The strange mystery behind this lost X-Files song

Humankind is haunted by a number of mysteries, many of which are likely to remain unsolved forever. Whatever happened to the inhabitants of the Mary Celeste, a ghost ship found adrift and deserted in the middle of the vast, lonely Atlantic ocean? Why didn’t things work out between me and that guy I was seeing for three months in 2019? Who was really responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy? And why, in 2023, did Taylor Swift suddenly become the most important person on the planet, when the last album she released was kind of mid? We may never know the answers to these mysteries and many more like them. But there is at least one enigma we can strike off the list: thanks to the heroic efforts of online sleuths, the name of a country song in an X-Files episode from 1998, which had previously been lost to time, has at least been revealed.

It all started last week when a Twitter user named Lauren Ancona was watching an old episode of The X Files (‘Dreamland II’ from Season 6) and heard a country song playing in the background. She liked it so much that she tried to Shazam it, and when that didn’t work, she Googled the lyrics. She couldn’t find the song, but she did stumble across other people who were trying to do the same thing – the IMDB for the episode features a reference to the mystery of the lost song, and some people on Reddit said they had been searching for it since the episode first aired back in 1998. “Given how on the nose some of the lyrics are, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t thrown together as incidental music, but that hook is just so good,” she wrote.

After Ancona’s thread went viral, the internet kicked into gear, pulling up the credits of the episode and identifying the music editor who worked on it, a man named Jeff Charbonneau. He replied, saying that while he didn’t know the name of the song, he was certain it hadn’t been written specifically for the show.

At this point, more and more people were chiming in to help out. An editor and director named Michelle St Claire replied to the thread suggesting that the song was “production music”, meaning that it was composed for television in general, rather than the show specifically. This meant that it would not have been available for the public to purchase at the time, nor digitised for streaming platforms today.

The following day, the mystery of the song was finally solved. A music producer named Jonathan Leahy replied to the original thread to reveal that the track is titled “Staring at the Stars” and written by Glenn Jordan and Dan Marfisi, two songwriters who had provided additional songs for The X-Files. 

The sleuths then managed to track down Jordan and Marfisi over social media. Marfisi confirmed that the song had been written specifically for that episode, writing on Twitter: “Our directive was ‘we need a country song that could be about an alien or a human….oh, and we need it in four hours.”  After searching for a CD backup, he posted the song on YouTube in its entirety on December 8. And with that, the mystery was finally laid to rest.

After all that build-up, what about the song itself? It must be a lost masterpiece, surely, to have inspired such obsession over almost three decades? Not quite, but it is a perfectly pleasant country track which does, undeniably, sound like it could be about an alien. Now, if the internet sleuths aren’t too busy, I’d like to set them loose on a new, far more urgent case: where the hell did I put my vape??