Okay, so I want you to close your eyes for a
second. Imagine you're walking into one of those
really prestigious, you know, slightly intimidating
university libraries. High ceilings, that quiet
hum. Totally. You can smell the old paper and
floor wax. Students are just frantically typing
away. You're walking past the history books,
past classic literature. You are deep in the
heart of the academic establishment. It paints
a very specific picture, doesn't it? Order, reason.
Exactly. It feels grounded, safe. But then you
take a sharp left into the Woodson Research Center.
This is the special collections area at Rice
University's Fondren Library. Right, where you'd
expect to find... What, old manuscripts? Civil
War letters? That's what I'd think. But instead,
you find yourself standing in front of a climate
-controlled vault that holds millions, I mean,
literally millions of documents on things that,
well, that science says shouldn't exist. We're
talking UFOs, telepathy, near -death experiences,
basically what researchers call anomalous phenomena.
Today, we are doing a deep dive into the archives
of the impossible. And I want to be really clear
here because I know what you're thinking. This
isn't a bunch of... tabloid clippings or, you
know, Internet conspiracy printouts. This is,
and I think you'll agree, probably the most ambitious
academic attempt ever to bridge the paranormal
and the scientific method. That's the perfect
way to put it. And the fact that it's at Rice
University is so important. The mission isn't
what people assume. They think it's about disclosure,
right? Proving aliens are real. Exactly. But
the goal is, well... It's much more subtle and,
frankly, more intellectual than that. It was
founded back in 2014 by a professor of religion,
Jeffrey Krippel. And the whole mission is to
steward these collections. Steward them. So like
a caretaker. Precisely. They treat reports of
the impossible with the same serious, rigorous
care and preservation that they give to, I don't
know, the patriots of a founding father. And
the scale is just, it's hard to get your head
around. Looking at this from our perspective
now in early 2026, the amount of material they've
collected is staggering. It is massive. As of
late last year, we're talking 18 distinct collections,
over a million documents. Whoa. And this matters.
The Washington Library Association actually flagged
this as... Like a historic milestone. They said
it's the first publicly accessible archive where
this kind of paranormal research is the primary
focus. And that publicly accessible part is a
huge deal. Usually the stuff is classified, right?
It's in a Pentagon basement somewhere. Or in
a private collector's garage where no one can
verify anything. Which is why this deep dive
is so important. We're not speculating. We're
going to metaphorically open the boxes for you.
Okay, let's do it. We're going to look at what's
actually inside, from raw emotional abduction
accounts to cold, hard files on psychic spies
in the U .S. Army. And maybe the craziest part,
how they're now using AI to find patterns in
all this impossible data. So let's start at the
beginning. How does a major university like Rice
end up as the headquarters for the unexplainable?
You mentioned Professor Kripal. Kripal is the
academic anchor, for sure. He's a historian of
religions. And he'd been building these relationships
for years with Amanda Falk, who's the head of
special collections. But the real spark, the
catalyst, that was Jacques Vallée. Oh, Jacques
Vallée. He's a legend in this field. He was the
basis for the French scientist in Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, wasn't he? He was. But in
real life, he's a computer scientist, an astronomer.
Very rigorous. And around 2014, he came to Kripal
with a big problem. He's sitting on a lifetime
of research files on 500 anomalous events he
personally investigated. And he was getting worried.
Worried about what? The men in black showing
up? Nothing so dramatic. He was worried about
loss and commercialization. He saw his colleagues
getting older and their life's work. Decades
of data. was just ending up in dumpsters. Or
worse. Or worse, yeah. Auctioned off to some
private collector who'd lock it away forever
or sold to a TV producer to make some sensationalized
show. That's a legitimate fear. You spend 50
years doing serious work and your legacy becomes
a B -movie prop. He wanted preservation. He wanted
it to be safe. So after four years, they finalized
the donation in 2018. The Valet collection is
really the bedrock of the whole archive. And
how big is that one? It's 38 linear feet of documents.
Let's put that in perspective. Linear feet. That's
like a shelf of paper roughly the length of a
school bus. Good analogy. Yeah. And it's full
of field notes, sketches, even old computer punch
cards. It's the raw data. Yeah. But here's the
detail that really got me. Okay. While most of
it's public, some files in his collection and
in another researcher's, R. Leo Sprinkle, are
under embargo. Embargo. So they're there at Rice.
