Are you paranoid enough?

It seems appropriate that “The X-Files” will soon be returning to our TV screens, even if only for a limited engagement.

If you believe your eyes, recently released production photos showing Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) back in action confirm the six-episode “miniseries event,” scheduled to air in January, is really happening. Before you know it, Mulder and Scully will be back to chasing ghosts and unraveling conspiracies.

When “The X-Files’ ” original run limped to an end in 2002, the war on terror was just beginning. The idea that the government might have surveillance programs capable of spying on the phone calls and emails of every American seemed like just another of Mulder’s wild conspiracy theories.

That was before WikiLeaks, before Chelsea Manning and, most importantly, before Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents detailing the NSA’s sweeping domestic surveillance agenda.

Reading journalist Glenn Greenwald’s account of the Snowden revelations, contained in Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide,” is almost like getting caught up in an “X-Files” plot, only without the extraterrestrials. That there are no hints of extraterrestrial encounters in Snowden’s treasure-trove of incriminating NSA documents is probably a good indication that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it has better things to do than visit us.

“The X-Files” returns to a landscape where large-scale wrongdoing and coverups by secretive government agencies are pretty much accepted as a given.

It is a landscape eerily similar to that of the 1970s, when revelations of government misconduct, especially by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, forged a golden age of Hollywood thrillers.

If you weren’t paranoid, you weren’t paying attention. This was the age of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. It was also when the public first learned of COINTELPRO, an unwieldy acronym for Counter Intelligence Program. Via COINTELPRO the FBI waged a sometimes illegal campaign against domestic political organizations it deemed subversive — organizations both on the left and on the right. The FBI’s tactics involved infiltration, surveillance and, most worryingly, disinformation.

COINTELPRO came to light only when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office, took more than 1,000 classified documents and turned them over to the media. It was the Snowden leaks but with analog technology.

As far as Hollywood was concerned, this landscape was fertile ground for a decade of political thrillers, from “The Parallax View” to “Three Days of the Condor.”

Now the ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy thrillers are in bloom again. They sprout even among superhero movies, where “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” deals in secret governments within secret governments and spy networks that can be turned on innocent people with the flip of a switch.

It’s no surprise that Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” is in the early stages of being dusted off and updated for the 21st century by Skydance Productions, which is looking to adapt the story for television. Nor is it a surprise that “The X-Files” isn’t alone in bringing back the combustible mix of conspiracies and the otherworldly.

Netflix is prepping a series based on the “Montauk Project,” which is half science fiction and half urban legend, and takes in everything from secret experiments and time travel to aliens from space and Nikola Tesla. It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to paranormal conspiracies. And the strangest thing about it is it’s set to star Generation X “it girl” Winona Ryder.

A true conspiracy theorist might well wonder if the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex is churning out truly outlandish conspiracies just to make a buck off the public’s renewed interest or to make people more skeptical of the real conspiracies.

Culture Shock 09.12.13: In America it's 'In no one we trust'

For more reasons than you may suspect, 1776 was a momentous year.

The United States declared independence from Great Britain. Several signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock, were Freemasons. In Scotland, Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations," which posited an economy guided as if by "an invisible hand." And in Bavaria, Adam Weishaupt formed a secret society called the Illuminati, which, by some accounts, sought to promote reason over superstition and liberty over despotism.

All of that is true, as far as it goes.

By other accounts, the Illuminati sought to rule the world and, although outlawed and supposedly disbanded, were responsible for the French Revolution and the Terror that followed. Some say the Illuminati infiltrated Masonic societies, like the ones to which many Founding Fathers belonged, and now the Illuminati's symbol, the All-Seeing Eye, is hiding in plain sight, on the dollar bill. On the dollar's other side is a picture of George Washington, or maybe an impostor, Adam Weishaupt, who some say looked a lot like Washington and took his place.

It's a conspiracy theory rooted in the nation's founding, with branches that spread, according to some, from the New York offices of the Council on Foreign Relations to California's Bohemian Grove.

America has no shortage of conspiracy theories. Whenever some pundit tells you the Arab world is rife with conspiratorial thinking, the proper response is, "Yes, well so is America," and it has been since Colonial days.

That's one point of Jesse Walker's — dare I say it? — illuminating and entertaining new book, "The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory." Another point is conspiracy theories are not the province just of the lunatic fringe: Birthers and Birchers and Truthers, oh my! Some conspiracy theories are so widely believed as to qualify as conventional wisdom.

