For nine consecutive television seasons, FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully – later joined by John Doggett and Monica Reyes – investigated strange and unusual cases that involved the supernatural and paranormal. While a government conspiracy involving the existence of extraterrestrial aliens served as the centerpiece of The X-Files, the majority of its episodes were standalone installments that featured everything from the occult to mythological creatures to unexplainable phenomenon.
The investigation of these “X-Files” often led Mulder and Scully and their later counterparts to various locales throughout the country, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their first foray into the region occurred during the season two episode “Blood,” in which the small town of Franklin – in nearby Venango County – was experiencing a rash of mass murders. Although not Pittsburgh proper, Steeler pennants and Penguin posters can be seen dotting the break room of a local post office facility during the installment nonetheless.
“Since colonial times, there’s only been three murders in this area,” the local sheriff explains to Mulder. “In the last six months, seven people have killed twenty-two.” Mulder and Scully discover an illegal toxin being secretly used as an insecticide that has an LSD-like effect on those exposed to it, heightening their fears and phobias.
While Mulder and Scully were only in the vicinity of Pittsburgh during “Blood,” they made a full-fledged excursion into the Steel City during the season four episode “Leonard Betts.” The title character is an Emergency Medical Technician for the Monongahela Medical Center who was decapitated during a traffic accident. His “body” later escapes from the morgue, and Mulder believes that Betts walked out on his own accord. Scully, naturally, disagrees.
“I think it’s obvious that this is some sort of bizarre attempt at a cover-up,” she says. “My guess would be body-snatching for profit. There’s a shortage of teaching cadavers at medical schools. An unscrupulous medical supplier might pay top dollar, no questions asked.”
Betts’ head is later found and discovered to be riddled with cancer. Leonard Betts himself, meanwhile, turns up as the new EMT at Allegheny Catholic Hospital and kills his former partner in order to keep his identity secret. These two events cause Fox Mulder to connect the dots and reach a more substantive conclusion than his previous speculations.
“What if there was a case were the cancer was not caused by damaged DNA, where the cancer was not a destructive or aggressive factor, but was the normal state of being?” he rhetorically asks Dana Scully. “What if this man’s life force, his chi, whatever you want to call it, somehow retained a blueprint of the actual man himself? Guiding rapid growth not as cancer but as regeneration?”
Leonard Betts also needs to consume cancer in order to survive. With the supply of tumors that he had been stealing from hospitals now cut off, he is now forced to “eat” the cancer from living humans, killing them in the process.
Dana Scully’s own diagnosis of cancer was a major part of The X-Files in later years, and the episode “Leonard Betts” was the first to suggest that she had cancer – Betts targets her as his latest, and ultimately last, victim. The case of Leonard Betts is solved by the end of the installment, but its ramifications continued to haunt both Mulder and Scully during the seasons that followed.
FBI Agent Fox Mulder was only a recurring character on The X-Files during season eight of the series, having been abducted himself by aliens and thought to be dead, resulting in Dana Scully being assigned a new partner in the form of John Doggett. While Mulder was previously the “believer” and Scully the “skeptic,” it was now Scully who sees the supernatural elements of the cases they investigate and Doggett who cannot comprehend the unimaginable.
Doggett soon develops a deep respect for Scully, however, as well as an open mind, two traits that serve him well when he is forced to investigate a mass murder in Pittsburgh without the aid of his partner. The victims of the massacre were members of a cult – as well as two FBI agents keeping surveillance on them – who were apparently bludgeoned to death with an axe while they were sleeping.
“Anthony Tipet served twelve years for the bludgeoning death of his wife,” Assistant Director Walter Skinner explains of the prime suspect. “After his release, he became a minister, preaching a hybrid of evangelical and eastern religions. He claimed a higher plain of being could be reached by the ‘Via Negativa’ – the path of darkness, a plain closer to God. Once reached, it would let the spirit travel unhindered. Tipet believed hallucinogens would lead him to this plain, specifically compounds of the bark of an African tree.” Skinner then suggests that Tipet took the drug and was able to kill his victims subconsciously while his body was elsewhere.
Doggett obviously does not believe that explanation, calling it a “science fiction story,” but is willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads nonetheless. This includes a drug dealer who is afraid of falling asleep and assistance from the Lone Gunmen, the trio of conspiracy advocates who have unofficially assisted on various X-Files at the request of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in the past.
“What if Tipet could invade his victims’ consciousness in their sleep?” Doggett suggests to the Lone Gunmen. “That’s why you’d be afraid to fall asleep, right? If you thought your nightmares might come true?” When asked if he actually believes that theory, Doggett replies, “No. But if Tipet does, he’ll need more drugs to keep killing.” Once Doggett has left, the Lone Gunmen look at each other and say, “Not bad for a beginner.”
While John Doggett is indeed able to track down Anthony Tipet, he briefly experiences the “invasion” of his own consciousness before the murder suspect dies from self-inflicted wounds. Doggett may be a skeptic and mere “beginner,” but the events of the “Via Negativa” episode of The X-Files and his journey to Pittsburgh firmly places him on the path of Mulder-and-Scully-like enlightenment nonetheless.
There were never any confirmed UFO sightings or evidence of an alien invasion in Western Pennsylvania during the course of The X-Files, but the FOX series was always more about the supernatural in general than its overarching storyline involving government conspiracies. Paranormal events were investigated by Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and John Doggett throughout the United States, and Pittsburgh was no different.
From the regenerative abilities of the cancer-infected Leonard Betts to the “higher plain” capabilities of Anthony Tipet, the Steel City was as much a part of The X-Files mythology as anywhere else – a fact that is equally satisfying as well as unsettling, depending on one’s point of view.
Anthony Letizia