Smartphones are supposed to be making us stupid: curtailing our concentration, mangling our spelling and sending us out into the road in front of trucks.

But whilst dumbing us down in some areas, they’ve sharpened us in others. For years, alien sightings were reported and magazines would be devoted to the dodgy claims, reprinting readers’ photographs of blurs and wobbling lights in the sky. But technology has killed off alien sightings because now everyone has a camera phone in their back pocket so if you’re going to claim you saw an alien you’ll be asked for razor-sharp, pixelated proof. Even then, everyone has access to Photoshop so your triumphant picture might be mocked-up - or just plain mocked. In an instant it can be tweeted around the world to be assessed, ridiculed and de-bunked.

So people don’t report alien sightings as they used to and those who still relish such unearthly topics are catered for by the current craze for sci-fi and superheroes, besides the countless websites and forums dedicated to such phenomena. So, in our Internet world, one whose odd corners are increasingly being smoothed down by scrutiny, is there still room for The X-Files?

I say yes, as long as the show ditches the aliens and goes instead for other types of conspiracy: Julian Assange was out on his balcony yesterday. Terrorists are plotting attacks against us. Paedophiles congregate on the “dark web”. Nuclear weapons in the former Soviet states lie in risky, rusty decay. There are a thousand hideous and secretive stories out there so there’s no need to look to little green men if you want a frightening conspiracy plot, but that’s exactly what this new series did.

I’m sure the die-hard fans loved it because it assured them that nothing about their beloved programme had changed and their heroes were back discussing alien abduction like they’d never gone away. However, to avoid being accused of stagnation, the writer perhaps felt compelled to throw a lot more into the mix and so ended up with a tangled and dissatisfying episode.

The story claimed that the famous Roswell Incident did indeed occur, and the Government (in a theory I’ve heard espoused by Karl Pilkington) used the alien craft to learn new technologies which they then concealed. Having inherited a spaceship which used “no fuel, no flame, no combustion", they kept the "technology kept secret for years while the world ran out of petroleum”, allowing the oil companies to make trillions of dollars.

If the story had stuck to this point it’d have been fascinating: the US government in cahoots with grasping, war-mongering oil men intent on bleeding the planet dry and making themselves insanely wealthy, all keeping the secret of this pure new technology. But the story ran away like an over-excited child and grabbed at a thousand other things too, so we also had a woman who claimed to have been abducted by aliens who then impregnate her and steal her babies; we had lots of Scully in the operating theatre sporting scrubs and a blood-sprayed neck as she worked on children born without ears; there were desperate attempts to re-ignite the tension between Mulder and Scully, all of which was hammed-up by Mulder looking dishevelled and sad, and Scully speaking in increasingly low, husky tones as though to remind us all of how sceptical and detached she is from her partner’s chaotic suspicions, and there was a bit of mind-reading, just for the sake of adding yet more to the pot.

From the stramash, some sense slowly began to emerge and, surprisingly, it came from the exhausted Mulder. He had a theory that there were actually no alien abductions. Instead, the Government was doing the abducting so they could perform terrible experiments on us and, using their secret Roswell craft, make it look like it was aliens because, in our rational age, who’ll believe the hick who stumbles in from the highway claiming a spaceship hovered over his car? Mulder claimed a group of rich people were behind this, waiting to “cull, kill and subjugate” and eventually take over America and the world. Perhaps those nice little Roswell aliens were actually trying to warn us?

Yes, but why? Scully initially said this was “fear-mongering clap trap” but didn’t simply ask Mulder why people would do this. We’re already ruled by elites - the super-rich, big business, the billionaires, oligarchs and sheiks – and they all seem to be doing quite nicely. Why grab for more? What would they do with it? So instead of feeling Scully’s scepticism, and perhaps a tantalising urge to “believe”, I just felt weariness: yeah, Mulder, but why?

The story over-reached itself. If it had stuck with the concept of the rampant military industrial complex getting too powerful and bloodthirsty, urging our reliance on oil so they could prompt wars in the Middle East, then that would have been a meaty, horrible story but this idea vanished in a fog about big baddies wanting to be even bigger and badder without giving us a reason why. In a very limp, throwaway manner we were asked to believe and not shown why we absolutely must.