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Anomaly Archives eNews – February 6th, 2022

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Source: Anomaly Archives eNews – February 6th, 2022

The Anomaly Archives Email Newsletter

February 6, 2022 – Austin, Texas

 

Anomalous Archives in Texas

Opening of the Archives of the Impossible @RiceUniversity
March 3-6, 2022

Greetings Friends and Supporters of the Anomaly Archives!

It’s been nearly 6 months since our last eNews installment. I apologize for this long delay but, as with many folks during this pandemic, it’s been a tremendously difficult time for me (SMiles Lewis) in my personal life, in my day-job life, and of course, with my life’s-work, my passion-project, these Anomaly Archives. The loss of loved ones and the (hopefully temporary) loss of ground towards one’s most-loved endeavors is an ongoing source of grief and challenge for me and the Anomaly Archives board of directors and its volunteers. While there has been no change in the hiatus status of the Anomaly Archives collections laying in storage in South Austin, the long-awaited grand opening of another Texas-based anomalous archive is finally happening!

I’m proud and excited to be a panelist representing the independent nonprofit Anomaly Archives as part of the public opening of this important new anomalous archive at Rice University. Follow the links and information below to find out more about this Tuesday’s zoom session that is the first in a free series of preparatory webinars setting the stage for the March 3rd through 6th, grand opening event.

I probably first learned of the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University in late 2018 or early 2019. It was incredibly exciting to discover its existence, piecemeal, before any overt public announcement. I think I first found information about it while searching the PCHP (Preserving the Historical Collections of Parapsychology) directory and noticing the entry for Rice University. At that point I think it was still being referred to as the “GEM Archives” because of its Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism (GEM) certificate program connection. Soon thereafter I heard Diana Walsh Pasulka alluding to the formation of the archive in an interview she did on Podcast UFO. Within a year of learning about the new Rice University / Fondren Library special collection, and piecing together part of its origin story, I was invited to participate. It may have taken two years since first getting wind of its existence but in a month’s time I’ll finally get to visit it in person AND be a part of its opening events!

Visit: ImpossibleArchives.Rice.Edu

FREE Pre-Event Webinars:
February 8th, 15h, & 24th, 2022

FREE Main Event:
March 3rd-6th, 2022

… more below …

Back in the April 15th, 2019 edition of the eNewsletter I mused on the sea-change in academic anomalistics while referencing the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University:

“We may be witnessing a new renaissance in anomalistic / para oriented public events. While rumors swirl about the activities and identities of anonymous “Invisible College” UFO researchers recently re-described in Dr. Diana Pasulka’s book American Cosmic, public organizations such as the Archives of the Impossible (formerly the GEM Archives [Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism]) at Rice University, Houston (within the Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center – special collections) … We’ve also seen the recent … shift towards more scientific and academically accepted public events. Meanwhile, the more traditional, folksy festival type events continue to flourish and grow across the country.”

IMAGE: Anne & Whitley Strieber Collection 1970-2016 at the Archives of the Impossible, Rice University.

Later that year in our October 24th, 2019 edition of the eNewsletter – as we edged towards the great unknown awaiting us in the pandemic future of 2020 – we linked to the announcement of the opening Jeff Kripal’s, Opening of the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, to launch in late October, early November of 2020:

Archives in the News

[Grand Opening Originally Scheduled for Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2020]

We are delighted and honored to have been invited to be a panel participant at this unique event celebrating the opening of this important and unique archive. The 3 upcoming free webinars coming up this Tuesday the 8th, then the following Tuesday the 15th, and another on Thursday the 24th (see below for details) make the next 3 weeks in February of 2022 into an amazing lead in to this grand opening event for Jeff Kripal’s and Rice University’s Archives-Of-The-Impossible!

We hope you all will show your interest and support for this amazing event. It is an important milestone along the journey of creating a more respectable foundation for the exploration of these strange surrealities found within the raw living experiencing of folklore and myth which make up the storyline of humanity’s long-term contact with seemingly Alien Others.

Below in the rest of this long-overdue eNews installment is part of the introductory message from Professor Kripal that you can see at the official ImpossibleArchives.Rice.Edu website (where you can also see the event schedule and register for all of the events) along with the list of Plenary Speakers as well as links to the upcoming Pre-Event Webinars to prime your psychic pump for the main event.

