Full disclosure, my Aunt Melba. Does anyone agree with me, that making the full-disclosure episode into a “To Be Continued” episode was a dirty trick?

We have been talking about this episode for weeks now. Will they really tell us what everything means? Will we really find out the answers to every unanswered question? Is Mulder’s sister still alive? Why was Scully abducted? Will the Cigarette Smoking Man finally die of lung cancer? And now, will Mulder shoot Cassandra? This is worse than “Dallas!”

The Fox network has been promoting this episode endlessly, and all of us, the diehard X-Files fans, have been scheduling our lives around this last Sunday night, 8 p.m., for weeks.

I personally left a really exciting Open Mic at La Boheme, and I’ll bet there were plenty of people who didn’t show up at all because they didn’t want to miss the show.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I arrange my schedule around the X-Files television show, but I’m not the only one.

According to a 1995 interview with Chris Carter (Atlanta Journal & Constitution) there were already 16 million viewers in the United States alone.

Another article by Bruce Headlam of “Saturday Night” magazine suggests that there were over 40 million viewers in 1995. I don’t even want to know how many of us there are today.

The problem for most X-Files fans is the logical assumption that there is no series if all the answers are provided. This has led to rumors that the series is ending. I don’t buy it.

This is a major success, in television terms, and no television executive is going to allow the cash cow to die.

So relax, fans. Either all the questions will not be resolved next week, leaving some thread of mystery to maintain our interest, or Chris Carter will continue to demonstrate his talent by coming up with new questions and new conspiracies.

This could actually be good for us. We need more conspiracies and cover-ups to occupy our time and conversation.

We need to have a reason to come home on Sunday night. The advertisers need our money. The television studios need our Nielsen ratings.

It’s not that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I was right there with Mel Gibson in “Conspiracy Theory.” I think it’s the intelligent people of the planet who question authority, who ask why and how. Anyone who scoffs at the possibility of alien life falls into a mostly ignored category of people I call “close-minded.” Anyone who accepts whatever they hear as the “gospel truth” without verifying the facts with alternate sources is suspect, in my mind, of looking for easy answers to difficult questions.

In light of many so-called documentaries on the Roswell crash, how many people still believe that the U.S. government absolutely would not engage in some type of cover-up?

Even if you don’t want to believe it, shouldn’t you be at least open to the possibility?

In spite of the naivete of many Americans, a great number do believe there are other forms of life out there in the vast universe. Many of those believe we have been visited by those other life forms.

The supposition presented in science fiction that the aliens were here first is also enjoying new popularity.

I like that idea. It explains the unexplainable in a way religion could never achieve for me. What a challenge to our egocentrism, that something outside of human intelligence could have been here, leaving some strange things behind for us to try to explain in human terms.

I like to imagine how different our world would be if we had seriously considered the possibility of alien visitors long ago.

All those people who claimed to have been abducted would have been paid for their stories instead of laughed at by the rest of the country.

The government wouldn’t have had to cover up the arrival of aliens and their crash sites in order to avoid the mass hysteria as suggested in “Independence Day.”

And we might even have real live aliens walking among us, teaching us something about life beyond this minor planet we call Earth.

Never mind. We probably would have figured out a way to use them to our own advantage, maybe capitalizing on their differences or any special talents they might have. Or we would have given them some kind of fatal disease.

I suppose we are better off not knowing the truth, even though we all know that it is “out there.”

And maybe we are too enamored with wanting to know the truth to accept explanations that remove all the mystery from our lives.

We need mystery. Why else would religion be so popular?

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Kata Alvidrez is a graduate student in English from Los Angeles and has seen UFOs in the Yucca Valley.