A while back Whitley Strieber's graphic novel The Nye Incidents was mentioned in passing in the comments. Now I hear this has been optioned as a film:

Dark Castle is turning to aliens as its newest bogeymen.

The Warner Bros.-based horror label has picked up rights to Devil's Due graphic novel "The Nye Incidents," from sci-fi and horror novelist Whitley Strieber. Todd Lincoln will direct.

Inspired by true events, comicbook revolves around a medical examiner on the hunt of a killer of alien abductees.

Source

Hat tip

So what is it all about? And what true stories is this based on?

Well I agree it sounds an awful lot like one of the stories from the X-Files. So in an endeavour to find out the actual story I have ordered up the graphic novel and will let you know what that is like when it turns up (I suspect I am taking one for the team - this review doesn't fill me with hope, but we'll see). In the meantime, lets see if we can't dig a little deeper. Interestingly, it turns out to be a topic I've touched on before - human mutilation (although I have suggested other parallels). He goes into more detail in his Unknown Country blog:

it has a bad side, and that's what the Nye Incidents is about. The reality that the visitors are a complex phenomenon must be accepted. To reject the good they offer because there is bad along with it is a great waste. At the same time, to try to pretend that there is no bad is dangerous.

I first heard rumors of human mutilations in the mid nineties, but I discounted them because, out of all the hundreds of thousands of letters we had received about close encounter experiences from readers of Communion, there was not even a whisper of such things happening.

But then Linda Howe told me a story of a case she had briefly investigated, of a man who had been found devastatingly mutilated, just like a cattle mutilation. I know, and knew then, of Linda's astonishing career and how hard she works to get the facts, so her story concerned me deeply. She had been called by a coroner because he had a human case similar to a cattle mutilation. But when she tried to pursue the matter, she was told that he had been officially silenced, and was unable to take it any further.

Then there were other cases. In 2001, I heard of a coroner in the general area of my old cabin who had a number of such cases, and who had also been silenced. Then there was the Point Mountain case in Pennsylvania. This began when Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center and Unknowncountry.com both received reports from people from this area, to the effect that they had observed a bright column of light come down out of a cloudy daytime sky and shine into a wooded area. There was a report of a human form rising up in this light.

A few days later, a local man was reported missing. His 4 wheeler was found, but not him, and hounds could not locate a scent leading away from the machine. A few days later, his body was found in a wetland not far from his house, in what was described as a state of advanced decomposition. I wondered, decomposition or mutilation? But when Linda Howe tried to investigate, she was warned by the sheriff to leave town. Later, the FBI claimed that the man had died of a cocaine overdose.

...

Then, in 2001, I began to hear of a large number of mutilation murders taking place in northern New Jersey—in fact, within about forty miles of my old cabin. These were absolutely terrifying stories, to say the least. At first, I thought they must be a hoax, but subsequently was forced to place them in the realm of the unknown.

These stories involved the remains of street people being found mutilated like cattle, on the roofs of buildings . Worse, they had been drowned by being taken to such a depth in the ocean that their lungs showed pressure damage.

So these street people were being taken, having their genitals and tongues and eyes and lips cut off, then being plunged into the sea a hundred miles away and drowned, then dropped back on the roofs of buildings.

At first, it appeared that I had a direct line to the coroner involved. Then that collapsed, and I was left unsure about what had happened. I could not believe that the murders were done by some sort of serial killer, because how could a serial killer mutilate people, then drown them by taking them down in the ocean, then bring them back and put them on roofs? It just struck me as impossible.

But, for the visitors it would not only be easy, it would be of a piece with cattle mutilations...and with the other stories I head heard.

Source (also at Beyond Communion)

The problem is the actual cases remain elusive, as Strieber admits in this interview with AICN:

I actually did a lot of research. I tried to track cases down, but whenever I did, I ran into reluctant, unwilling and even hostile law enforcement personnel. Our researcher tried to pin down a case in Pennsylvania, for example, and was told to either leave town or go to jail.

Source

It is the lack of definitive evidence that encouraged him to write it up as a film script, and then Craig Spector turned it into a graphic novel:

“A few years ago, I got word that there were also human mutilations, and that there were a few coroners here and there who had seen these cases, but they had been silenced by the FBI. I was never able to definitively track the cases down, so I began to explore the possibility -- or threat -- in fiction.”

Source

This fact-fiction switching he (and others) indulge, is something I've noticed quite a bit and is a cause for concern.

If you want more there are previews on the publisher's site and a a long interview starting here:

Book

The Nye Incidents
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com