Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife

Introduction

While exploring the evidence for an afterlife, I witnessed some unbelievable things that are not supposed to be possible in our material world. Yet they were unavoidably and undeniably real. Despite my initial doubt, I came to realize that there are still aspects of Nature that are neither understood nor accepted, even though their reality has profound implications for understanding the true breadth of the human psyche and its possible continuity after death.

I was directly exposed to people capable of perception that seemed to transcend the limitations of the physical brain; unexplainable forces, acting with apparent intelligence, able to move objects; and the delivery of obscure and accurate details by possible discarnate beings communicating through people unknown to them. I also studied numerous published papers, including those by medical doctors, describing clinically dead patients with no brain function who reported journeys to a sublime afterlife dimension.

My explorations of these and other remarkable phenomena gave rise to many questions. How can it be that an apparition returns a wave from a human observer? Or that people watch their own resuscitation from the ceiling in the operating room, aware that they have left their bodies? How about a human hand materialized by a declared disembodied survivor of death, on multiple occasions? And how could a two-year-old boy seem to remember numerous specific facts about a previous life, unknown to anyone in the family, that are later verified as accurate?

As documented within the scientific literature for over a hundred years, these and other manifestations have one aspect in common: they suggest that consciousness—or some aspect of ourself—may survive physical death. In these pages I will take you on a journey into this world.

An investigation of such evidence has rarely been systematically consolidated and subjected to in-depth, rigorous scrutiny by a journalist. This task has been left primarily to a few courageous scientists, philosophers, medical doctors, psychiatrists, and other investigators usually writing about one specific area of research. My intention is to present some of the most interesting evidence from diverse sources and show how it interconnects, making it accessible for the intelligent and curious reader encountering the material for the first time. Strict journalistic protocols can be applied to any topic for which there is data, no matter how unusual or even indeterminate.

Yet, this book is far from a catalog of evidence for the survival of bodily death. It is also a very personal story for me. My narrative would have remained one-dimensional and abstract without the experiences and personal experiments that are part of it. In this sense, I have taken a step inside this investigation in a new way—through experience and first-hand examination, and not just from the perspective of a detached observer who studies data and peers into a strange world from the outside. It may be professionally risky to expose these very personal events, but I feel it is my obligation to do so. It would be dishonest to omit elements that had an impact on my thinking and my effort to come to terms with many remarkable phenomena, elements that drew me even more deeply into the material. However, I was also careful to step back from them afterward, remaining as analytical and discriminating as I was with everything else. The tricky aspect lies in the interpretation of the extraordinary events, not in their reporting.

As a journalist, I have been interested in the question of whether there is evidence for survival past death for over ten years. In 2007 I became an associate producer for a documentary film on this topic, which offered me exposure to some of the best cases and experts in the United States and abroad. I traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, to meet with the family of a small boy named Cameron who had talked about a past life that haunted his early years. The memories had generated much emotion and longing for his previous family. His mother and psychiatrist Jim Tucker, an expert on child reincarnation cases, eventually took Cameron to his previous house on an island called Barra, where they were able to document the accuracy of his memories. Although very sad and subdued while walking through the home, Cameron seemed to be healed after that; his memories faded away and he was able to live a normal life in the present.

Was all of this just wishful thinking on the part of a mother with a disturbed little boy? Strange as it might seem, was three-year-old Cameron using some kind of psychic mental power to retrieve information about this location to which he had no known connection? Or, was he actually remembering a life lived before this one, as seemed indisputable to him and eventually to his mom?

I also assisted with interviews of two physical mediums—those who facilitate the manifestation of extraordinary physical phenomena while in a trance state that they say is generated by forces coming from the spirit world. In this case, these included moving lights, levitated objects, materialized hands, unusual images on factory-sealed photographic film, and detailed information provided from deceased relatives. These manifestations were witnessed by hundreds of people between 1993 and 1998 in the village of Scole, England, and in six other countries. The stated purpose of the Scole experiments, as the more than five hundred sessions were called, was to demonstrate the reality of life after death. The sessions were scrutinized for three years by three qualified outside investigators, who often conducted and controlled the experiments themselves, and who documented the events as genuine in a lengthy, scholarly report. Others who studied the data after attending only a few sessions questioned whether enough controls were in place, especially since most of the experiments were conducted in darkness. I was determined to experience these astonishing phenomena myself someday, which I finally did with a different physical medium while researching this book.

