UFO flying saucer hovering over trees with 'I Want to Believe' caption

I Want to Believe

1993catchphraseclassic

Published August 31, 2026

"I Want to Believe" is the phrase printed on the blurry UFO poster hanging in Fox Mulder's FBI office throughout The X-Files, which aired from 1993 to 2002. Fans turned that prop into a parody template on YTMND starting in August 2005, and it grew into a catchall catchphrase and image macro for anything you want to be true, from aliens to Santa Claus.

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Overview

The joke pairs the phrase with the poster's grainy sky and blurry flying saucer, and gets swapped onto anything the maker wishes were real, from Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster to Santa Claus and a favorite team pulling off an upset1. The tone lands between sincere fandom and open self-mockery, which is why it works for both true UFO believers and people using it ironically about, say, a stable software release.

The format is loose. Some versions keep the sky and swap only the object above the tree line, others rework the caption while keeping the object, and a few redraw everything in the same washed-out palette2. The through line is that the viewer instantly recognizes Mulder's poster and reads the new object as the thing the poster maker actually wants to be true.

Origin & Background

Platform
The X-Files (TV set prop) / YTMND (viral spread)
Creator
Chris Carter / The X-Files production team
Date
1993

The poster was built as a scene prop for The X-Files, the Fox sci-fi series created by Chris Carter that ran for nine seasons from September 1993 to May 20022. Special Agent Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, kept it pinned to the wall of his basement office at FBI headquarters for most of the show's run, where it became a visual signature of his belief in extraterrestrial life.

The show's production never officially explained where the saucer image came from. The Swiss nonprofit FIGU later claimed the picture was based on a UFO photograph taken by their founder and self-described contactee Billy Meier3, though the studio has not confirmed that link.

How It Spread

X-Files fan clubs kept trading copies, reprints and knock-offs of the poster well after the finale in May 20022. The template hit the art-sharing site YTMND on August 25, 2005 when user RTF posted "Milton Files," an Office Space and X-Files mashup set to Mark Snow's original X-Files theme4.

Other YTMND pages piled on within days, including "The Truth is Out There"5, "I Want to Believe"6 and "Believe in Me"7, each swapping the poster's subject for a different in-joke. By 2006 the indie group Worrywood used the poster's layout for the cover of their first mini album2, and in summer 2008 Elite MRP launched a dedicated generator that let anyone drop a custom object above the tree line and print the caption underneath8.

How to Use This Meme

Typical builds keep the poster's washed-out sky and pine trees, replace the UFO with the object of belief (a yeti, a crypto token, a working printer), and leave the "I WANT TO BELIEVE" caption at the bottom. People commonly use it as a reaction image when arguing for something they know is a stretch, or as a straight fan tribute in X-Files circles.

Frequently Asked Questions