After that you’ll find the usual long list of latest Anomaly News Headlines that we post to our Flipboard Magazine, as well as link to the interview with did with Professor Jeffrey Kripal for the 2020 Streamathon Emergency Fundraiser.

Finally, for a little humor and levity, check out this old Rice University archive flashback about a UFO-Hoax perpetrated by students in 1966.

SMiles Lewis / Founder
AnomalyArchives.org
SMilesLewis.com

 

Jeffrey Kripal Welcomes You To The Archives Of The Impossible

“The intellectual gravity of the gifts of Vallée, Strieber, and May created a kind of “black hole” effect among those who knew. Soon, others were attracted by their gravitational pull and approached us with their own offers of generosity. These individuals included Brenda Denzler and Diana Pasulka, two scholars of religion with extensive ethnographic and interviewing experience with contactees; Robert Fuller, an accomplished psychologist of religion whose father had collected almost every issue of Fate magazine, whose wonderful early pulp fiction covers and real-life stories has functioned since 1948 as a kind of Reader’s Digest of the American paranormal; Richard Haines, a long-time NASA scientist, aviation expert, and author of CE-5: Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, with a very considerable trove of scientific research on UFO sightings; Larry Bryant, an employee of the Pentagon who spent much of his life collecting ufological materials and engaging in activist and legal work around the Freedom of Information Act and disclosure movement (Larry and his daughter sent us 102 boxes); and Stewart Alexander, a leading physical medium from the UK who has been working for over forty years and manifesting various extraordinary abilities and physical phenomena.

At present, we estimate that the total archival collection stands at somewhere well north of 100,000 items, and that this is probably much too modest of a figure. We are professionally archiving the material as fast as we can, with significant help from Ph.D. students and the professional staff of Woodson Research Center. When complete, these Archives of the Impossible will easily constitute one of the largest collections of its kind in the world and almost certainly the largest at an American research university. We look forward to the days when we can welcome researchers and students from around the world into these boxes, folders, and files. The truth may or may not be out there, as one popular American television series had it, but it is almost certainly in here, somewhere. Please come and help us find it.”

 – Jeffrey J. Kripal

 

This is one event you don’t want to miss, so register today 

Register for the online conference here

Plenary Speakers

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. His new book will come out this spring, entitled The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging new order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories, cultures, and futures. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com

Jacques F. Vallée, PhD, is the founder of Documatica Research, LLC, San Francisco, California. An information scientist with a background in astrophysics and AI, he served as one of the architects of social networking on the early Internet, and as a founder of five international venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, including NASA’s Red Planet Capital. Jacques’ early interest in the UFO phenomenon and psychical research led to a series of books and technical papers in many languages. Most recently, he developed the largest extant UAP “data warehouse” for a classified project.

Leslie Kean is an independent investigative journalist who has been bringing credible information about hidden, paranormal and “impossible” realities into the mainstream for over twenty years. She is the author of Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife and UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, a New York Times bestseller. Kean co-wrote the pivotal December 2017 New York Times story which revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon UFO program and included the release of now-famous Navy videos. Surviving Death is the basis for a 2021 six-part documentary series on Netflix. Kean is now working on a documentary series on UFOs for CNN. https://www.lesliekean.com/

Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion, the best selling book about close encounters in history, and many follow up books. His latest works are the Afterlife Revolution, about the mysterious possibility of extra-physical consciousness, A New World, covering his recent experiences with the phenomenon he calls “the visitors,” and the latest discoveries about the ambiguous experience of contact, and Jesus: A New Vision, a reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus. His website is Unknowncountry.com, which hosts his podcast, Dreamland. The site has been in operation since 2000, and the podcast has been broadcast weekly since 1998. Whitley lives in California.

Diana Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research spans Catholic history to new religious movements. Recent books include American Cosmic: Religion, UFOs, and Technology (OUP 2019) and Contact 21: Encounters with Non-Human Intelligence (forthcoming). She has published in Tank, Vox, Vice, and has been invited to speak at numerous institutions and venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, keynotes at universities, and international public radio. She is lead investigator on an ongoing study of Catholic manuscripts and saints at the Vatican Secret Archive and the Vatican Space Observatory.

John Phillip Santos is a Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian. In addition to television documentaries on religion and culture for CBS News and PBS, myriad magazine articles and newspaper work, he has authored two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999 National Book Award Finalist), The Farthest Home is in An Empire of Fire (2010), and a book of poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer (2007). He teaches Writing and Mestizo Cultural Studies in the Honors College at University of Texas San Antonio. He is currently working on the last installment in his trilogy of memoirs, and collaborating with Chicano rocker Alejandro Escovedo on a “mythic” memoir of the musician’s storied life in punk rock and beyond.