During this time I was also exploring another tantalizing question: whether we are alone in the universe. In 1999 I began an in-depth investigation into evidence for unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, reviewing decades of official case reports, government documents, and interviewing pilots, military personnel, and government officials. Over many years, I learned that there is solid evidence for the existence of remarkable unknown physical objects in our skies, but we have not yet determined what they are, why they are here, or where they come from. My work culminated in the publication of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record in 2010. Understandably, this phenomenon is difficult to study for a host of reasons, and more hard data is needed. But it is unfortunate that the extensive documentation on UFOs has been marginalized or dismissed by scientists searching for more conventional signs of extraterrestrial life. Similarly, the paranormal events covered in this book have been considered a fringe topic by the scientific establishment for a long time, even though in reality they are worthy of serious academic and scientific attention.

Curiosity about the physical universe is one thing, but the universal question of the state of consciousness or spirit after bodily death, pondered by human beings since the beginning of time, has a particular urgency on our home planet. People foment hatred and even kill one another over ideological differences, and distortions in faith can be used to justify the most horrendous human activity. What if we could develop a broad unified view of what could be the reality of life after death, based on facts, and thereby diminish the potency of competing, rigid belief systems? Perhaps a more rational understanding could bring consolation to many people at the end of their lives, while also motivating us to be more ethical and compassionate throughout life. Greater understanding of the nature of consciousness and its possible survival beyond death could have far-reaching, enlightening effects on humanity.

It must be clear by now that this book has nothing to do with dogma, whether we’re talking about the dogma of an immaterial God through various religions, or the dogma of materialist science that holds that matter is all that exists and that all phenomena, including consciousness, are reducible to physical processes. This does not mean that one’s personal or religious beliefs need be in conflict with the material presented here. I fully respect all perspectives and hope that evidence suggestive of survival might enrich and support anyone’s search for more objective answers, regardless of their background. My intention is to provide clarity and not to create conflict. I hope you will agree that it would be interesting to look at what actually is when dealing with such an important question.

Regardless of our individual perspective, we must all face our own impending death and the tragedy of losing those we love. In the last four years, while working on this book, I lost my father, younger brother, and dearest uncle. In 2011 I was present the moment a close friend with cancer took his last breath. Some people rely on religious or mystical belief systems to cope with the incomprehensible, shocking, and often surreal finality of death. But for many others, this simply doesn’t work. Like these others, who may be agnostics, I want to understand what this momentous end to life actually means, to the extent that this is possible. Are we only the body left lying there, physical matter with a brain that has shut down all human functioning and every element of our consciousness, leaving only empty matter no different from a lump of clay? Or, does something essential and conscious leave our physical body at the time of death and transition to another existence in a nonmaterial realm? Even if it may be impossible to prove, we can be comforted by the ample objective evidence suggesting that those we have lost survive in another form and may even be able to communicate to us from the next world.

Most people are probably not aware that a survival hypothesis has been formulated and debated within many disciplines for a long time. Usually hidden away in obscure volumes, scientific papers, and diverse areas of research, it has a strong academic and scientific foundation. To enhance my narrative, I invited ten leading experts and important witnesses, offering astonishing and groundbreaking stories, to contribute exclusive chapters so the reader could hear from them directly, in their own words.

The American contributors are a child psychiatrist from the University of Virginia studying children with past-life memories; a parapsychologist who is an expert on apparitions; a leading researcher studying mental mediumship under strict controls; a medical social worker with personal involvement in a veridical out-of-body case; and a parent of a young boy with dozens of past-life memories that were later found to be accurate. From the UK, you will hear from a neuropsychiatrist specializing in end-of-life experiences; a retired psychologist from the University of Nottingham on investigations into trance mediumship; and a well-established, genuine physical medium. A Dutch cardiologist and expert on near-death experiences has also contributed a chapter, as well as a psychologist from the University of Iceland with evidence for survival after death provided by a young Icelandic physical medium. Many others have been willing to be interviewed and provide case material and witness accounts for this book.

