With breaking news of UFO whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork, and Disclosure advocates warning us to “buckle up” every other week, it feels as if the air has been sucked out of the room and we’re losing the ability to have open-minded, albeit grounded discussions about the major philosophical implications these phenomena—and others which are equally challenging to our standard model of science—have in relation to our societal structures; how every institution our modern civilization relies upon for continuity (governments, industries, schools, churches, and even families) are in desperate need of revision and updating, if we’re expecting them to survive and evolve in a fast-changing world where the things that define us as human—and even those which delineate the very fabric of Reality—keep getting blurrier and blurrier.
Fortunately, there are scholars and institutions that are up to this monumental challenge. Professor Jeff Kripal, along with many other collaborators at Rice University, are ensuring that we maintain an intergenerational conversation about what he calls ‘Impossible things’ (one of his predecessors, Charles Fort, would have called them ‘Damned things’). They are the experiences and events which, despite being deeply human and transformational for those who get to live them, are often swept under the rug by materialist skeptics; both because they are so difficult to categorize into neat ontological boxes, and also because they refuse to be harnessed under strict laboratory conditions.
These are just a few of the things Greg and I had the pleasure of discussing with Jeff on our latest YouTube video interview:
Before Kripal and other like-minded colleagues like him, entertaining the idea of UFOs or psychic phenomena as serious areas of academic endeavor would have been out of the question; that is, if the researchers would have approached these subjects with the notion that amid the clutter of delusion, superstition, and disinformation, there is still a ‘There’ there—imagine if an expert in Greek mythology confessed to their peers that they believed the god Pan was a cultural interpretation of real Trickster force acting upon the world!
But as Jeff explained to us, his intention in writing books like How to Think Impossibly is to allow himself and other academics in the Humanities the liberty to acknowledge these pesky topics, not just as a quirky pop-culture interest but as a legitimate part of the corpus in their fields. He invites us to approach these mysteries by suspending disbelief and resist the urge to reduce them into neither simplistic Cold War era mythologies—The UFO as a potential threat, or a resource which must be hidden under impenetrable layers of secrecy from foreign adversaries and commercial competitors—nor as validation to a particular religious cosmology—UFOs as angelic or demonic apparitions.
The UFO is in fact such an incontrollable and unpredictable force, the effects of its disruptive quality in our culture is in many ways similar to that of Psychedelics, once these chemical compounds were re-discovered in the late 50s and early 60s giving way to the post-war counterculture movement. And here we tried to explore the similarities between the two (UFOs and Drugs) in how first they are embraced by the marginalia of society while the Status Quo first frowns upon them, then they are condemned or criminalized, and then they are slowly integrated by the mainstream thanks to the work of pioneers like Dr. Rick Strassman with his DMT study, or Dr. Jacques Vallée with his decades-long research and cataloguing of the UFO enigma.
It is in fact due to Vallée and his preoccupation with preserving his massive legacy of files for the benefit of future researchers, that The Archives of the Impossible came into being in the first place. Now the Archives is home to a treasure trove of documents and artifacts, including Whitley Strieber’s letters received from thousands of readers who felt compelled to share with him and his late wife Anne their personal experiences, which were in many ways strikingly similar to those he recounted in his seminal books Communion and Transformation.
Were those experiences factual recollections of interactions with extraterrestrial visitors obsessed with human genitalia, or were they the result of a cultural interpretation heavily influenced by Cold War anxieties and cheesy Sci-Fi movies? Jeff leans heavily on the latter, and feels it is our responsibility to tell better stories with our art genres in order to improve the quality of this sort of imaginal loop we seem to be immersed in, with some inexplicable presence at the edge of our world (and subconscious) seemingly trying to communicate with us through our dreams and nightmares.
Speaking of communication, Jeff shares our love for the movie Arrival (2016) and he interprets it as the second modern film that breaks with the cliché of the Cold War alien invasion (isn’t it curious BTW how this film was released just before the Pentagon revelations of 2017?) with the first one undoubtedly being Close Encounters of the Third Kind; which also happens to be the first movie linking UFOs with psychic phenomena, since the plot doesn’t make any sense unless you understand Roy Neary and all the other people encountering the UFO were experiencing a powerful precognition designed to implement open contact.
But contacting this alien Other is not always joyful technicolor with a vibrant John Williams soundtrack, as Karin Austin would know fully well. Karin, who is now the Project Manager of the Archives of the Impossible, has been dealing with these harrowing experiences for most of her life, and as a result of it she became one of the closest allies to the late Dr. John Mack, who was at the forefront in the controversial study of so-called alien abductions. After Mack’s untimely passing in 2004, Karin ended up becoming the Director of the John Mack Institute dedicated to continuing his work and preserving his legacy, and after she took the decision to donate all of Mack’s files to the Archives in Rice U.—she and other friends rented a U-Haul and transported all those boxes by themselves all the way from Massachusetts to Houston! —she eventually convinced Jeff to accept the role of co-Director at the JMI.
We asked him about this and his work with experiencers during the interview. And for those who haven’t done so we urge you to watch Karin’s emotional speech at the Archives of the Impossible conference in 2023, in which she describes a powerful vision she had of Jeff picking up the mantle of John’s work.
This is just a very broad overview of the many topics we touched upon during the roughly one-hour conversation we had with Jeff which was both illuminating, irreverent, challenging, funny, but also reflective and not without a touch of melancholy. I say this because the very essence of the Archives of the Impossible lies in the fact that all of us—Jacques, Jeff, Karin, Greg, myself, and everyone reading this—are going to die sooner or later. We are all like musicians performing at some grand open space, and each of us get to play and jam with our fellow band members just for a little while; we dance and sing and shout and cry, until it is our time to leave the stage so others can pick up where we left off.
The musicians come and go, but the Music goes on and on. Forever.
If you enjoyed this video interview, then please don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Also, please consider supporting us through our Patreon so we may continue providing you with content like this.
