Archived streaming video of this event is available at this link.
About the Speakers
Jack Hunter, PhD, is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of consciousness, religion, ecology and the paranormal. He is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, a tutor at the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He teaches on the MA in Ecology and Spirituality and the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. He is also a tutor for the Alef Trust on their MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology, where he teaches on the Approaches to Consciousness module. He is the author of Manifesting Spirits (2020), Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020) and Ecology and Spirituality (2023), editor of Deep Weird (2023), Greening the Paranormal (2019) and Damned Facts (2016), and co-editor of Talking With the Spirits (2014), Mattering the Invisible (2021) and Folklore, People and Place (2023). He lives in the hills of Mid-Wales with his family.
Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and sits on numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the human, social, and natural sciences. Most recently, Jeff is the author of The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories and futures. His forthcoming book is How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago, 2024). He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies.
About the Moderators
David Daegling is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He is the author of Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend (2004) and various short pieces on the sasquatch, including “Bigfoot’s Screen Test” and “Why Americans Need to Believe in Bigfoot.”
Terry Harpold is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is co-editor, with Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs, of Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot (2015), and co-editor, with M. Elizabeth Ginway, of Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Latin American Science Fiction (2025). His recent scholarship in science fiction and the fantastic has appeared in journals such as Épistémocritique and Science Fiction Studies, and in edited collections such as The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019) and Teaching Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom (2024).
Erin Prophet is a lecturer in the Department of Religion, University of Florida. She received a PhD in religion, with a specialization in Western esoteric traditions, from Rice University (2018). She earned a master’s degree in public health with an epidemiology concentration from Boston University (2014). She focuses on the relationship between religion and medicine and is the author of the forthcoming Evolution and Psychic Powers: Salvation, Healing and the Human After Darwin (Columbia University Press).
The Charles Fort Sesquicentennial Symposium, “UFOs, the Deep Weird, and the Impossible,” is sponsored by the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Departments of Anthropology, English, and Religion, and the George A. Smathers Libraries.