I want to cover a few basic points, and then we will begin this journey. By the end of the book, I think you will conclude that the nature of consciousness is more vast and complex than anyone understands; that belief in survival past death is rational and supported by the facts; and that this body of information deserves further investigation by the scientific community since it deals with one of the most fundamental questions ever addressed by human beings.

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First, it is important that I make clear what I mean by survival. This concept does not refer to an impersonal merging into pure awareness or becoming one with universal consciousness as envisioned by many who meditate or are influenced by Eastern religions. If this were all that happened, we would lose our individuality. The question here concerns personal survival—a postmortem existence in which distinct traits, memories, and emotions are sustained at least by some of us for an unknown period of time. It refers to a psychological continuity after death, which makes it possible for the disembodied personality to be recognizable by those left behind when communication is received. The survival hypothesis is proposing this kind of personal survival as an unproven but rational theory explaining much compelling data. In other words, without meaning anything religious, this represents survival of the individual essence, spirit, or soul.

Within this context, we must also understand that human beings have extraordinary mental abilities that science cannot explain. They may be controversial, but they have been documented by legitimate scientists for many years; I have also personally witnessed them in operation. We call these abilities psi, or psychic functioning, interchangeable with extrasensory perception (ESP). They refer to that force that is used for the acquisition of information through the mind without the use of any of the currently accepted five senses (sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell). This is why some refer to it as a sixth sense.

In order to study the survival hypothesis, we must understand the various forms of psi. Telepathy occurs when one mind influences or reads another, such as when one perceives someone else’s thoughts. Clairvoyance involves the perception of objects or physical events at a distance, such as knowing the location of something missing or what a faraway document says. Psychokinesis (PK) is the active influence of the mind on matter, causing observable physical effects like the movement of objects. Precognition involves an awareness of future events before they happen. The results of all of these perceptive abilities can be documented and verified.

If communications occur between the living and discarnate beings in a nonphysical realm, these psychic abilities are often the tools required on one or both sides to make that possible. The discarnate consciousness no longer can communicate through bodily senses and must rely on psi to reach from beyond the veil into the physical world. Some living people have the ability to act like a telephone operator with a psychic antenna into this other realm, using their psi to receive specific information from the discarnate, like invisible fiber optics.

Your red flag may have just jumped up. Certainly fraud abounds when discussing this topic. Many so-called psychics and mediums have taken advantage of gullible and earnest people for a long time. But in certain instances, extraordinary abilities have been exhibited by people with decades of experience, and they have been studied under controlled conditions. Believe it or not, after over a hundred years of research, and even though mainstream science may not accept it, this repeated documentation has established that these abilities are real.

We don’t understand how telepathy or clairvoyance might work, but this is not a reason to dismiss them. We also don’t understand how gravity works, yet no one denies its reality. And then there is something scientists call dark energy, which makes up about three-quarters of our universe. It weighs more than all the energy of the stars and galaxies combined. Even so, standard models of the universe, established by physics, did not predict its existence, and scientists don’t have a clue about what it is. No theory can explain dark energy, although experimental evidence for it is staring us in the face, says Michio Kaku, the well-known theoretical physicist and bestselling author. University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. Turner ranks dark energy as the most profound mystery in all of science.

And within our interior universe, science does not understand the nature of consciousness either. Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind, says David Chalmers, philosophy professor at New York University and the Australian National University. There’s nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett says we at least know how to think about the unanswered questions within cosmology, particle physics, and other areas of science. With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle, he writes. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused.

Psychic abilities, or psi, are one very puzzling subset of this consciousness muddle, making the study of consciousness even worse for those who don’t like to stray far from the status quo. It seems many scientists simply want to run away from the whole unexplainable mess and find ways to avoid dealing with the evidence for psi and related phenomena.

