'Archive X' and the impossible | Reality Check

In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and host of the new six-part series "Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena." Kripal oversees Rice's Center for the Impossible, formerly the Archives of the Impossible, a collection that holds the papers of John Mack and Jacques Vallée among more than a million items on telepathy, near-death experience, abduction and precognition.

The conversation opens with the nonverbal autistic children of the series' first episode and the place they call the hill. Then, moves to the abduction account of Karin Austin, the artist Andrew Paquette's dreams of disasters that later happened and Kripal's argument that the brain is a receiver of consciousness rather than its producer. Coulthart puts the harder questions to Kripal, including why a nonhuman intelligence would block a witness's memory, whether a future human civilization is behind the encounters and what to make of Christian arguments that the phenomenon is demonic. Kripal's answer runs through all of it, that these experiences cluster around trauma and love, that they have happened for millennia and that the task is to listen before reducing them to any worldview.

SOCIAL TAGS:

Ross Coulthart

X: @rosscoulthart https://x.com/rosscoulthart

Instagram: @rosscoulthart https://www.instagram.com/rosscoulthart/

Jeffrey Kripal

Substack: @jeffkripal https://jeffkripal.substack.com/

Website: https://jeffreyjkripal.com/

#telepathy #abduction #nonhumanintelligence

CREDITS

Host: Ross Coulthart

Executive Producer: Andy Gipson

Editorial Producer: Meagan Medick

Producer: Will Tomasi

Research Producer: Rob Jones

Editor: Anthony Diasio

On "Reality Check," NewsNation Special Correspondent Ross Coulthart takes a fact-based approach to tackle everything from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to mysteries often missing from the headlines.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

3:07 Has the Phenomenon Increased?

4:59 Non-Local Consciousness

6:16 The Telepathic Autistic Children

12:15 The Hill

18:23 Becoming Superhuman

19:58 Karin Austin's Abduction Account

28:38 The Future Human Hypothesis

31:50 Andrew Paquette and Precognition

39:28 Trauma and the Thinned Veil

44:47 Unreliable Space-Time Sensors

49:20 Ross's Esalen Experience

51:26 The Demonic Interpretation

52:38 The John Mack Archives

56:22 Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Texts