Our History (and the story behind our recent name change!)

The Center for the Impossible (CFTI) traces its origins to the work of Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal, who founded the Archives of the Impossible (AOTI) at Rice University to address the absence of a serious, humanistic framework for studying anomalous human experience. Drawing from his scholarship in the superhumanities, Jeff recognized that these experiences carry profound implications for how humanity understands “the impossible.”

This insight catalyzed a simple but ambitious question: What would it mean for a major research university to take these materials seriously? The answer began in 2016, when the first archival collection arrived at Rice—a foundational gift from renowned internet pioneer, computer scientist, and ufologist, Jacques Vallée, whose decades of correspondence and research on unidentified anomalous phenomena needed a safe scholarly home. His contribution transformed Jeff’s conceptual vision into a living reality. As additional collections followed, the Woodson Research Center in Rice University’s Fondren library quickly became a hub for interdisciplinary engagement with anomalous experience, drawing scholars, experiencers, investigators, and members of the public into a shared intellectual space.

The AOTI conference series revealed the scale and urgency of this developing field. The inaugural 2022 gathering drew thousands of participants from around the world, demonstrating a profound appetite for rigorous, open, and human-centered inquiry into anomalous experience. Subsequent convenings deepened that momentum. By 2025, registration filled within twenty-four hours—a clear sign that what began as a modest experiment had become one of the gravitational centers of a new cultural and scholarly movement.

As our work expanded, the name Archives of the Impossible began to stretch across too many functions at once: Jeff’s intellectual project, the archival collections, the conference series, the metadata study, and the emerging public-facing research ecosystem. To support this growth and provide a clear institutional home, the Center for the Impossible (CFTI) was established at Rice University in 2025.

The bifurcation clarifies two complementary domains:

• Archives of the Impossible (AOTI) remains the intellectual imprint and personal scholarly project of Jeff Kripal, encompassing his research, publications, and public-facing thought leadership within the (super)humanities.

• Center for the Impossible (CFTI) is the formal campus home for the archival collections, conference series, metadata study, and all associated research and educational initiatives.

This evolution reflects both the scale and significance of the work. The archives now encompass more than twenty major collections—accounting for 60% of all archival inquiries and over 50% of all research visits to the Woodson Research Center, despite representing just 1% of its total holdings. The institution needed a center—an infrastructure—to meet this rising demand and nurture the international community responding to these materials and the broader cultural shift they reflect.

CFTI now carries forward Jeff’s founding vision: to create an ethical, humanities-centered environment in which anomalous human experience can be studied openly, rigorously, and with care. It serves as the institutional expression of a developing superhumanities—one devoted to understanding the impossible as a legitimate domain of inquiry into humanity’s place in a reality far more complex than our materialist frameworks allow.