Gillian in Question
Although both Fox TV and Chris Carter's production company provided alleged biographical information about Gillian, we regarded it as suspect. Not that there was anything especially unbelievable about it, but just on principle. The Truth - as they say - is out there, and we intended to find it. The hard way.
Our first real clue came from an informant who called himself "Deep Thought". He e-mailed us a scanned image of a 35mm negative which he claimed was a photo of Gillian in high school. The manufacturing information on the margins of the film was consistent with early 1980's Kodak Tri-X, a popular high-speed black-and-white film of the era. It seemed superficially authentic.
Gillian on Film
Using our lab's advanced digital processing capabilities, we enlarged, enhanced, and tonally reversed the image for better viewing. It contained two figures, one of which quickly caught our eye. It appeared to depict a girl (or young boy) in an old-style police officer's hat. The features - although difficult to make out in detail - were an uncanny match for Gillian Anderson's.
We traced Deep Thought's e-mail to an IP address in a dial-up class-C netblock serving the 616 area code. At the time the photograph was allegedly taken, 616 covered the entire western third of the lower peninsula of Michigan, from the Indiana border to beautiful Grand Traverse Bay with its vineyards and cherry orchards. Not that this has any relevance to our investigation; due to the proliferation of area codes, 616 now covers little more than the extended Grand Rapids-Holland-Muskegon metropolitan area. I'm just providing some historical context. Anyway, we began checking high school yearbooks, focusing on the early 1980's, when Gillian Anderson - at least according to her official biography - would have been a teenager.