Caught on Camera

Still from opening credits of The X-Files.

Begin an X-Files episode, and one of the many eerie images you’ll see in the opening credits is a hand ringed by blue light. This image was created using Kirlian photography, which captures the corona discharge produced when an object is laid on electrified photographic film. But according to Semyon Kirlian, inventor of this technique, these photos also showed the auras of living beings, revealing information about their health and mental states.¹

Such paranormal photographs appear throughout The X-Files. In “Unruhe,” a serial killer’s delusions manifest in Polaroid photos. In “Leonard Betts,” Kirlian photography of the titular mutant’s brain reveals that he has survived decapitation. And in “Tithonus,” death itself is captured on camera.

Beyond their roles in their individual episodes’ plots, these images serve a potent thematic purpose. They reveal the modern world’s fascination with and fear of the camera and what the camera’s capable of.

William Mumler’s spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband’s supposed ghost, c. 1872 (Wikimedia Commons).

Supernatural photography has existed almost as long as photography itself. So-called spirit photographs became popular in the 1860s, when photographers like William Mumler used double exposure to superimpose images of spirits over their customers. Spiritualists explained these photographs in elaborate scientific terms. An 1862 letter to the spiritualist publication Banner of Light proposed that ghosts, though invisible to humans, “may yet be sufficiently material, so as to reflect the chemical rays which alone are instrumental in the production of a photographic picture.”² Arthur Conan Doyle spent much of his literary career defending spiritualist photographers like William Hope and hoaxes such as the Cottingley Fairies, a series of photos depicting two cousins in a meadow with fairies.³

As the century wore on, glass-plate cameras gave way to ones using film, and spiritualism was traded for anxieties surrounding science, space, and the Cold War. Just a couple of weeks after the pilot Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” sighting in the summer of 1947, the first modern UFO photographs debuted, two images of a crescent-shaped object snapped by William A. Rhodes. Photographs of UFOs, no matter how blurry or debunked they may have been, became part of UFO lore, supplementing witnesses’ oral accounts.⁴

William Rhodes’s flying saucer photos, 1947 (Wikimedia Commons).

These photos’ quality (or lack thereof) may be irrelevant. Folklorist Linda Milligan notes that the comparable mythology of Bigfoot relies not just on photographic proof such as the Patterson-Gimlin film, but also on oral narratives shared within communities of believers. These testimonies combine with physical evidence to paint a nearly incontrovertible “multi-dimensional portrait” of their supernatural subjects.⁵

Semyon Kirlian’s “aura” experiments developed in the 1940s, while Ted Serios’s unimaginatively-named process of “thoughtography” debuted in the 1960s. Respected experts like the psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud promoted Serios’s claims that, with the aid of a cylindrical “gizmo” and plenty of beer, he could project his thoughts onto film.⁶ While Serios’s blurry images failed to convince the scientific community, his claims would inspire the psychic Polaroids seen in The X-Files’ “Unruhe.”

Film critic André Bazin argued that photography has an “essentially objective character,” as it reproduces the world with minimal human interference.⁷ With this reputation for objectivity, it is unsurprising that the camera has been envisioned as a source of unambiguous scientific proof. The 1862 letter to Banner of Light shows how old and enduring this cultural presumption is. It envisions the camera’s “chemical rays” as being more accurate and perceptive than a human eye, able to reveal what we cannot see.

In this light, The X-Files’ use of supernatural photos becomes particularly noteworthy. The show hung on the premise that its protagonists could investigate the paranormal using the tools of science and the legal system. Yet just as the law is endlessly subverted by the show’s conspiracies, the “essentially objective character” of photography is constantly uncertain. Photographic evidence is produced by inexplicable forces and cannot be reasoned with scientifically. These unearthly images serve as a microcosm of the show’s anxiety that our sources of truth and certainty are dangerously compromised.

In an age when false claims spread much quicker than true ones, The X-Files seems particularly prescient in recognizing how the camera isn’t synonymous with neutrality or honesty.⁸ Whether it’s “transvestigators” claiming that images of celebrities prove they are secretly transgender, “Tartaria” conspiracists presenting 19th-century street photos as evidence of a forgotten global empire, or propagandists misattributing wartime footage for political gain, images which are trustworthy in their own context are constantly being reframed to benefit dishonest agendas.⁹

Mulder and Scully (well, mostly Mulder) may be better known for seeking the truth through unorthodox means, but The X-Files also reflects the obvious yet vital fact that, as much as we might want to believe that unimpeachable sources of knowledge exist, even supposedly objective evidence demands cautious evaluation. From double-exposure ghosts to psychic Polaroids, the history of supernatural photography reminds us that the flash of a camera can reveal the truth — or obscure it.

Example of Kirlian photograph, from cover of Beyond Reality magazine, 1974 (Internet Archive).

1. Ioannis Gaitanidis, “More than Just a Photo?: Aura Photography in Digital Japan,” Asian Ethnology 78 (2019): 101–26.
2. Quoted in Yani Kong, “Sensitive Mediums: Spiritualism, Spirit Photography and the Re-Enchantment of the World” (dissertation, Trent University, 2011).
3. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case For Spirit Photography (1922).
4. Jane D. Marsching, “Orbs, Blobs, and Glows: Astronauts, UFOs, and Photography,” Art Journal 62 (2003): 56–65.
5. Linda Milligan, “The ‘Truth’ about the Bigfoot Legend,” Western Folklore 49 (1990): 83–98.
6. Mark Alice Durant, “The Blur of the Otherworldly,” Art Journal 62 (2003): 6–15.
7. André Bazin and Hugh Gray, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13 (1960): 4–9.
8. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 6380 (March 9, 2018): 1146–51.
9. Hayden Vernon, “The Conspiracy Theorists Who Think All Celebrities Are Secretly Trans,” Vice, Sept. 21, 2023; Zach Mortice, “Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture,” Bloomberg.com, April 27, 2021; Bellingcat Investigation Team, “Hamas Attacks, Israel Bombs Gaza and Misinformation Surges Online,” Bellingcat, Oct. 11, 2023.