For the last six years, the Woodson Research Center at Rice University has been collecting and professionally archiving materials related to paranormal currents in American history. Ranging from once highly classified government remote viewing files to thousands of firsthand abduction accounts, the Archives of the Impossible Collection at Woodson has become one of the largest and most significant collections of research materials related to these marginalized or tabooed topics in the world. It is also the archival basis necessary for inaugurating a new phase of scholarly attention to this field.
Fondren Library maintains a dedicated home page for the archive, including finding aids and research guides.
Beginning during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Rice University graduate students in the Department of Religion began conducting oral history interviews with some of the archive’s major donors. These interviews, which were largely carried out via Zoom, focused on the donor’s collections and their personal and professional work related to the paranormal.
These oral histories, which include video, audio, and text transcriptions, represent a significant supplementary archive of paranormal currents in American culture.
The oral histories can be found in Rice University's Digital Scholarship Archive.