Head of the featured creature from the episode, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster."

X-Files Preservation Collection

Saratoga Springs, New York

"In a nutshell, I'm a crazy superfan," said Jim Thornton, co-owner of the X-Files Preservation Collection with his wife, Kelly Anthony. Jim was 24 when The X-Files first aired on network television in 1993; it was an episode about space alien abduction. Jim, who'd enjoyed the similarly-supernatural 1970s show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, was hooked.

Scully was trapped in this cryopod in the 1998 X-Files movie.

Jim began collecting mass-market X-File show memorabilia -- trading cards, magazines, action figures -- but found it unsatisfying. He and Kelly started attending X-Files conventions, and made contacts with the show's crew members and actors, and even show creator Chris Carter. "It went in stages," was how Jim described the collecting. "It escalated."

Eventually Jim and Kelly amassed a trove of over 10,000 X-Files props, scripts, set dressings, costumes, and prosthetics -- enough to fill a secret government warehouse of wrecked UFOs and pickled monsters.

What to do with it all? Jim wanted to keep the show's memory alive, and he credits Kelly with the idea of opening the Collection to the public. "I'm kind of a negative guy," he told us. "I'm like, 'Who's gonna come? Nobody's gonna come.'" Kelly, however, pushed the idea. "She said, 'You gotta do it. If it crashes it crashes. At least you can say you tried.'"

Beneath a space alien corpse, a mini-diorama of Scully at work in her autopsy room.

The result, said Jim, has been gratifying. "We get fans from parts of the world that I never knew existed," he said. "We get a lot of 12-13-year-olds who love the show, which is mind blowing to me," particularly since the last original X-Files episode aired back in 2018.

Stay far away from the chompers of Mr. Chuckleteeth

The Collection is not in Hollywood, but in Jim and Kelly's hometown in upstate New York, which means that most people have to travel out of their way to see it. Agents Mulder and Scully have yet to stop by, but Chris Carter was at the Collection's grand opening in 2022, and X-Files actors who've visited include William B. Davis ("Cigarette Smoking Man") and Karen Konoval (the ghastly Mrs. Peacock in season 4's "Home," one of the series' most horrific episodes).

Jim is especially proud of his artifacts from the show's first five seasons, which are hard to find. "The first five years were filmed in Vancouver and they worked on a shoestring budget and a lot of the props were thrown away. That's what they did back then. It was just stuff," said Jim, clearly troubled by the thought. Among these prized original relics are a tiny alien nasal implant and lumpy "mammalian corpse" from the show's very first 1993 episode.

This non-human corpse was found in a human coffin in the very first X-Files episode.

Flukeman: a big sewer-dwelling parasite.

Despite the X-Files' overarching theme of sinister conspiracies and coverups, it was also known for its standalone "monster-of-the-week" episodes, and the Collection displays a satisfying menagerie of some of the show's nightmarish freaks. Among them are the sewer-dwelling Flukeman from season 2, the Great Mutato's two-faced baby from season 5, Blobface Boy from season 10, Mr. Chuckleteeth from season 11, and the Human/Alien Harvest Host from the 1998 X-Files movie.

Iconic props on display include Scully's autopsy gear; Mulder's FBI office file cabinet and original "I Want to Believe" poster; a pack of Cigarette Man's smokes; a "Die! Bug Die!" spray can from the "War of the Coprophages" episode (season 3); the evil Chinga doll that Scully fried by throwing it into a microwave (season 5); and the clunky Toshiba laptop on which Chris Carter wrote the pilot episode. "When fans see that," said Jim of the old word processor, "they lose their minds."

Smoking Man always had a pack of these cigarettes handy.

Jim said that it would be impossible for him to pick a favorite artifact in the museum ("That would be like trying to pick the favorite of my kids") although he easily identified the biggest prop in the Collection: the alien cryopod that entrapped Scully in the 1998 X-Files movie ("That thing is a beast"). The Collection's displays are arranged at random so that visitors can quickly immerse themselves in the entirety of the X-Files -- all 202 episodes and two feature films -- and Jim or Kelly are usually on-hand to provide background details and episode arcana.

"I'm collecting all the time; I just added some yesterday," said Jim, whose passion for X-Files artifacts is undiminished after over 30 years. "The X-Files is up there with Star Trek," said Jim. "It's one of the greatest television series on the planet. It is a Holy Grail TV show."