| Occupation | FBI Special Agent |
|---|---|
| Family | The Smoking Man (biological father) Teena Mulder (mother) Bill Mulder (legal father) Jeffrey Spender (paternal half-brother) Samantha Mulder (maternal half-sister) |
| Children | William Scully |
| Partners | Dana Scully |
| Affiliations | John Doggett Monica Reyes Walter Skinner The Lone Gunmen |
The mysterious disappearance of Mulder’s sister and his ensuing search for her became the consuming drive of his life. In 1982, Mulder graduated with first class honors from University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology. He then graduated with honors from the Quantico FBI Training Academy in 1984. Mulder joined the FBI on October 24, 1984. On graduating from the Academy, Mulder began his work in the Behavioral Science Unit(psychological profiling) under Agent Bill Patterson, with whom he had a testy relationship.[5]
In 1988, the FBI assigned Mulder to the Violent Crimes Unit. Around this time, Mulder first came across the X-Files, an obscure FBI section dealing with cases relating to the paranormal; he pored over these cases in his spare time, becoming obsessed with them. In 1991, Mulder re-opened the X-Files with Special agent Diana Fowley, but Fowley left shortly thereafter. Mulder investigated the X-Files by himself until March 1992, when Dana Scully, an instructor at the FBI Academy’s Forensic Science Research and Training Center, was partnered with him for the purpose of applying scientific reasoning to Mulder’s work and theories.
Mulder’s ultimate goal was to uncover what he believed to be a government conspiracy to hide the truth about alien life, and to find out what had happened to his sister. His quest and belief in the existence of aliens was, for most of the series, the driving force of the plot, or myth arc. However, during a period of time after Scully’s cancer went into remission (season 5), Mulder was convinced by Michael Kritschgau that aliens did not in fact exist, and that the government conspirators had merely concocted that threat as a smokescreen, to justify military activities and toy with him.