One exception to that is Dean Radin, perhaps the leading authority on the scientific study of psychic phenomena in relationship to consciousness. With a doctorate in educational psychology, he is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, and has held appointments at Princeton University. He also worked within a classified program now known as Star Gate, investigating psychic phenomena for the US government. He writes:

The reality of psychic phenomena is now no longer based solely upon faith, or wishful thinking, or absorbing anecdotes. It is not even based upon the results of a few scientific experiments. Instead, we know that these phenomena exist because of new ways of evaluating massive amounts of scientific evidence collected over a century by scores of researchers.

British psychologist David Fontana studied the evidence for psi for over thirty years. Psychic abilities are a matter of fact, not of belief, he writes. What they are and they mean for our view of reality is another matter, but one cannot dismiss them as fiction and yet retain credibility as an unbiased observer. The reader will encounter the reality of the most refined psychic functioning throughout this book, and by the end will have no questions as to its existence.

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Proponents of survival, often called survivalists, believe that the hypothesis of personal survival provides the best explanation for the kind of evidence you will find in these pages. (And this book provides only a small portion of that evidence.) However, Michael Sudduth, an Oxford-educated professor of philosophy and religion at San Francisco State University and prolific writer in the area of postmortem survival, points out that survivalists are confused, or even disingenuous, in their deployment of the survival hypothesis. Their version of this hypothesis carries certain auxiliary assumptions along with it that they take for granted without acknowledging them to be the unprovable and untestable premises that they are. In other words, certain beliefs about what survival would look like, which cannot be proven, are built into what survivalists call their hypothesis. They assume that at least some discarnate persons (those who have died and passed into the afterlife) have memories and personal identifying characteristics; these discarnates have the intention of communicating with the living; they have the psychic powers necessary to communicate with the living; and they have knowledge of what is happening in our world, allowing them to find someone through whom they can communicate.

Without these suppositions being part of the survival equation, it would be impossible for us to know what counts as evidence either for or against the hypothesis. Yet how do we know if these suppositions are true? They are assumed to be so in order to allow the survival hypothesis to fit the data. These characteristics of the afterlife realm and of the survived consciousness must be assumed to be true in order for the survival hypothesis to have explanatory power.

This may seem abstract, but it represents an ideological problem that we can’t ignore. We are assuming that the nature of consciousness on the other side of death would have characteristics and motivations similar to ours when alive. We do not know how the experience of death might alter consciousness or the mental states or causal powers of immaterial persons, Sudduth states. Think of it this way: We know the quantum world—the infinitesimal components of matter imbued with life—is governed by different principles and realities from the ones we know in our everyday lives. How different and unimaginable to us might be a world where consciousness exists post-death?

Fortunately, Sudduth offers what he calls a strengthened or robust survival hypothesis: one in which we can attach the assumptions previously listed, as long as we are aware that we’re doing so, so that we have something to work with. This is the one examined in these pages. If we accept those assumptions about the nature of this existence, which survivalists believe to be true but can’t prove, then indeed the evidence is compelling. And you will see why they believe in these characteristics of existence in the afterlife when you discover the case studies and personal accounts presented here. Numerous theorists have made the argument that survival after death is the most logical explanation for the data; scholarly volumes and research studies have been published making this point.

So this brings us to the obvious question: Is there another way of interpreting the extensive evidence, other than survival, that makes sense and could explain it? (I recognize that the reader has not yet perused the evidence, but these concepts are the background needed to make a proper assessment.)

There is one competing hypothesis that has generated much discussion and consternation within the research community. It claims that the evidence can be explained as psychic functioning solely among the living rather than through communication with the deceased. This would mean that mediums who receive verifiable communications, which they interpret as coming from discarnates, for example, are actually using their highly developed telepathy to read the minds of those connected to the deceased person, where the information can also be found. The human sources can be physically far away; that has no bearing on telepathy. Or, gifted people able to locate a hidden will unknown to anyone living could be using their own clairvoyance rather than relying on the now disembodied author of that will to convey its hiding place. People with highly developed psi abilities might unconsciously misinterpret this information as coming from a disembodied consciousness external to themselves. But in reality, the hypothesis proposes, all the information is acquired through their own telepathy and clairvoyance solely from earthly sources, no matter how refined the ability is.

