The Basement: Jeffrey Kripal | Inside the Archives of the Impossible

Jeffrey Kripal, a religion professor at Rice University who runs an archive of the impossible, spent his childhood in a Nebraska hardware store, stopped eating at thirteen to become a saint, and had a night in Calcutta in 1989 where he thought the wall was electrocuting him. He says every book he has written since came out of that night. Today he holds an endowed chair at Rice, where the archive holds over a million documents on the paranormal—Jacques Vallee’s files, John Mack’s 150 boxes, and 3,400 letters people wrote to Whitley Strieber after reading Communion. His new series, Archive X, airs on AMC.

The third space

Kripal describes his intellectual stance as a “third space”—neither believing nor debunking, just having a conversation. He finds that most people, including very smart students at an elite university, cannot occupy that space. “Some people are set up to be reflexive, to step outside of their worldview and to laugh at it and to live in that third space,” he says. “And most people are not capable of it. And I don’t know why.”