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A ghostly figure of a young woman appears before FBI agent Dana Scully. A look of terror crosses the agent's face as she stares at the creepy image. Suddenly the figure vanishes. Scully is left to wrestle with what she thinks she just saw.

Welcome to the bizarre world of The X-Files. During each episode of this popular TV series, fans of psychic-weirdness follow FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder as they track down something straight from a supermarket tabloid. From buggy-eyed aliens to monstrous genetic mutants to demon-possessed computers, the show seeks to curdle our blood through spooky special effects, as it strives to baffle our beliefs about what's real.

The popularity of the series has generated tons of X-Files paraphernalia, including novels, magazines, videos, posters, game cards, shirts, hats and even statues of X-Files creatures. And die-hard fans—known as "X-Philes"—are anticipating a movie based on the series.

No doubt about it, the weekly drama, now entering its fifth season, is very hot.

So what draws 20 million viewers to this off-beat show? Well, let's start with those two hip FBI agents assigned to check out "paranormal activity." There's Scully, the hard-nosed, you-gotta-prove-it skeptic. Then there's Mulder, Scully's total "dramatic opposite." Believing his sister was abducted by aliens when she was a child, Mulder is open to the unseen and the unreal. When Scully couldn't make sense of one bizarre event, Mulder deadpanned, "Might we not turn to the fantastic for an explanation?"

Along with the drawing power of the series' two stars, there's also the thrill of a "good heart-pumping jolt," says Brian Lowery in Trust No One: The X-Files, the official guide to the series' third season. More than that, though, says Lowery, viewers are undoubtedly fascinated by the idea that "the world is stranger than we know, and more mysterious than we want to believe."

Yes, the series masterfully feeds our inner longing to believe there's something very real beyond this world. Just check out the UFO poster on Mulder's wall that reads: "I want to believe." Over and over, the show exploits our desire to believe the unbelievable.

Many would say The X-Files is simply an hour of harmless entertainment each week. And they'd add that the plots are straight from the lively and macabre imagination of the series' creator. After all, who could possibly believe in alien autopsies, a sewer-dwelling monster mutant and a teen who zaps his adversaries with lightning bolts?

Yet amid all the imaginative and unreal stories are hints of the reality of a supernatural world. But unfortunately, the supernatural presented in The X-Files most often deals with dark, evil and occult themes—things the Bible warns us to avoid:

"Let no one be found among you," says the writer of Deuteronomy, " … who practices divination or sorcery, who interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead."

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