THE X-FILES Mapping Project
How The Episode Maps Were Created
Episode Location Maps
The episode location maps show the location that the episode took place, not
where the episode was filmed. Many of the locations of episodes are fictional
and had to be estimated.
The episodes are numbered by production order, not by date. The Pilot was
numbered episode "1x01" (instead of the more official "0x79") to simplify things.
These maps contain several instances of "artistic license" (see below).
Please email me if you have any
questions or suggestions on how to do this better. Thanks.
How the Locations Were Chosen
To create these maps, each episode was assigned to one location only. Obviously,
many episodes feature several different locations. To make things simple, one
"primary" location was chosen for each episode. For the first three seasons, the
locations from The Official Map of THE X-FILES were used. For seasons
four through seven, I chose what I thought was the primary location of the episode -
with one exception. Because so many episodes are primarily located in Washington,
D.C., other locations for Washington, D.C. episodes were assigned whenever possible.
For example, the episode Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man (US airdate =
November 17, 1996; Season 4, Episode 7) is primarily set in Washington, D.C.,
but on my map it is located at Dogway, West Virginia (where the UFO crashed and
Deep Throat killed the alien in Part III).
Artistic License
As stated above, other locations were substituted whenever possible for Washington,
D.C. Call it "spreading the wealth".
In addition, all overlap of the episode "dots" has been eliminated. For instance,
both Irresistible (US airdate = January 13, 1995; Season 2, Episode 13) and Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (US airdate = October 13, 1995) took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In order to make both episode "dots" visible on the map,
they are located slightly apart.
"Real" vs. "Fictional"
All of the episode locations have been designated as either "real" (such as
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) or "fictional" (such as Home, Pennsylvania).
"Real" means that there is a city/town/locale called Philadelphia in the state
of Pennsylvania. It does NOT mean that in Philadelphia there is a bar called
the "Hard Eight" with a tattoo parlor across the street (as seen in the episode
Never Again). I may be wrong in some of these designations, and would
appreciate any corrections. Thanks.
Software Used
All maps on this site were created with
ArcView GIS version 3.1.
The "Select a State" imagemap of the United States was created using the
"view to imagemap" script created by
David Kreinheder.
This script is available at
ArcScripts.
Data Used
The point data layer showing the locations of X-FILES episodes was created by me.
The United States city, state, road, river and lakes data layers were downloaded for free from the National Atlas website.
The land and country boundaries data layers for North, Central, and South America were downloaded for free from ESRI's World Basemap Browser.
The world map image was created by the CIA and can be found at the
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at The University of Texas at Austin.
Miscellaneous Information
I learned how to create the imagemaps for the state maps at
this website.
The episode descriptions for the first three seasons are from The Official Map
of THE X-FILES. The episode descriptions for seasons four through seven are
from TV Guide.
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