What to Read After Watching "Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena"

This week is the final episode of Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena on AMC+ and Sundance. If you’ve been watching, you may be facing an entirely unexpected problem as the season closes: What do you do when the six-episode series on real-life anomalous experiences ends but your curiosity about the secrets of the unexplained has officially been piqued? What can you read now that you’re questioning all the things most of us were taught not to ask? Well, if Archive X has provided a glimpse of what goes on in the mind of Jeffrey Kripal, there is good news: there is a lot more to find out.

Jeff, the co-director of the Center for Theory & Research at Esalen Institute, a Rice University scholar and longtime explorer of the territory where religion, science, consciousness, paranormal experience and the history of ideas overlap, has been thinking about these questions for decades. His recent book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else, is the most obvious place to discover more. Jeff has written across disciplines, and his books offer several different perspectives on the deep questions that animate Archive X.

Long before the first episode aired, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy was investigating extraordinary human capacities with The Future of the Body, a seminal volume that draws on thousands of sources to explore the outer limits of physical, psychological, and spiritual possibility. One of his earlier works, In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports, co-authored with Rhea White, explores the extraordinary states of consciousness, heightened awareness, and seemingly inexplicable experiences reported by athletes at the peak of their abilities.

Jeff delves into many of the same questions through his own unique lens. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion is the quintessential text for understanding the extraordinary place that has been part of both authors’ intellectual lives. It is both a history of Esalen and an exploration of the larger human-potential movement that emerged in the 1960s, following the people, ideas, and experiments that helped shape an alternative American approach to spirituality, psychology, and human possibility. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred looks at three very different investigators of extraordinary experience. It asks what happens when the subjects usually dismissed as impossible become objects of serious intellectual inquiry. 

With Mutants and Mystics, Jeff traces connections among science fiction, superheroes, paranormal experience and the imagination. If the UFOs and pop-culture dimensions of Archive X grabbed you, make sure to check out Super Natural, written with Whitley Strieber. This book turns directly toward extraordinary human experiences and the problem of how we understand them. And then there is The Flip, which explores those moments when a person’s fundamental understanding of reality changes, along with the larger implications of such experiences for how knowledge itself is constructed. 

Jeff is currently writing a three-volume project called The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. The planned volumes are The Physics of Mystics: Thinking Impossibly after Religion and Science, Biological Gods: Evolution and the Coming Superhumans, and The Soul Is a UFO: The Bomb, Technology, and the End of All Things. Jeff  says he works on all three every morning, so more material will be entering the archive soon, but until that time, there are even more options.

Keith Thompson, Anomalous Phenomena
If UFOs and unexplained-phenomena are your driving passions, Keith Thompson’s new book, Anomalous Phenomena: Apports and the Mystery of Objects That Materialize and Translocate, is a natural next stop. Published October 6, 2026, it begins with one of the strangest categories of reported phenomena: objects that appear, disappear, or seem to move without a known physical cause. From there, Keith ranges through apparitions, telepathic experiences, spontaneous healings, unusual dreams and UFO encounters, asking what these reports might tell us about the relationship between consciousness and matter.

Keith has been part of the Esalen story for decades. He discovered the Institute in 1975, became friends with co-founder Michael Murphy and was involved in the early incarnations of Esalen’s Center for Theory & Research. His previous book, The UFO Paradox, explored UFOs not simply as a question of extraterrestrial technology but as a phenomenon that may challenge our assumptions about mind, reality, and human potential. 

Andrew Huberman, Protocols
At first glance, Andrew Huberman might seem like an unexpected name on this list, but he’s actually one of the clearest ways to widen the conversation. If Archive X asks what we might not yet understand about the mind and reality, Andrew asks a complementary question: What can we understand, measure and actually do with the remarkable machinery of the human brain and body?

Andrew, a newly minted Esalen board trustee, translates decades of neuroscience research into practical approaches to mental health, physical health, performance, learning and behavior with his new book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This work is less concerned with the unexplained than with the extraordinary things the nervous system can already do —and how much more there may be to discover. It is also a reminder that “human potential” doesn’t have to mean something mystical, but rather understanding our biology well enough to work with it rather than against it. 

If Jeff is inviting you to question the boundaries of what we think is possible, Andrew offers a path to learn more about the instrument doing the questioning.

Sravana Borkataky-Varma, The Serpent’s Tale
A historian of South Asian religions and a scholar of Hindu Śākta Tantra, Sravana studies the places where spiritual traditions, embodied experience, ritual and ideas about consciousness meet.

Her 2025 book with Anya Foxen, The Serpent’s Tale: Kuṇḍalinī, Yoga, and the History of an Experience, is a good read for Archive X fans because it asks, What exactly are we talking about when we talk about an extraordinary experience? Rather than treating Kundalini as either unquestionable spiritual truth or something to be explained away, Sravana and Anya trace its many meanings across South Asian traditions, Western esotericism, modern yoga, and contemporary culture. The result is a book about how humans experience something, how they describe it, and how those descriptions change as they move between cultures and generations.

