Opening of the Archives of the Impossible
“These are “Memory” slideshows created automatically by my phone using photos I took while attending and participating in the March 2022 Opening of the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University.” – SMiles Lewis (Founder of the Anomaly Archives)
Visit: ImpossibleArchives.Rice.Edu
Pre-Event Webinars: February 8th, 15h, & 24th, 2022
Main Event: March 3rd-6th, 2022
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.
“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
- The conference begins and many pleasant meetings (me w/Clas & Eghigian)
- Meeting with Whitley and presentation by AFU (our presentation and post-panel dinner group)
- Meetings with Vallee and Strieber (and pics of our trip to the archives with our hosts and panelists)
- Return trip and breakfast with Diana
- Intermediate preparations and podcast recording (mentions Ed May’s talk)
“Opening of the Archives of the Impossible”
Conference Recordings, Schedule & Photos
Thursday, March 3
4:30 Kathleen Canning, Dean of the School of Humanities: Welcome
4:35-5:30 Opening Remarks: Jeffrey Kripal, “On Radar and Revelation: Connecting the Dots (and One Another)”
5:30-6:30 Plenary Session: Jacques Vallée, “The Four Garments of Aletheia: Reality Management and the Challenge of Truth”
6:30-8:00 Connecting With One Another: Food and Drink
Below: SMiles Lewis & Clas Svahn after the first days opening presentations.
Below: Clas Svahn, Greg Eghigian & SMiles Lewis.
Friday, March 4
9:00-10:00 Digital Tour of the Archives of the Impossible
10:00-11:30 Archiving the Impossible
- Amanda Focke
- Brian Hubner
- S. Miles Lewis
- Blynne Olivieri
- Clas Svahn
11:30-1:00 Lunch Break
1:00-2:30 Para-Ecologies
- AnaLouise Keating
- Simon Cox
- Stephen Finley
- Christine Skolnik
- Sam Stoeltje
2:30-3:00 Break
3:00-4:30 Experiencing the Impossible
- Annalisa Ventola
- Elizabeth Krohn
- Gail Husick
- Paul Smith
- Sravana Borkataky-Varma
4:30-5:30 Plenary Session: Leslie Kean, “Physical Impossibilities: From UFOs to Materializations”
NOTE: no part of this presentation recording may be reproduced or circulated without the permission of the presenter.
5:30-6:30 Plenary Session: Whitley Strieber, “Them”
Saturday, March 5
9:00-10:30 Science and the Impossible
- Christopher White
- Michael Masters
- Erin Prophet
- Stanislav Panin
- Eric Wargo
10:30-noon The Academy and the Impossible
- Diana Pasulka
- Margarita Guillory
- Joseph Laycock
- Wendy Lochner
- Natasha Mikles
12:00-1:30 Lunch Break
1:30-3:00 Public Cultures and the Impossible
- Cameron Dezen Hammon
- Gregory Bishop
- Jay Christopher King
- Angelo John Lewis
- David Metcalfe
- Marques Redd
3:00-3:30 Break
3:30-4:30 Plenary Session: Diana Pasulka, “Mathematicians and Artists: The New Sites of UAP Field Research, or ‘Toto, We’re Not in New Mexico Anymore’”
4:30-5:30 Plenary Session: John Phillip Santos, “Encuentros No Imaginables en Lugares Increibles: Locating the Borderlands in the Archives of the Impossible”
Sunday, March 6
9:00-9:30 Jeffrey Kripal, Weekend Thoughts on “Making the Impossible Possible”
9:30-10:30 Plenary Session: Edwin May, “The True Story of the Star Gate Psychic Spying Program”
10:30-11:30 Plenary Session: Sebastiano De Filippi, “The Spectral College, Beyond Reasoners and Believers”
11:30 to noon Open Conversation Around the Future of the Impossible (and You)
- Learned Foote
- Timothy Grieve-Carlson