This counter explanation is known as the living-agent psi (LAP) hypothesis as opposed to the survival hypothesis, which proposes that the source for the information is a discarnate. Sometimes the more extreme examples of human psychic ability have been called super-psi since they go way beyond what can be demonstrated in the laboratory, but LAP includes the full range. In other words, it’s only the source of that psi that is up for debate, not the psi itself.

The validity of the living-agent psi hypothesis has been argued and dissected in detail by philosopher Stephen Braude, professor emeritus of the University of Maryland, in his brilliant and sophisticated work Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life After Death (2003). This meticulous treatment has served as an indispensable reference for my research because of its rigor. Along with Michael Sudduth, Braude is among the toughest and most fastidious of any contemporary critical analyst of this evidence.

However, like the survival hypothesis, the LAP hypothesis depends on its own auxiliary assumptions, or built-in theoretical beliefs, to sustain itself. The central assumption is that human psychic abilities can be virtually unlimited in reach and scope, based on evidence of extraordinary psychic functioning. No scientific theory renders any form of psi improbable, Braude states. With this assumption, virtually anything that could be interpreted as evidence for survival can also be theoretically interpreted as a product of unlimited human psi. Some analysts can’t accept that human beings are capable of producing the psi required in the most extreme cases we have on record, which you will soon encounter, so they postulate that these manifestations must come from somewhere other than the human mind. But, there is a catch here. Is it logical to argue that these extreme psychic abilities are more acceptable when attributed to a deceased person than to a living one? Braude also makes the point that we have no clear scale or standard for what counts as super or extraordinary. Maybe the amount of psi required by LAP is not so extreme—it’s just better than what we tend to see in the lab.

Regardless of the source of psi, the displays of psychic functioning that you will shortly encounter are truly magnificent. I introduce the LAP vs. survival debate to set a framework so we can examine it periodically throughout the book.

Braude’s primary objective in writing Immortal Remains was to determine whether a survivalist interpretation of the evidence is reasonable, while also looking at the role living-agent psi might play. Overall, I’d say that the evidence most strongly supports the view that some aspects of our personality and personal consciousness, some significant chunk of our distinctive psychology, can survive the death of our bodies, at least for a time, he states. Sudduth concludes that how much of the phenomena either hypothesis can explain depends on what auxiliaries you enlist and what sort of explanatory criteria you use. On this theoretical level, the conclusion is a matter of personal opinion. Braude and I are critiquing arguments for survival, not the hypothesis of survival itself, he told me.

Another expert commentator who will be given a voice in this book is British psychologist David Fontana, mentioned earlier, who is the author of the classic tome Is There an Afterlife? (2005). Fontana died in 2010. He wrote more than two dozen books on psychology translated into twenty-six languages, and was also a psychical researcher for many decades, serving as president of the well-known Society for Psychical Research in London. Fontana is a survivalist, and a knowledgeable one, with whom Braude does not always agree. Fontana recognized that some of the evidence for survival could also be explained as living-agent psi, but to argue that such abilities explain all or even most of it stretches the hypothesis way beyond the breaking point, he wrote.

One final note: In the cases presented here, we can rule out the obvious—what Braude calls The Usual Suspects—such as fraud, errors in observation, misreporting, or any kind of dishonesty or deception. These are always the first considerations, and if they were in question, the cases would not appear in this book. Braude’s Unusual Suspects, defined as abnormal or rare processes such as dissociative pathologies, unprecedented forms of savantism, or latent creative abilities, are harder to rule out in some cases, but these are more obscure angles that are unlikely to explain the phenomena included here.

The reader must understand that for each case or witness report I present, there are many others. I chose to offer fewer cases in more detail rather than a survey of many cases with a superficial treatment of each. Although I have tried to select those cases that are most evidential, the reader will find much more to ponder in the literature. The endnotes will help open the door to further reading and video watching.

