The tendered premise in a recent episode of the X-Files: since World War Two Americans have had an unquenchable appetite for 'bogus revelation'; having determined this, the United States Government has built, presumably as a cover for its more radical weapons of mass destruction programs, an elaborate web of alien abduction and sighting hoaxes. This hoax, we are led to believe, may or may not be one. At the end, intrigued to a ghastly degree, we are left both believing (the elements of documentary inherent in the X-Files aiding this process) that there are aliens around and that the Government has cooked up (and deployed) weapons even more diabolical than the ones it has copped to. This tv 'fiction' seems to me only slightly less credible than what the evening news, reporting live from the White House! serves up, or than the gamut of what can be found gathered up daily in The New York Times. (The day after watching the X-Files episode I read allegations by Puerto Rican petitioners at the United Nations that the United States Government was testing uranium-capped bullets at its facility on Vieques Island; during the debate an Iraqi delegate stated that similar weapons had been used during the Gulf War.)