HOUSTON – Do you believe in aliens? UFO’s? Believe it or not, there’s a lot of research that seems to show something is going on. Rice University hosts a unique collection of research focused on personal accounts of the Supernatural. It’s been growing over the past decade and researchers are now diving into these mysteries in a way that’s never been done before.
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Stories that once lived in the shadows are now stored in one of the most extraordinary archives in the world. The “Archives of the Impossible” consists of 15 separate collections documenting the supernatural including UFO sightings and alien abductions. “The official interest in this is much greater than people realize,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University.
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They include a vast number of photos, drawings, sketches, and personal testimonies, all claiming to document encounters with the unknown. “I don’t know how big it is. Certainly over a million documents and files and recordings. My strong sense is that no single human researcher can encompass everything that’s there. We can only get pieces of it. It’s created a community of inquiry, a very serious community from all of the sciences, social sciences and humanities and the experience community that we try to bring together and try to think about these things in a rigorous way that I think people are not used to,” Kripal said.
Kripal played a pivotal role in securing a home for Jacques Vallee’s work. Vallee, a French-born American astronomer approached him back in 2014 about finding a suitable university archive for his research. “It took us about 4 years to negotiate that first gift. and multiple gifts have come in since 2018 or so,” Vallee said. The archives have grown exponentially and among the treasures, is a collection of 3,400 letters written to author Whitley Strieber, best known for his work related to the paranormal. They offer a rare look at deeply personal accounts from those who claim to have had encounters with the extraordinary. What’s remarkable is how many of the experiences share strikingly similar details, common threads, and recurring themes, despite coming from strangers across the globe who have no connection to one another. “So the question inevitably arises, why do so many people have this similar kind of experience and why do similar kinds of entities are showing up again and again in people’s experiences?” Kripal said.
After ten years of adding to the archives, the university is now embarking on a two-year study to analyze many of these accounts, hoping to change the narrative on a phenomenon largely misunderstood and ignored by mainstream science for decades.“ I want to see what the patterns are and I want to see what’s in common,” Kripal said. As the study unfolds, Kripal hopes Archives of the Impossible will offer insights into one of the most mysterious aspects of the human experience. For now, they remain a testament to those who believe and those who want to understand.
