AMC Global Media has just announced a six part documentary series titled Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena, showcasing material currently archived in Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible, which was the brainchild of our friend Jeff Kripal.
The stories told on Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena add to a trove already containing over one million pieces of evidence – collected for nearly a century – investigating telepathy, near-death experiences, UFO encounters, alien abductions, prophetic dreams, and messages from the beyond. Included in the series is work by Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John E. Mack and bestselling author Whitley Strieber. Together their accounts raise a larger question at the heart of Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena – what if these seemingly separate mysteries are not separate at all?
The breakdown of the series shows it will not only focus on UFOs and abductions, but will dig deeper in the sort of psychic phenomena—telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, etc—which have been studied and documented for over a century by the forefathers of the parapsychology field, who considered them to be emergent abilities hinting to a next step in the mental and spiritual evolution of our species; what Kripal in his books calls ‘the Super Natural’ (and if that sounds an awful lot like the origin story of almost all superheroes, there is a good reason for that).
As usual, these sort of announcements fill me with both excitement and trepidation; because I always fear TV producers will fail to properly capture the reasons why thinkers like Kripal (our ourselves at The Grail, for that matter) believe the so-called paranormal is all deeply interwoven with the untapped potentiality of the human psyche—the fact they went with the facile ‘X’ for the title is not too reassuring, either…
Still, it is encouraging to learn that The Archives of the Impossible is getting more media exposure, since it is a project we’ve enthusiastically supported since day one. Now if we could just get enough Patreon supporters so I could one day cover the conference in Houston…
Archive X will premiere on Thursday, October 1 at 10pm ET/PT on SundanceTV, AMC+ and All Reality.
