Archive X: A new series on AMC+
Inspired by Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Archives of the Impossible
Premiers October 1st
Welcome to Center for the Impossible—
a future facing model of the Superhumanities.
Our archival collections form one of the most distinctive bodies of anomalous research materials housed at any American university. We preserve and provide ethical public access to a unique multimedia library representing humanity's most extraordinary encounters with the unknown. This mission reflects an emerging paradigm shift in science and academia, one that is at last beginning to recognize anomalous human experience as a legitimate field of inquiry, study, and knowledge.
“The superhumanites are the humanities that foreground altered states of consciousness and embodiment as sources of real knowledge (think precognitive dreams and near-death experiences). They are the “weird” or “impossible” humanities that are central to the history and meaning of the humanities themselves. CFTI is what the superhumanities look like when it thinks and imagines both from the past and from the future.”
— Jeffrey J. Kripal
AOTI 2027: Art and the Impossible
Anderson-Clarke Center
Rice University
October 21st - 24th
The Archives
CFTI archives span decades of correspondence, field notes, scientific reports, interview transcripts, personal narratives, investigative files, audio visual recordings, and cultural artifacts that document the lived, historical, and intellectual dimensions of anomalous experience. Housed at Rice University’s Woodson Research Center (WRC), our collections serve as a foundational resource for scholars, students, experiencers, investigators, and members of the public seeking to understand extraordinary phenomena through a humanistic lens.
Public Access
Many of our collections are available for public viewing while others are scheduled for future release in accordance with donor stipulations. You can consult the WRC archival guides or email us for information about specific materials.
Research Visitors
Scholars who wish to engage the CFTI collections for research, may schedule an appointment through the Woodson Research Center. Call (713) 348-2586 or email impossiblearchives@rice.edu to arrange a reading room visit, request materials, and coordinate onsite logistics.
Behind-the-scenes with October Films on the set of Archives X
CFTI Experiencer Metadata Research Project
Some of our archival collections contain historical case files about human encounters with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and/or advanced Non-Human Intelligence (NHI). By transcribing, anonymizing, tagging, and making publicly available thousands of documents across various researcher collections, eras, and worldviews, we are creating a philosophically neutral, high-fidelity foundation for future scholarship—one that will allow examination of a corpus free of assertions about cosmology, ontology, or belief. Our goal is not to prove Contact or adjudicate interpretations of the data, but to build a secure database that supports a rigorous mapping of the full statistical and phenomenological terrain.
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