This is going to be a silly question

[Guest A Stranger]

What's the basis for saying there was no alien involvement until the 70's? In "Fight the Future" the well-manicured man implies in his explanation to Mulder that his group's aim for the whole time since the late 40's was to find a vaccine or other protection against the aliens when they returned to take over and enslave humans. Up to that time, the group had been working on the assumption that the "black oil" would allow aliens to take over a human host parasitically but they weren't prepared for the fact that the host would be used as a food source/gestation chamber to allow the alien to reconstitute itself.

No biggie, but did you cite the Mulder/Lone Gunman meeting as 1989 because that's when they met or were you citing the year of the episode and mistyped 1998? I don't know that it's totally correct to say that Mulder had no interest in aliens/paranormal until he met the LG but I think it is correct to say that the LG showed him enough evidence of government conspiracy and cover-up to convince him that things were not as he had been told with Samantha's disappearance. The LG were really the first to convince him to "trust no one" even though they used other words.

"Two Fathers/One Son" is where the the flashbacks to the alien allience takes place. In the series finale "The Truth" it is said they recoverd the technology and information in Roswell about the aliens' plans. A "time table" is mentioned in "Patient X/The Red and the Black" this is presumably what they were working from. They knew what they were doing and started working. There is a scene that was cut from "One Son" that depicts the Syndicat'e's original attempts at making a hybrid without alien assistence and it was disasterous which is why they finally had to give in.

And yes 1989 is the date of "Unusual Suspects." There are a couple of scenes that demonstrate Mulder had no interest in aliens or conpiracies. He worked in the Violent Crimes unit and threw away a promising carrer after the events that took place around this time to pursue the X-files.