Archives of the Impossible 2025


"The UFO and the Impossible"

We are excited to announce our 3rd international conference of the AOTI series!
This year, we will be focusing on the UFO — or UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) — an aspect of the phenomenon receiving increasing coverage in the media as new whistleblowers are stepping forward to share credible testimony regarding their interactions with the Impossible. Officials operating within political and legal circles on the Hill have been paying attention and are beginning to take the subject matter seriously. Plausible deniability is, apparently, no longer plausible.

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Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University
Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and
Religious Thought, Rice University
In 2010, I published an intellectual history of the paranormal entitled Authors of the Impossible. The conceptual matrix of the paranormal, it turns out, was not born in the tabloids or in a science fiction novel, but in some of the most accomplished scientific personalities and elite academic institutions of the European and American academies—in figures like Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution with Darwin (who used the earlier terms “Spiritual” and “Superhuman”) and around institutions like Cambridge University, Harvard University (particularly around the psychologist and philosopher William James), and, a bit later, Duke University (around the botanist J. B. Rhine).
By an “author of the impossible,” I meant something specific and radical. I meant an author who writes about well-documented historical events and common human experiences that are not supposed to happen but clearly do, and who, by writing about these “impossible” things in an especially powerful way, renders them newly plausible, imaginable, thinkable . . . in a word—real. I meant an author who makes the impossible possible. Continue >


“I never said it was possible, I only said it was true.”

– British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes, 1874


“Look, Bill, I’m not telling you it doesn’t sound whacky. What I’m telling you is, it’s real.”

– Former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo to Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes on the UFO or UAP, 2021


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IMPOSSIBLE NEWS AND MEDIA