SCULLY: What the janitors describe sounds more like a sonic boom.

MULDER: No sonic boom did this. The construction worker who was killed had his spine crushed like a string of seashells, a circular abrasion on his torso in roughly the shape of an elephant's foot. Other workers at the site said they felt the ground shake followed by a faint whiff of animal odor in the wind.

SCULLY: Mulder, if you're still suggesting that the elephant did this, it just defies logic. Somebody would have seen it.

MULDER: Well, if somebody would have seen it, Scully, we wouldn't be here. Another vehicle would have left evidence of a collision - distress to the metal, or paint. I can see signs of neither of those things. I'd be willing to admit the possibility of a tornado but it's not really tornado season. I'd even be willing to entertain the notion of a black hole passing over the area... or some cosmic anomaly, but it's not really black hole season, either. If I was a betting man I'd say that it was, uh, ...

SCULLY: An invisible elephant?

MULDER: I saw David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear once.

SCULLY: Have they determined what he died of?

MEECHAM: She. Ganesha was a 12-year-old Indian female [elephant]. Near as I can figure, she ran herself into exhaustion.

WILLA AMBROSE: Elephants aren't particularly good jumpers if that's what you're thinking.

KYLE LANG: The W.A.O. believes only tragedy results from keeping animals in captivity. In the wild, an elephant like that would roam an area 20 square miles, minimum. Ganesha weighed in excess of 5000 pounds, and she was being held in a 50 by 50 foot cage.

SCULLY: And you consider that inhumane treatment?

KYLE LANG: It's like you or I living in a pickle barrel.

KYLE LANG: Endangering these animals is against everything we believe. These are incredibly spiritual creatures. Their rituals and behavior are linked to a past no man ever witnessed. Did you know they actually bury their dead? They can visit an elephant graveyard centuries old and know instinctively where the bones of their ancient ancestors lie.

KYLE LANG: All animals should run free.

SCULLY: Even if that means trampling a man to death?

KYLE LANG: Maybe he should have gotten out of the way.

MULDER: I'm sure he would have if he'd seen it coming.

BYERS: So what's this costing the taxpayers, Mulder?

MULDER: Uh, about 150 bucks an hour.

FROHIKE: Ouch. Almost as much as Bill Clinton's haircuts.

MULDER: What do you know about alien abduction?

WILLA AMBROSE: You're ... you're ... you're kidding me. You think these animals were taken aboard some space ship?

MULDER: I don't know where they're being taken but there's obviously some problem getting them back. Due to what is probably an astrological variation, a trouble with the time-space continuum - these animals that are being taken from locked cages are being returned roughly two miles westsouthwest of the zoo.

WILLA AMBROSE: Aliens impregnating zoo animals?

MULDER: Yes, and harvesting the embryos.

WILLA AMBROSE: Why?

MULDER: Maybe their own Noah's ark? To preserve the DNA of these animals that we're depleting to extinction.

MULDER: (voiceover) ... the pall of a greater tragedy remains. The motives of the silent visitors who set these events in motion remain unclear. Could this be a judgement on a global rate of extinction that has risen to 1000 times its natural rate in this century? An act of alien conservation of animals we are driving hard toward oblivion? And if so, might it follow that our own fate and existence could finally be dependent upon the conservatorship of an extraterrestrial race? Or in the simple words of a creature whose own future is uncertain, will "man save man?"