But you can't look at them. Exactly. Restricted
by the donors because of their sensitive nature.
Some are locked down until 2028, some all the
way to 2031. Wow. OK, my mind immediately goes
to what could be so sensitive. I mean, witness
names, sure. But with Valet, you have to wonder
if it's something he thinks we just aren't ready
for yet. It definitely brings up that forbidden
knowledge angle. But Kripal and his team. They're
really trying to move away from that kind of
sensationalism. Their goal is to undo the damage
of the Condon Committee. I see that name pop
up a lot in the source material. For anyone who
doesn't know their 1960s Air Force history, why
is that report the big villain here? The Condon
Report was this big study the Air Force commissioned.
And its conclusion was basically, nothing to
see here, folks. Nothing of scientific value.
Stop looking. And that just killed the field
for decades. It created what people call the
laughter curtain. It made it career suicide for
any respectable academic to touch UFOs. So Rice
is trying to tear that curtain down. They're
saying, we don't care if it's weird. If it happened
to a person, it's data. And they're doubling
down. Last year, Kripal mentioned they're even
calling it the Center for the Impossible now.
They're pulling in anthropology, art, physics.
Even genetics. They want to throw the whole university
at this. So let's get into that data. Because
a million documents sound so dry, but a huge
part of this archive is just deeply personal.
Let's talk about the Whitley -Striber collection.
Yes. This is, without a doubt, the emotional
heart of the entire archive. Whitley -Striber
wrote the book Communion in 1987. It was his
own non -fiction account of his abduction experiences.
That book was a cultural bomb. I still remember
that cover with the gray alien face. It terrified
an entire generation. It did. But the book was
just the beginning. After it came out, Streber
became a kind of lightning rod, a confessional
booth for the whole world. People who had been
suffering in silence suddenly saw his book and
felt they weren't alone. And they started writing
to him. Hundreds of thousands of letters. And
this wasn't fan mail. These were desperate letters.
People writing things like, I've never told my
wife this, or I thought I was going insane until
I read your book. That's intense. His wife, Anne,
spent years curating them. And the archive now
holds about 3 ,400 of the most significant ones.
That's nine linear feet of trauma. It really
is. And this is where the academic value really
becomes clear. A physicist might not care about
a letter from a farmer in Iowa. A psychologist.
A sociologist. Yeah. A historian. These letters
are absolute gold. It's a hidden history. It
reframes the whole abduction thing. It's not
just about was the spaceship real. It's about
the fact that thousands of people felt something
so profoundly that they had to write it all down.
Yes. It's a repository of what gets called rejected
knowledge. And that theme carries right over
to the John E. Mack collection. John Mack is
so important because of who he was. This wasn't
some guy in a van. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning
professor at Harvard Medical School. Which made
his interest in alien abductions so, so controversial.
He risked everything, his reputation, his tenure,
to treat these experiencers as patients who needed
help, not as people who were just delusional.
And his collection is the biggest one, isn't
it? By far. It's 450 linear feet. So, to use
your bus analogy again, that's a line of boxes
longer than a football field. But it came with
a huge, unique challenge. The privacy issue.
Doctor -patient confidentiality. Exactly. These
boxes are full of medical records, hypnosis session
tapes, therapy notes. You can't just put that
out for any student to browse. So what did they
do? Just black out all the names? It was much
more systematic. Corinne Austin, who was actually
Mack's former assistant, became the project manager
for the archives in 2024. She led this massive
de -identification effort. So they had to strip
out all the identifying details. Every name,
every location, thousands and thousands of pages.
It took years. But now a researcher can study
a hypnosis transcript from 1994 and analyze the
structure of the experience, but they'll have
no idea who the person was. It turns private
trauma into public data. Okay, so we have the
emotional, personal side covered with Struber
and Mack. But the archive isn't just feelings.
It's got the hard power files, too. We have to
talk about Project Stargate. Yes, this is where
the tone shifts from close encounters to a Cold
War thriller. Project Stargate was a secret U
.S. Army unit started in 1972. Its purpose was
to research and use remote viewing. And for anyone
listening, remote viewing isn't just watching
TV. What are we talking about here? It's the
alleged ability to perceive details about a distant,
unseen target using only your mind. Psychic spying,
basically. The Army had protocols, they had target
coordinates, Soviet subs, nuclear sites, and
they had viewers try to sketch or describe what
was there. And this wasn't just a weekend experiment.