Edwin C. May, PhD, is the president and founder of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research, Palo Alto, California. Formerly, he was a scientist with the U.S. Government’s secret ESP program popularly known as Star Gate from 1976-1995, and was the director of that program from 1985 to 1995. He is the author of several articles in the nuclear physics literature, many papers in the technical journals of parapsychology, and over 300 technical final reports on ESP to the government. He received his doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1968.

Sebastiano De Filippi (B.A., M.A., Ph.D. candidate) is an Italian-Argentinian musician, author and scholar. He studied social sciences at the Buenos Aires and Argentine Catholic universities. He is Music Director of the National Congress Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Latin-American Orchestra Conducting Academy. As a researcher of fringe phenomena he has 25 years of experience. He is the author of a hundred papers and articles. His UFO-related books are The City of the Blue Flame, The Lords of Uritorco and Project Erks, published in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Italy; The Other Toscanini was published in the United States.

 

 

Webinars

In the weeks leading up to our conference at Rice, Jeffrey Kripal will be holding a series of live webinar conversations with leading scholars in the field. These conversations will push the academic study of the paranormal in new directions while they set the tone for the conference to come.

You can register for these webinars and learn more about the speakers here:

Feb. 8: John Phillip Santos – Webinar Registration

John Phillip Santos is a Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian. In addition to television documentaries on religion and culture for CBS News and PBS, myriad magazine articles and newspaper work, he has authored two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999 National Book Award Finalist), The Farthest Home is in An Empire of Fire (2010), and a book of poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer (2007). He teaches Writing and Mestizo Cultural Studies in the Honors College at University of Texas San Antonio. He is currently working on the last installment in his trilogy of memoirs, and collaborating with Chicano rocker Alejandro Escovedo on a “mythic” memoir of the musician’s storied life in punk rock and beyond.

Feb. 15: Priscilla Wald – Webinar Registration

Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Chair of English at Duke University, where she co-edits American Literature with Matthew Taylor. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke, 2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke, 1995). Wald is currently working on a monograph entitled Human Being After Genocide, which considers the “mythistory” of humanity that emerged from efforts to articulate an “underlying spirit of unity” that could sacralize “the human” in the wake of two world wars and a proliferation of scientific and technological developments that challenged conventional notions of life.

Feb. 24: Hussein Ali Agrama – Webinar Registration

Hussein Ali Agrama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His previous research and writing focused on religion and secularism in the Islamic Middle East. A central current of his ongoing research explores how the UFO phenomenon and the anomalies associated with it may profoundly challenge the secular foundations of the contemporary social and humanistic sciences, a recent example of which can be found here.

ImpossibleArchives.Rice.Edu 

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Headlines

Here are some headlines of note for this week:

. . .

Check out more news links at the

Anomaly Archives Flipboard

[NOTE: Inclusion of news & event info is purely informational

and does not indicate endorsement.]

Jeff Kripal Discusses Anomalous Archives with SMiles Lewis as part of the Anomaly Archives’ Streamathon-2020 emergency fundraiser series. Alt-version: Anomaly Archives
Saturday Streamathon Fundraiser Series 5.4 Jeff Kripal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KFz…“Archives of the Impossible” [Formerly the GEM Archives: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism] – Rice University, Houston, Texas
http://libguides.rice.edu/paranormalArchives of the Impossible at Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center (special collections) From the certificate program within the Religious Studies department of Rice University, founded by the efforts of Jeff Kripal.Main Collections:
  • Jacques F. Vallee –UFOlogist, computer scientist, venture capitalist.
  • Whitley Strieber – author of the Communion books detailing his abduction experiences, and his wife and co-author, Anne Strieber.
  • Edwin May – research director at Pentagon’s Star Gate project that focused on ESP research.
  • Richard Haines – founder of National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).
  • Brenda Denzler – anthropologist and scholar of the paranormal (books and some archival materials).
  • Jeffrey Kripal Academic Papers, 1970-2015 A full run of Fate magazine.

Play “Jeff Kripal Discusses Anomalous Archives with SMiles Lewis”

 

Source: Anomaly Archives eNews – February 6th, 2022