A win for the humble internet detective tonight, as a 25-year-old musical TV mystery has now been solved—complete with a full release of the song in question. That’s “Staring At The Stars,” by Dan Marfisi and Glenn Jordan, a song previously available only to a very limited audience—i.e., people paying extra strong attention to the background music of a 1998 episode of The X-Files. (Specifically, “Dreamland II,” the second episode of a sixth-season two-parter that sees David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder and Michael McKean’s government agent Morris Fletcher swapping bodies.)
As reported in a number of outlets at this point—most notably The Washington Post, which interviewed pretty much all involved for a story on the search this week—the song caught the attention of Twitter user Lauren Ancona, who was perplexed to find that she couldn’t seem to track down the provenance of the music used in the scene. This kicked off a viral surge of interest that produced a day-long online investigation, which eventually spat out the answer: The song was an original, never-released commission for the show created by songwriting partners and L.A.-based musicians Marfisi and Jordan, who were apparently given all of four hours to put together a song that “could be about an alien or a human being.” Now (after finding the original version of the song on a 25-year-old CD) the pair, who still put out music as JonesHouse, have released a lyric video for the song, which does, indeed, merge lyrics about heartbreak with lines that could just as easily be about extraterrestrials.
It’s pretty easy to hear why the song caught the attention of Ancona and other X-Files viewers over the years: There’s a sweet quality to the tune, and Jordan’s vocals, that belies its status as potential filler material for a single episode of a long-running TV show. And given how well mysteries on the mothership series usually don’t go for the people investigating them, it’s also a treat to have an incident where the truth that was out there turned out so decidedly pleasant for all involved.