The public, talk shows, network news programs and law enforcement across the country fell for the 1980s Satanic cult conspiracy, which speculated that a network of devil worshipers was active nationwide, abusing children and performing ritual sacrifices. There was nothing to it.

Conspiracy theories are built on paranoia, but as They say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean They aren't out to get you. (They got JFK, didn't They? Or did They?)

Some conspiracy theories are undeniably true, such as the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln. Every day, a new story details more incidents of National Security Agency snooping. Worrying about the NSA got you branded as a kook as recently as last month. But now if you're not worried about the NSA, you're either dangerously naïve or an apologist for the system. Or maybe on the NSA's payroll.

While the truth or falsehood of conspiracy theories is of interest to journalists and historians, Walker approaches the subject as an anthropologist: What do conspiracy theories say about American culture at different times in history?

Sometimes the fear is the Enemy Without: communists, fascists or, as in the nation's earliest days, Indians. Sometimes it's the Enemy Within, such as your neighbors who are secret satanists. Sometimes it's the Enemy Below, as when Southerners worried about slave rebellions. Usually, however, it's the Enemy Above, the cabal of bankers and politicians who meet in secret to rule the world. And the paranoia runs both ways. If militia groups can be paranoid about the government, the government can be equally paranoid about militias, Walker shows. No one is immune.

And sometimes it's all just a put on, as Walker details in a fascinating chapter about ironic conspiracy theorists such as "Illuminatus!" co-author Robert Anton Wilson.

"Trust no one" was the motto of "The X-Files." America's could be "In no one we trust."

Culture Shock 07.23.09: 40 years later, moon hoax theories persist

This week, America marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. But even after four decades, some people still don't believe.

Earlier this year, I met an earnest young man who was absolutely convinced we never went to the moon. He said the U.S. government faked Apollo 11 and the five subsequent lunar landings for propaganda purposes.

I didn't ask, but I can only assume he believes the Apollo 13 mission was faked, at great expense, just so Tom Hanks could one day turn "Houston, we have a problem" into a catchphrase.

You may think you've seen NASA archival footage of the Apollo astronauts traipsing around the lunar surface and hitting the occasional golf ball, but it all really took place on a super-secret soundstage. Yep, it was all just an elaborate hoax designed to fool the Soviets and the American people, too.

That's how the theory goes, anyway. And the fellow I met this past spring is not alone in buying into it. The moon hoax movement dates to the end of the Apollo program.

In 1974, Bill Kaysing, a former technical writer for Rocketdyne, self-published "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle." The book makes his case for why going to the moon was impossible. For example, Kaysing claims, no space capsule could safely pass through the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the Earth.

Astronomer Phil Plait, who spent 10 years working on the Hubble Space Telescope and currently blogs for discovermagazine.com, debunks the major moon hoax claims at his Web site, Bad Astronomy.

Conspiracy theorists haven't improved much on Kaysing in the past 35 years. The wacky moon hoax theories you hear on late-night talk radio pretty much all originate with his book. Four years before he died, Kaysing resurfaced on the ludicrous 2001 Fox special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" True to form, he made the same old, shopworn arguments that scientists have refuted time after time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm the last person who would say you should trust the government. And I'm sure the more than $33 billion spent on the Apollo program could, in theory, have secretly funded a lot of nefarious black ops programs. But the evidence of our having gone to the moon is overwhelming.

Just this past week, NASA released photos, taken from a satellite in lunar orbit, that plainly show the Apollo landing sites, abandoned instruments and even the footpaths the astronauts left behind. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.

If it is a conspiracy, it's one too sophisticated for our federal government to have pulled off. I don't give the folks in Washington that much credit.

The late Robert Anton Wilson used to draw a distinction between conspiracy theories, which could be true, and paranoid conspiracy theories that claim there is one giant

Conspiracy behind everything. He ought to know. Wilson co-authored "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," a sprawling science-fiction epic that satirizes just about every conspiracy theory imaginable.

The moon hoax conspiracy definitely falls into the paranoid category simply because of its mind-boggling scale. And to add to the paranoia, just about everyone I've encountered who believes the moon landing was faked also believes a lot of other conspiracy theories, too.

This is where it gets really crazy, because not all of these conspiracy theories are compatible. If you don't believe in the moon landings, how can you believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947 near Roswell, N.M., and we've been reverse engineering its advanced technology ever since?

You would think we could have used some of that alien tech to mount a real moon mission.

Hmmm. Maybe we did.