X-Files fans solve a 25-year-old mystery about a country song on the show

Fans of The X-Files have been losing their minds of late – and it’s not because they want to know who’s covering up the existence of aliens from star FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Instead, they’ve been grappling with their very own X-Files-worthy mystery, after someone discovered an incredibly catchy song playing in the background of one of the episodes.

It happens in season six, episode four, which aired in 1998. For people who aren’t familiar, that’s only just halfway through the iconic, incredibly long running sci-fi megaseries.

And as far as internet sleuthing goes, it’s an absolute epic investigation that Mulder and Scully would be proud of.

It all started with a thread on X/Twitter. The user said: “Just had the weirdest experience. was watching an X-files episode & there’s this country song playing in the background of the bar they’re in & it’s so good it jars me out of my idle multitasking to shazam it except...”

As the plot thickened, it emerged that Shazam doesn’t know what the song is, while Googling the lyrics only lead back to… This episode of The X-Files.

Somehow, the song, shared below, just didn't seem to exist.

It sparked a mass internet search, and because everyone trying to find it was a fan of the show, conspiracy theories were running wild. This thing could go right to the top!

There was, of course, the possibility of a much more mundane explanation too. Sometimes TV shows don’t want to pay for the rights to a popular song, so they’ll pay songwriters to create something instead.

Even worse, some producers simply pay for something much cheaper again, called library music, which is designed to sound generic.

If you’ve ever heard the same instrumental song on a bunch of TV shows or YouTube videos, you’ve experienced some production music without even realising it.

Library music for TV shows isn’t normally online. In that case, this would normally have reached a dead end. But this is where the internet comes to the rescue.

The thread somehow got as far as Jeff Charbonneau, the music editor of The X-Files, who decided to help hunt down the track.

And eventually, someone else managed to track down the cue sheet for the episode.

There it is. The second-last entry. “Staring at the Stars, by Glenn Jordan and Dan Marfisi, songwriters who sometimes provided music for The X-Files.

Even better, Dan Marfisi then heard about the hunt, and said a CD backup of the song actually does exist. “Staring at the Stars” will now live on forever.

“We never knew people loved our music so much,” Marfisi said. “Truly wonderful to find out.”

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