More than a million documents, recordings and files on telepathy, near-death experiences and alien encounters have been sitting in a climate-controlled facility outside Houston for years. Starting Oct. 1, they go on national television.
“Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena,” a six-part documentary series filmed at Rice University, premieres Oct. 1 at 9 p.m. on SundanceTV, AMC+ and All Reality with new episodes weekly through Nov. 5. The series is hosted by Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, who oversees Rice’s Center for the Impossible (formerly the Archives of the Impossible).
Much of the series was shot in and around the Woodson Research Center at Fondren Library where researchers can request and review the collection. The Rice community will recognize the reading room and other campus locations throughout the six episodes.
Each episode sets archival material alongside first-person accounts from people who have never spoken publicly on subjects ranging from precognition and mediumship to alien abduction. Among the sources drawn on are the papers of Harvard University psychiatrist John E. Mack and author Whitley Strieber.
“People are used to simple debunking or simple belief,” Kripal said. “They are not used to this kind of third space where we ask what this looks like historically or experientially or from physics or astronomy.”
Strieber’s collection includes 3,400 letters mailed to him by strangers in the late 1980s and 1990s, many with drawings enclosed, after readers recognized the face on the cover of his book “Communion.”
“They wanted human recognition. They wanted support,” Kripal said of the people who reached out to Strieber. “They were not looking for fame. They were not looking for money. They just wanted somebody to talk to about their experience.”
The archive began in 2014 with a conversation between Kripal and ufologist Jacques Vallée. It now holds 18 collections.