Interesting ‘X-Files’ News Breaks as Bettors Hope for Alien Life Confirmation by Year’s End

Art reflects life, and alien truthers hope renewed interest in The X-Files might lead to some real-life reveals about extraterrestrials.

In addition to renewed enthusiasm for the Fox show and news of Ryan Coogler’s reboot, yet another update on the X-Files franchise is here. Disney+ has announced plans to stream the director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, the 2008 sequel film, starting June 11.

Chris Carter, the show’s creator and director of the movie, first announced this new edit in an interview on Fail Better, the podcast that X-Files star David Duchovny hosts.

“I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie,” Carter recalled, per a CinemaBlend transcription. “So we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie, and we thought, ‘OK, we’ve satisfied their demands.’ The critics, the people who rate the movies, said ‘No, it’s not a PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even farther.’ I can tell you that you can do more on network television, [the censors] are more permissive than they are for the movies.

“Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make. It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page but never got to the screen.”

New X-Files Movie Cut Comes as Real-Life Hopes for UFO Disclosures Continue

The X-Files slogan of “the truth is out there” is still giving alien-truthers hope all these years later.

Members of the public have been actively placing bets on whether or not the U.S. government will confirm alien life in 2026, per Polymarket. The prediction market for “Will the US confirm that aliens exist by…?” currently has a $43,669,821 volume.

The leading window is the safest: by Dec. 31. Despite recent alien posts by President Donald Trump, mosts bettors don’t believe a reveal is coming by the end of May (1% chance) or end of June (2%). Polymarket odds jump up a bit at the Sept 30 deadline (9%), but the end of year bet, complete with $30,252,638 in volume, sits in the lead at 16%.

Alien truthers (and government transparency advocates) want to believe, and maybe this new attention on the world of The X-Files will help get the truth out there — and publicly confirmed.