and are taking over the minds of human beings by "infecting" them with "black slime" that attacks anyone unfortunate enough to touch meteorites that are actually tiny space capsules, each containing a amorphous alien creature, part of a collective for which the "black slime" is a medium. These creatures need a human host to survive in our environment.

When "infected" a human becomes a zombie, under the control of the alien inhabiting him/her. Through their government lackeys, the aliens have adapted Prof Q's plans for a moonbase, using the same design to construct a base in the English countryside where they can live within its pressurized domes, until such time as Earth's atmosphere can be changed over into the kind of methane/ammonia mix that can support their species. At which time, their "colonization" (the phrases in quotes are all used in the movie) will be complete, and their human slaves will no longer be needed.

Or, as the Prof. remarks to one of those human slaves, in the BBC serial version:

"--until your condition becomes the condition of all humanity -- a subject race, forever, or until such time as we have served our purpose and are brought to an end."

In Fight the Future, the "Well Manicured Man" puts it in somewhat more personal terms:

"Until Dallas, we believed the virus would control us, that infection would make us a slave race. Imagine our surprise when it began to gestate."