These questions have been with us for years now. The genius of the X-Files' enduring popularity may lie in its very lack of originality, in the way it's predicated on wide audiences' being familiar with the idea of sinister bureaucrats coming between us and our cosmic neighbors. This myth has already coalesced into cliche, summed up neatly by Charles Portis in his 1990 book Gringos - "there were government agents to fear, so efficient in their neat business suits and gray Plymouths. They would spirit the [alien] body away to a hangar at some remote air base and then deny all knowledge of it with their fixed smiles."

So these organization men, with their walkie-talkies and conspiratorial ways, are the counterpoint to the open, cosmic knowledge represented by the aliens. Forty years ago, Americans might have counted on "G-men" to protect us from the depredations of bug-headed space aliens. Before the 1960s extraterrestrials were usually portrayed as monstrous and aggressive, an occasion for displays of might. Popular psychology explains the scary aliens of the past as figments of Cold War paranoia or as the monsters spawned by button-down America's sleep of reason. The swollenly cerebral features of the post-Close Encounters extraterrestrial, by contrast, seem only to promise deliverance from the squalid circuit of daily life - promise frustrated by the circles of power here on earth.

In the face of such ethical gamesmanship, it's not hard to spot the appeal of the aliens: Not moral correctness, but moral neutrality. Human elites play upon class and race prejudice; the aliens never do that, because they are no respecters of persons. Humans make elaborate psychological defenses; the aliens have no psychology to speak of. You don't have to call them "alleged" abductors, and you don't see their hired apologists lying for them on TV. And when they're gone, they stay gone.

The distinction here may not be otherworldly omniscience against human weakness so much as innocence versus experience. And here the struggle to attain the Zen state of the aliens finds an odd parallel in the real news. John Ramsey may have successfully used an army of lawyers and a pliant police force to clear himself of his beauty queen daughter's molestation/murder. Whether he killed his own daughter or (as DNA evidence now indicates) the crime is part of some wheels-within-wheels plot involving an outsider, Ramsey has famously subverted the investigation and is now pretty much unprosecutable, an affront to every tabloid-buying American. The mere fact that they entered their daughter in those sinister pageants is reason enough to despise the Ramseys, and the human race in general.

Part of the JonBenet outrage is the sight of an unsullied child grotesquely made up with adult cosmetics and hair styling. To note that aliens eschew such worldly vanities is to trivialize the crime; but the two stories often appear on opposite pages of the same tabloids. Just how far is it from the crowd of deferring police, lawyers, and public-relations flacks dragging around JonBenet's murdered body to that image of the Roswell alien's innocent corpse, stolen, hidden, and dissected for secret purposes by the military? Lost forever to human eyes, defiled, and exploited even in death. Divest the two scenes of their accidents, and the essence that remains is the stink of secrets, the hasteful scurrying of sinners, and "the sneer of cold command," of Shelly's Ozymandias, reeking across the ages and the gulfs of space as well.