Sravana and Jeff both are interested in what happens when an experience that doesn’t fit conventional categories becomes worthy of serious investigation. Jeff approaches the question through religion, paranormal studies, and the history of ideas; Sravana approaches it through Tantra, history, embodiment, and the lived experience of the body. Sravana’s upcoming books include Divinized Divas: Superwomen, Wives, Partners, and Hijṛās in Hindu Goddess Tantra and Altered, a co-authored book with Anya. 

To hear Sravana rather than just read her, check out the Voices of Esalen podcast episode on The Serpent’s Tale, in which she and Foxen talk with Esalen scholar Simon Cox about Kundalini, its history, and the ways the experience has been interpreted across cultures. 

Charles Stang
If Archive X left you wondering whether some of today's strangest questions are actually very old questions in new clothes, Charles Stang will take you on a mind bending historical journey. An Esalen board trustee and co-director of the Center for Theory & Research, Charles is also a professor of Early Christian Thought and director of Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions. His work focuses on Christianity in late antiquity, philosophy, mysticism and the ancient Mediterranean world, a period when the boundaries between religion, philosophy and cosmology were considerably less rigid than they are today.

His books include Theosophy and the Study of Religion and The Gnostic Trilogy by Evagrius of Pontus, while his current projects include a book on daemons in ancient philosophy and a translation of Evagrius Ponticus's Letter to Melania. Charles takes us backward into intellectual traditions that have been asking questions about spirits, consciousness, reality and the relationship between the human and divine for centuries.

For an introduction to these ideas, listen to the Voices of Esalen limited series The Subtle Body, which brings Charles into conversation with a range of Esalen scholars and practitioners, including Simon Cox, to explore how different cultures have understood the relationship between the physical body, consciousness, and the unseen. It's a reminder that some of the most radical questions about human experience have been with us for thousands of years. Podcast: The Subtle Body — Charles Stang and Simon Cox

Robin Carhart-Harris, How Psychedelics Work
While Jeff asks us to reconsider what we think is possible and Andrew asks us to understand the machinery of the brain more deeply, Robin Carhart-Harris takes us into what happens when that machinery enters an entirely different state.

His forthcoming book, How Psychedelics Work: The Hidden Mind and Our Power to Heal, draws on decades of psychedelic research and clinical trials to examine what these substances do to the brain, why they can disrupt rigid patterns of thought and perception, and what that might teach us about consciousness, mental illness, and healing. Robin's central argument is that some forms of psychological suffering may be understood not simply as chemical imbalance but as excessive mental rigidity, and that psychedelics can temporarily loosen those entrenched patterns for new perspectives and therapeutic change.

Robin is asking: what happens when we become curious about the limits of ordinary consciousness? His work, which hits bookstores February 23, 2027, asks whether altered states can become tools for understanding how the mind constructs our sense of self and reality. After that, continue the conversation in person with Robin for his new workshop at Esalen April 9–12, 2027,  How Psychedelics Work: A Journey Into Mind, Meaning, and Healing, with East Forest and Marisa Radha Weppner. The program brings neuroscience into conversation with music, embodiment, meditation and breathwork.

Simon Cox, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy
What exactly do people mean when they talk about energy, consciousness, and the subtle body? Simon Cox, Esalen's first Center for Theory & Research fellow, has spent years investigating that question. His 2022 book, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, traces the concept across millennia, from ancient philosophy and Indian spiritual traditions to Carl Jung, the counterculture, and Esalen itself. Originally Simon's doctoral dissertation under Jeff at Rice University, it became an academic monograph published by Oxford University Press, shaped in part by conversations at Esalen's Center for Theory & Research. 

Simon also offers a fascinating bridge between Esalen's invitation-only CTR gatherings and its public programming. You don't need an invitation to encounter his work. His upcoming workshop, Sleep Alchemy: Secrets of Daoist Sleep Practices for Inner Peace and Renewal, April 26–30, 2027, with Jeffrey S. Reid, explores Daoist approaches to sleep, dreaming and altered states, drawing on Simon's six years of training in China's Wudang Mountains.

For a free introduction, listen to Simon and Charles explore the subtle body together on Voices of Esalen. Podcast: The Subtle Body — Charles Stang and Simon Cox

Fun fact: Since curiosity doesn't always lead to another book, here's one last rabbit hole: Esalen trustee and Stay Woke author Justin Michael Williams is also a recording artist, with albums including SOUL CHILD and Meditations for the People. His upcoming workshop is Stop Holding Yourself Back, April 9-11, 2027. At Esalen, the exploration of consciousness and human potential has never been confined to the printed page. Sometimes a soundtrack is just as fulfilling and thrilling.

Read the books. Listen to the music. Look at the history. Follow the neuroscience. Read the mystics. See what happens when a question that once seemed too strange to ask becomes interesting enough to investigate. After all, the most interesting thing about Archive X may not be what it explains, but what it leaves us wanting to explore. Six episodes were only the beginning!