Jeffrey Kripal
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person
Contents 5
| Type | Person |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Kripal |
| On the Timeline | 1 event, 1952 |
Jeffrey John Kripal (born 1962) is an American scholar of religion at Rice University in Houston, Texas, known for his studies of mysticism and for treating paranormal and UFO experiences as serious subjects of academic study. He founded the Archives of the Impossible, a large collection of UFO and paranormal research papers.[1]
Academic career
Kripal holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago and is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice, where he helped found a doctoral program in Gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism. His first book, Kali's Child (1995), a psychoanalytic study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, won the American Academy of Religion's prize for best first book but was strongly disputed by critics in India. He later wrote Esalen (2007), a history of the California retreat centre.[1]
The paranormal
In Authors of the Impossible (2010) Kripal studied four writers on the paranormal, including Charles Fort and UFO researcher Jacques Vallée. He co-wrote Super Natural (2016) with abduction author Whitley Strieber, and in How to Think Impossibly (2024) he argued for "thinking with" people who report paranormal experiences and taking their accounts seriously.[1]
Archives of the Impossible
In 2014 Kripal founded the Archives of the Impossible at Rice's Woodson Research Center, which collects the papers of UFO researchers and paranormal investigators. It has been described as the first publicly accessible archive whose main focus is UFO and paranormal research material. In 2026 he hosted Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena, a six-part documentary series on SundanceTV drawing on the archive.[1]
On the UAP Timeline
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- Whitley Strieber's childhood memories (October 1952) — Author Whitley Strieber says he may have been tested at a Texas air base during childhood encounters.
References
- Jeffrey J. Kripal — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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