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He made a rare public appearance recently in Santa Barbara, Calif., which is where he lives part-time. It's also the place he most likes to surf. That's what they say about him in the online chat rooms, anyway. They also say his nickname is "Carver" from his days as a writer for Surfing, and that he surfs goofy-foot, which means he keeps his right foot forward. He chose the character name Mulder because it's his mom's maiden name and named Scully after famed baseball announcer Vin Scully. But if you're an "X-Files" fan worth your salt, you already knew that. There's little they don't know about him, those fans. In the chat rooms, Carter is commonly referred to as "God."

After Carter was introduced to a packed auditorium of 800 at Santa Barbara's gorgeous seaside University of California campus, the audience erupted into sustained, possessive applause. Carter strode onstage in tan pants and a blue, button-down oxford shirt. God was in the house, and he was wearing Banana Republic.

Before Carter arrived, the middle-aged woman in front of me had been wringing her hands in anticipation. When he was 10 minutes late, I feared a nervous breakdown. Now that he was here, she breathed easier but looked like she might cry.

Carter carried himself as though he were meeting up with some dudes for a beer. Despite being the '90s' most intense purveyor of paranoia, his entire demeanor in person seemed to say, "What, me worry?" After the applause died down, he initiated a penchant for deflective self-deprecation that would last all night -- "I have a lot of family and friends who are probably wondering why you are clapping."

Carter was introduced by Constance Penley, a professor and chairwoman of the University of California at Santa Barbara Film Studies Department, who has herself written extensively on science fiction. "The creation of 'The X-Files' was arguably the most important event of the decade, except for possibly the discovery of the Mars rock, or the impeachment of the president," Penley said. "Of course, in the 'X-Files' universe, the two would be connected."

Penley continued to gush: "The show was so sophisticated in its presentation of the ethical and social dimensions of science that you would have thought that Chris Carter had been trained as a philosopher, rather than a journalist."

A philosopher? A blue-collar guy from Bellflower, Calif., a crummy Los Angeles suburb? His dad was a construction worker; his mom, a housewife. He earned a journalism degree from cheap California State University in Long Beach in 1979, paying his way through school as a potter. For a while, he did construction. He started working as a reporter for Surfing magazine but, after seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" six times in six days, began to entertain the idea of becoming a scriptwriter. He was encouraged by his screenwriter girlfriend, Dori Pierson.

That's when things began to get weird.

In 1985, Jeffrey Katzenberg, while still head of Disney, saw a script Carter had written and gave him a development gig for $40,000 a year -- chump change in Hollywood, but twice as much as Carter had ever made in his life. He worked on such forgettable product as "Meet the Munceys" and "B.R.A.T. Patrol." But his work impressed an up-and-coming suit named Peter Roth, and when Roth became president of 20th Century Fox in 1992, he stole Carter away to develop new shows. Carter's "X-Files" pitch didn't fly at first. Too out there. But Carter did some research, showing in part that 3 percent of all Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens, and Fox took a chance.

Carter's story, obviously, is too whacked to have been scripted on any show besides, perhaps, his own. "It only proves he's an alien," Penley said. "He has been placed here by creatures who did not know how to construct a believable narrative about how one becomes a television producer and creator of a mass cultural phenomenon."

Carter's appearance in Santa Barbara came just a day after he began work on the final episode of the show's seventh season, which he revealed will be called "Requiem." It could be the last "X-Files" show. Carter and Duchovny's contracts come up this season. And even though Gillian Anderson is still under contract, she's said to be unsure about returning. Meanwhile, Duchovny has filed a lawsuit against Fox protesting what he sees as sweetheart rerun licensing deals.

"Elián González' future is more certain," Carter remarked.

But even after 160 episodes, Carter said, he still has more stories to tell, and would like to keep going: this, despite the incredible weirdness that the job has brought into his life. As he told the crowd in Santa Barbara, the weirdness began before the series even made it on the air.

Next page | The executives insisted on seeing Anderson in a bathing suit