Born to Albert Somchat Swellsman and Samantha Gobert Overton, Chris McLaren Swellsman arrived in the world by uttering a single word: hunter. As a child, he spent his days in Hamburg, Montana chasing moose and small rodents, earning a world record for longest marathon in pursuit of a bull moose at the age of 12. By his teen years, Swellsman had turned his attention to criminology and dual enrolled in the infamous Arswollow School for Serial Huntery, a college funded by the CIA and FBI to train a new generation of detectives focused on hunting down serial killers. He graduated at the top of his class in 1956 and was immediately recruited by the FBI's Sobrek Division, named after Paul Sobrek, a famous serial hunter responsible for catching the Appalachian Strangler, the Soap Maker, and Mr. Tibbits.
Under Sobrek's guidance, Swellsman developed an acute ability to manipulate suspects who had actually committed murder to confess. This is now believed to be the result of experimental radiation treatments he received to combat warty knees, which Swellsman did not reveal until his death in 2029; the treatment was successful, but it also gave him an unnaturally powerful mental insight. Before becoming a lead investigator, Swellsman helped catch Edward Gore (a.k.a. the Minute Man) and Mary Contrary (true identity still unknown). In 1964, Swellsman was promoted to lead investigator and took over management of the Sobrek Division to allow his mentor to retire to Florida.
As head of the division, Swellsman secretly used FBI resources to identify other individuals with radiation-based abilities. Through this effort, he recruited Philip Mammoth for his ability to identify patterns even killers cannot see, Tory Farraday for her ability to mentally visualize crime scenes to identify impossible-to-see clues, and Anong Sanouk, a Thai national who could make the concept of his existence invisible to the mind even though he could still be seen with the eye. Together, this unit became infamous for its solve rate, so much so that the FBI became suspicious and had the unit transferred to the Sub Investigations Unit (SIU; famously fictionalized in X-Files). There, Swellsman and his crew worked with minimal resources to solve a variety of unusual crimes, including supernatural serial murder, unusual sightings, and bank robberies.
From 1972-1999, Swellsman's SIU investigated a number of substantial anomalies, including the Ramses Museum Murders, the Ebertson Sightings, and sixteen cases of mysterious food poisoning. In 2000, he joined the FBI's UFO Analysis Team, whose primary function was the preparation of classified documents on unidentified flying object sightings by military personnel. These documents were released to the public in 2020 and 2021 and revealed the involvement of subversive organizations in the genetic manipulation of humans to turn them into killers. This led to the Swellsman Apocalypse, a dramatic top-down reorganization of the FBI which saw the largest purge of conspirators in the history of the U.S. government.
Following these incidences, Swellsman retired to New Zealand, where he raised alpacas until his death from natural causes in 2029. An Andy Warhol painting of Swellsman still sits in the FBI front offices.