Mission Statement

Serious work on these questions carries a professional cost, so most of it never happens. The institute exists to remove that cost. This is a place where the research can be done carefully, in company, without risking your reputation.

Methods and data are open by default, and results are reported regardless of outcome. Null findings are part of the record; withholding them is what distorts it.

Who is behind the institute

The institute is run by the people doing the work. A small group of founders handles administration and keeps the project records, but it holds no decision-making authority beyond what the membership grants it, so policy, procedure and spending all go to a vote of the participants. The founders are also the only people who see the contact details you give when you first make contact, which is what makes participating under a pseudonym real rather than nominal. Members range from university professors to trance channelers and most points in between, and that range is deliberate, because these questions are open enough that no single background has a claim on them.

Privacy and pseudonymity

Every member may participate under a self-chosen pseudonym, with their real identity protected, and you decide who inside the institute you share it with. The quality of your work and your ideas is what matters here.

The institute also goes to considerable lengths to protect your intellectual property rights in anything you develop, and you do not need to expose your identity publicly to hold that protection.

In 2020 the astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel published a study of photographic plates from a 1950 all-sky survey. On a single fifty-minute exposure she and her collaborators found nine point sources that had no business being there: no atomic tests that day, no satellites in orbit for another seven years, and no known phenomenon that produces nine simultaneous, identically behaving flashes. Her paper offered several hypotheses, cautiously, among them that the sources could be glints from reflective objects in Earth orbit. The data permitted that reading. It did not prove it.

Within days the attacks came, aimed not at the physics but at her. An invited talk was rescinded. An institutional affiliation was made conditional. The pressure was sustained enough to affect her health. Her work was sound and her credentials were never in question. She had pointed a telescope at the wrong question.

She is not alone. Stanford's Garry Nolan, Kevin Knuth at the University at Albany, and Harvard's Avi Loeb report the same costs: blocked publications, withdrawn invitations, isolated collaborators, and younger researchers who watch what happens and pick a safer question.

What the history of science says

Ignaz Semmelweis showed in 1847 that handwashing cut childbed-fever deaths from roughly one mother in six to under two percent. His colleagues took it as an insult to their honor, forced him out, and he died in an asylum. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912 and was ridiculed for lacking a mechanism, and plate tectonics vindicated him fifty years later. Barbara McClintock stopped publishing in 1953, worn down by hostility to her work on mobile genetic elements, and won the Nobel Prize thirty years after that. Daniel Shechtman was asked to leave his research group, and Linus Pauling said there were no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists. Shechtman won the Nobel in 2011. Barry Marshall could not get a hearing for the claim that bacteria cause stomach ulcers, so in 1984 he drank a culture of them and gave himself the infection and the gastritis that goes with it; he and Robin Warren took the Nobel in 2005.

The pattern is not that science self-corrects. It is the delay — the answer was already on the record years or decades earlier, unread, because of who had written it.

The skeptic deserves an answer

For every Semmelweis who was vindicated there was an N-ray or a cold fusion press conference. Being an outsider is not evidence of being right. At most it means the usual filters have not been applied yet, and the argument here is precisely that they should be applied, rigorously and openly, rather than skipped because a topic offends the current paradigm.

Not every account is accurate. Many are not. Memory is reconstructive, and sincere people can be sincerely wrong. The bar we hold to is whether a rigorous method could separate signal from noise, not whether the subject is comfortable.

Messy data is still data

That bar has been cleared before with data every bit as messy. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, spent fifty years on first-person reports from cardiac arrest survivors, built the standardized scale the field still uses, and published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers in mainstream journals. You need not accept his conclusions about consciousness to see what his career demonstrates: gathered systematically and at scale, first-person accounts can be scored and correlated with physiology and clinical events.

Nolan's laboratory now applies the same logic to people reporting close-proximity encounters, imaging their brains and finding patterns worth investigating. That work was possible only because someone took the accounts seriously enough to run the scans.

If even a small fraction of these reports describe something real, then the failure to study them systematically is a significant scientific failure of this century. This institute applies the method instead of the prejudgment.

The hub is running now, and material from earlier projects is still being migrated into it. What members get:

The one expectation is steady work on at least one project. Nobody here is anyone else's boss, and everyone is currently a volunteer, so assume for now that the work is unpaid.

Applications go through the join form and are usually approved within a day or two.

Membership is free, always. The institute is funded through voluntary contributions and grants. Knowledge should be accessible to anyone willing to engage with it seriously.