way to alleviate this pressure is to drive west. At first, Scully believes that Crump is suffering from some sort of infection; she takes a hazmat team to investigate the Crumps' home and finds a dog suffering the same symptoms and dead birds on a neighbor's property, but on noting that the neighbor herself, who is deaf, was unaffected, she then discovers a U.S. Navy antenna array emitting ELF waves stretches beneath their property. Scully deduces that an abnormal surge in these waves somehow caused a rising pressure in the inner ear of the nearby inhabitants. Westward motion and an increase in speed seem to be the only thing to help ease the pain of the increasing pressure. Initially, thinking that the FBI agent is part of a government conspiracy, Crump forces Mulder at gunpoint to drive, infuriating him along the way with antisemitic slurs. Eventually, Mulder and Crump make amends and attempt to work out a solution before it is too late. Mulder explains to Crump that Scully will meet them at the Pacific Coast, the end of the highway. There she will insert a needle into Crump's inner ear, hopefully relieving the pressure. Unfortunately, when Scully arrives, Crump has already died. Production Conception, writing, and filming Vince Gilligan, the writer of "Drive", was inspired to pen the episode based on an earlier idea he had about a man holding an individual hostage on a Tilt-A-Whirl. Gilligan had pitched this idea at several previous story meetings and it soon became a recurring joke among the show's writers, many of whom felt that the premise lacked an X-Files-like mystery. Gilligan soon revised his story so that after the ride was shut off, the man's head would explode. This led to Gilligan researching various government experiments, and soon he learned about two real-life military experiments: Project HAARP and Project ELF. The former is an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whereas the latter is a U.S. Navy experiment dealing with long wavelengths. Gilligan thus wrote a script that featured an individual who, due to a secret experiment involving soundwaves, could not slow down for fear of rupturing his head. Gilligan admitted that the episode was partially an homage to the action film Speed (1994), and contains a reference to the film: