FigureJeffrey Kripal (b. 1962)

PhD History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School, 1993 (under Wendy Doniger). Tenured at Rice University since 2002, currently holding the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought. Earlier academic work centered on Hindu Tantra (Kālī’s Child, Chicago 1995 — a controversial study of Ramakrishna that won the AAR Best First Book in History of Religions award and produced a multi-year scholarly dispute). From the late 2000s onward Kripal turned to the academic study of paranormal experience as a religious-studies object: Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, 2010) treats Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallée, and Bertrand Méheust as serious intellectual interlocutors; Mutants and Mystics (Chicago, 2011) reads modern comics-and-pulp paranormal traditions as continuous with older mystical literature. The Super Natural (Tarcher/Penguin, 2016), co-authored with Whitley Strieber, is the most-cited recent academic-popular collaboration in the field — Kripal provides the religious-studies frame within which Strieber’s first-person abduction-experience corpus is treated as data. Kripal co-edited Super Natural America (with Diana Pasulka, 2022). His significance is institutional: a tenured chair at a major research university maintaining sustained academic engagement with the UAP/paranormal record is a structural rarity, and Kripal is the figure most often named in the post-2017 disclosure cycle when the humanities are credentialed as having a seat at the table.