For far too long, people who encounter the impossible have been told their experiences don't belong in serious intellectual life. The Center exists to change that. Your gift makes our work possible.
The public conversation about anomalous experiences, psi-phenomena, and human contact with unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and non-human intelligence (NHI)—is moving faster than infrastructure can be built to ground it. The largest body of evidence — including troves of letters, investigator transcripts and case files, and drawings from the people who lived these encounters — remains largely unexamined. Our archives hold much of that evidence. For the first time we have the tools to study it, and make it available to other researchers at the scale it deserves. What we need now is the capacity.
What your gift supports
Some might find it surprising to learn that we are not funded by Rice University. We are an independent Center reliant upon the support of generous patrons such as yourself. Your contributions sustain the full range of our work:
The Metadata Project: turning thousands of experiencer accounts into a structured, ethically anonymized research foundation, the first of its kind.
Our people: the archivists, researchers, and staff who care for the collections and make it possible to carry the research forward.
Archival acquisitions and processing: receiving new collections and preparing them for researchers as quickly as care allows.
Digitization: opening collections to people who can't travel to Houston, wherever copyright, resources and privacy allow.
Conferences: the Archives of the Impossible series, including AOTI 2027: Art and the Impossible.
General operations: the everyday infrastructure that keeps all of it running.
How to give
The “Donate” button in the navigation bar above directs to Rice University's secure giving platform. Your gift goes directly to our operating fund. Gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Other ways to support
If you have archival materials that you think might be of research value, or you’d like to talk about donating a major gift, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at impossiblearchives@rice.edu.
To everyone who supports this work: thank you. You're helping build something that didn't exist a decade ago — a serious, ethical home for archives about humanity's encounters with the impossible. Your generosity honors the experiencers and investigators who trusted their stories to the Center’s archives, and it makes them available to the researchers who will learn from them generations from now. We're grateful to have you with us.