By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the creepier tropes in The X-Files was the revelation that alien blood (or the blood of alien/human hybrids) is toxic to anyone who is exposed to it. Eventually, this green blood became a staple of the franchise’s increasingly complex mythology, but most fans don’t realize that this hemoglobin horror was based on a real-life medical case. In 1994, Los Angeles woman Gloria Ramirez began emitting toxic fumes when her blood was being drawn, a phenomenon that perplexed scientists and fascinated showrunner Chris Carter.
Th X-Files Toxic Alien Blood
According to X-Files producer RW Goodwin on special features for the show’s Mythology, Vol. 1–Abduction DVD set, Carter had an immediate reaction to a news report about Ramirez’s apparently toxic blood: “Well, that’s a great thing for aliens, you know? Aliens probably have that.” This is what led to The X-Files Season 1 finale, “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” having a scene where Dr. Secare’s alien blood poisons the paramedics around his body.
If you’re a longtime fan of The X-Files, then you know that Carter always took a perverse joy in crafting fictional episodes out of real-life mysteries and bizarre phenomena. In this case, Carter is the first to admit that he and the producers took liberties with the original story and did things differently than other networks.
“You can make the connections, but they weren’t perfect connections,” he said on the audio commentary for “The Erlenmeyer Flask.” “It wasn’t like you might see in another show, where they exactly recreate the woman who’s brought in and when they open her up, these fumes come out.” The X-Files showrunner “wanted this to be a little different” because “this guy’s got alien blood in him,” and “I wanted to speculate a little bit about what this might be.”
Of course, the X-Files guru’s desire to “speculate” about what the alien blood might be really sums up his storytelling style of doing something cool and then trying to explain it later. Over the course of the remaining seasons, we learn more about how toxic this blood is when it appears again in mythology episodes like “Colony,” “Endgame,” “Nisei,” and more. Eventually, we learn that it contains a retrovirus that normally turns human blood into something akin to jelly but that the virus can be nullified by very cold temperatures (something Scully realizes in time to save Mulder’s life in “Colony”).
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that The X-Files wasn’t always perfectly consistent with the toxicity of the alien blood. Sometimes, exposure to its fumes is toxic. Other times, characters like Scully can walk right over it and experience nothing more than a burned shoe. And considering that we find out that the only way to kill alien bounty hunters is to stab them in the back of the neck, the show is remarkably inconsistent about whether the blood that emerges will or will not be toxic to those near it.
If nothing else, this tale is a lesson that everyone’s favorite paranormal show is often rooted in shocking events in the real world. The X-Files would never have introduced us to the phenomenon of green alien blood if not for the real-life case of Gloria Ramirez, a woman with reportedly toxic, fuming blood. It seems the truth isn’t just out there for The X-Files. It’s also, as always, way stranger than fiction.