Oh, no. It ran until 1995. That's more than 20
years of government funding. The collection at
Rice came from Edwin May, the program director
for the last decade of the project. So it's the
official files? Thousands of pages of declassified
documents. It's just wild to think that while
the CIA was using spy planes, they were also
paying people to close their eyes and look at
Russia. It shows the impossible wasn't just a
fringe thing. It was seen as a potential weapon.
An arms race of consciousness. Absolutely. And
you've got all these other collections, too,
from people like Larry Bryant and Brenda Densler.
Yeah. It's just this massive trove of information.
Which brings us to the big question. So what?
They have a million documents. Are they just
sitting there for future historians or is something
happening now? They are definitely not collecting
dust. In 2024, Rice launched a two -year research
initiative specifically to analyze this stuff.
And this is where it gets really futuristic.
Let me guess. AI. They are using artificial intelligence
to decode the impossible. Okay, that sounds like
a movie pitch. AI hunts for aliens in the library.
How does that even work practically? Well, you
can't feed a ghost into a computer, no. But you
can feed stories into one. Think about it. Hundreds
of thousands of letters. Thousands of therapy
transcripts. No single person can read all that
and hold it in their head. You'd miss connections.
You'd get tired. But an AI doesn't get tired.
Right. They're aiming it at the Streber and Mack
collections. The AI can scan millions of words
in an instant and look for semantic patterns
a human would just never see. What kind of patterns?
This gets into their core methodology. They call
it a phenomenological method. This was laid out
in a study in Global Policy late last year. Phenomenological
method. OK, break that down for us. It's actually
a brilliant tool for this kind of topic. It means
bracketing the question of reality. So instead
of asking, did a real spaceship land on the lawn?
Which you can't answer from a letter. You ask,
how did this experience present itself to the
person? So they're not trying to prove it happened.
They're trying to map the story itself. They're
treating the narrative as the data. And the AI
is perfect for this. You can look at a letter
from 1975 and a hypnosis tape from 1992 and see
that both people describe, say, a specific smell
or a specific sequence of emotions, even if they
use totally different words. It's finding the
common DNA in the impossible stories. That's
a great way to put it. It lets them map the structure
of the impossible. And if you find a pattern
that repeats across thousands of unconnected
people, that tells you something profound. either
about human consciousness or maybe about the
phenomenon itself. And it seems like the public
is finally ready for this kind of serious look.
The numbers for their conferences are really
high. The interest is exploding. Their conference
panel videos have like 300 ,000 views. Their
2025 conference, The UFO and the Impossible,
had 300 people show up in person. And it's not
just the usual suspects, right? Mainstream media
is coming to them. That's the big shift. In 2025,
they had ABC News visit. Even The Sun, the British
tabloid, said to a reporter who wrote this surprisingly
deep piece about it. The conversation is moving
out of the fringe. It really feels like a turning
point. For so long, this was all rejected knowledge.
You were nuts if you talked about it. Now a top
university is using AI to study it. And that's
the key takeaway. The Archives of the Impossible
isn't trying to make you a believer. It's a library,
not a church. Its argument is just that the human
experience of the impossible is a fact. People
have these experiences. And that makes it worth
studying. So keep an open mind, but keep it grounded
in data. Don't believe everything, but don't
dismiss everything either. In our age of information
overload, that's such a critical skill to look
at things that don't fit your worldview with
curiosity instead of just immediate dismissal.
That's the lesson here. We've covered a ton of
ground from the vaults at Rice to psychic spies
and AI detectives. But before we wrap up, there's
one thought that's been nagging me. What's that?
Okay. So we've established the AI is scanning
millions of documents, right? Looking for patterns
humans missed. Right. Connections across decades
of data. But we also mentioned that some of the
most important material from Jacques Vallée is
locked away under embargo until 2031 because
it's too sensitive. I think I see where you're
going with this. If the AI is successful, if
it starts to decode the deep structure of these
impossible events using all the public data.
What happens if it finds the answer that's currently
locked away in that embargoed box? It is a chilling
thought that we're building a machine that might
find the secret before we're supposed to know
it. And if it does, there's no embargo on an
algorithm. Something to think about. Thanks for
joining us on this deep dive. Stay curious.