The Secret X-Files Code That Disappointed Fans

If you don’t remember this particular X-Files episode, “Conduit” features Mulder and Scully investigating the possible abduction of a young girl, and part of that investigation involves analyzing binary code. The abducted girl’s brother claims he is receiving this code from a static-filled television. Mulder makes sure to analyze the code, and we later get a really creepy scene of the kid’s empty house and a giant mural of printed-out binary code on the floor that forms the face of his missing sister.

It was relatively easy (especially with the remastered version of the episode) for X-Files fans to study that first page of binary code that Mulder gets from the young boy. For some fans, this was an understandably exciting opportunity. Not only could they channel their own Fox Mulder by trying to crack the code, but there was always the possibility that the code would reveal some kind of Easter egg from Chris Carter.

However, X-Files fans trying to analyze the code quickly realized how disappointing the exercise was going to be. You see, the code Mulder faxes to the FBI only has 276 bits, or 34 and a half bytes. This was far too short a message to have any real information in it, implying that the code has been chosen for the episode more or less at random.

Still, X-Files fans are nothing if not persistent, and some of them set about trying to decipher this code into something readable. This wasn’t a very easy task…the binary code had to first be translated into HEX, and the subsequent HEX code would have to be translated using an ASCII table. There was still a faint hope in the fandom that some secret meaning might have been gleaned from this code.

That faint hope was extinguished even quicker than one of the Cigarette Smoking Man’s beloved Morleys. After X-Files fans put in all that effort to turn the original binary code into something readable, they got something completely unreadable. We’re being very literal here, as the final translated code didn’t have a single English letter in it.

Needless to say, this was a disappointment for both the X-Files fans actually trying to translate the code and those who followed their work and hoped to glean a secret from the early days of the show. Years later, however, Carter seemed to understand that fans enjoyed such interactive experiences, which is why the season 11 episode “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” translates to “Followers” if you decode it using Base64 and has a coded tagline that translates as “the truth is out there.” Unfortunately, by that time, Carter had forgotten the most important code of all: how to create a decent episode.