Comment by xhevahir
9 hours ago
Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.
I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.