It was written by Darin Morgan and directed by Rob Bowman, and featured guest appearances by Charles Nelson Reilly, Jesse Ventura, and Alex Trebek.

"Jose Chung's From Outer Space" earned a Nielsen household rating of 10.5, being watched by 16.08 million people in its initial broadcast, and also received praise from critics.

The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

While it follows the normal villain of the week pattern of those episodes, it features more humor than typical via manipulation of point of view, leading to multiple re-tellings of certain events with varying degrees of unreliable narrators.

At a later point, Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is interviewed about the case by famed author Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly), who is researching a book he is writing about alien abductions and UFO phenomena.

The foul-mouthed local detective, Manners (whose profanity is humorously replaced with words such as "bleep" and "blank"), does not believe his story, but Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) has Chrissy undergo hypnosis, in which she describes being on a spaceship surrounded by aliens.

Mulder is convinced that Chrissy and Harold were abducted by aliens, but Scully thinks it is more plausible that the two teenagers simply had consensual sex and are struggling to deal with the emotional aftermath.

The agents speak to an electric power company lineman named Roky Crikenson, who claims he witnessed the abduction of Chrissy and Harold, and then turned his eyewitness account into a screenplay.

Mulder allows Blaine to videotape Scully performing an autopsy on the alien, which is quickly released as a video "documentary" that is narrated by the Stupendous Yappi.

Mulder tricks the military officers into revealing the identity of a second missing Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Jack Schaefer.

After getting him some clothes, Mulder takes Schaefer to a diner, where the pilot explains that he and his partner were dressed as aliens while flying a secret U.S. military vehicle designed to resemble a UFO.

After leaving the diner, Mulder returns to the agents' motel and finds the men in black seen earlier (played by Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek) in Scully's room.

The next morning, Mulder, Scully and Manners visit the site of a crashed Air Force plane, where the dead bodies of the two pilots, including Schaefer, are recovered.

In his book, Chung describes the fates of the various people he interviewed: Roky has moved to California and founded a cult based on the teachings he believes he received from Lord Kinbote; Blaine has replaced Roky as a power company lineman and continues to search for UFOs most nights; Mulder (whom Chung describes as "a ticking time bomb of insanity") watches video footage of Bigfoot; and Harold professes his love to Chrissy, who rejects him and tells him she no longer has interest in romance, as her UFO experience has given her a new commitment to philanthropy.

[3] Disparate ideas that would eventually coalesce into "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" had been developed by writer Darin Morgan long before the script was actually written.

The writer was inspired both by works he had read on hypnosis, as well as the theory that UFOs are real ships that can manipulate space and time, but they are piloted not by aliens but by the U.S.

The writer claimed that he could not keep up with the frantic pace of the show,[5] although he would later write the similarly themed "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" for the TV series Millennium.

"[15] Assistant director Tom Braidwood appreciated Charles Nelson Reilly's presence, saying that he captivated virtually everyone and gave everyone a lift, nicknaming everyone on the crew.

[...] If The X-Files were a The Lord of the Rings-length novel, then "Jose Chung's" would be its first appendix, a source that is at once in love with the main text and critical of it, a place where real human concerns creep around the edges of the show's chilly implausibilities.