So, let the journey begin. Going forward, we must remember the famous words of William James: If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are black; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. Maybe you will find your white crow in the following pages, upsetting the law that death is final. In any case, I hope you enjoy the ride.

PART ONE

Is There Life Before Birth?

After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Chapter 1

Airplane Crash on Fire!

Over many decades, investigators have documented cases of children, often as young as two, reporting memories they say are from a previous life. In some cases, the children provide enough specific details—such as names, locations, and mode of death from this previous life—to solve the case. This means that records and family members from that claimed previous life are located, and the facts provided by the child are shown to be accurate to the life of one specific person. Nightmares about the previous death, behaviors and knowledge related to a previous career, longing for past family members, and phobias related to the past life are often part of the child’s world along with the memories. Most published cases have occurred in Asian countries, but recently some have been well documented in the United States.

Needless to say, these confusing events can be very troubling for the parents of such a child, especially when the culture and religion of the family do not support a belief in rebirth. For these families, such as the ones you are about to meet, the undeniable accuracy of their child’s memories has to take precedence over any resistance they might feel. Such cases provide strong evidence for the possibility that we can be born again, and thus survive death.

Bruce and Andrea Leininger—two attractive, well-educated, middle-class American parents from Lafayette, Louisiana—had no idea what awaited them in the year 2000, when their young son James began to talk. Andrea, once an accomplished ballerina with the San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, now teaches ballet with a local dance company. Bruce is the director of human resources for the Lafayette Parish School System. After many conversations with me, he provided original excerpts for this chapter describing his emotional and spiritual transformation throughout the ordeal.

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When James Leininger was not quite two years old, his father, Bruce, took him to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum while they were visiting family in Dallas. For some reason, when they were outside on the tarmac, James shrieked with delight when he saw the F-104 Thunderchief parked there. Once inside, the well-adjusted and happy toddler stood still by the World War II planes, fixated as if drawn by a magnet. Nothing separated him from the parked fighter planes except a single rope barrier, and he kept trying to get closer. Whenever his dad took his hand and tried to steer him to another exhibit, James resisted with desperate, piercing screams. Bruce was perplexed; it felt eerie to him. After three hours, he lured James away only by promising a trip to an airfield to watch actual flying planes take off.

The following month, James’s mother, Andrea, was pushing him in a stroller when she passed a hobby shop with a bin of plastic toys outside. She picked up a plastic propeller-driven model of an airplane and handed it to James, pointing out to him that it even had a bomb attached on its underside. James studied it for a moment, looked up and informed her: That’s not a bomb, Mommy, it’s a ‘dwop’ tank.

Andrea didn’t know what a drop tank was. Bruce later told her it was an extra gas tank carried by airplanes traveling long distances. Neither one could explain how James, who could barely talk, had ever heard of anything remotely like a drop tank.

James was the Leiningers’ only child, and they adored him. At the time, Bruce had just begun working for Oil Fields Services Corporation of America and Andrea was a full-time mom. Bruce was raised a Methodist, going to church every Sunday throughout his childhood, and he found comfort and safety there. As he matured, he became part of the Evangelical Christian movement, and met with the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship biweekly for Bible study and discussion. He considered himself to be a developed Christian on a continuous path of spiritual growth. But in a short time, Bruce felt all of that threatened by something that shook his faith and his very identity to its core.

In May, a month after James turned two, Bruce took him back to the Dallas flight museum, where he photographed the boy ecstatically mesmerized by a World War II aircraft. Since the last visit, Bruce and Andrea had watched their son become fascinated with toy airplanes, playing with nothing else. His obsession was not just with any toy planes, but with World War II airplanes in particular; he had an uncanny familiarity with them, a consuming attachment to them, and even knowledge about them that seemed to come from nowhere.

And then, the nightmares began. Actually, these were worse than your average nightmares. James was in terror, thrashing violently in a deep sleep while uncontrollable bloodcurdling screams issued from his crib. They plagued the family up to five times a week. The nightmares were so disturbing that Andrea took James to the pediatrician to find out if something was wrong with him. The doctor could offer nothing, and the repetitive dreams continued relentlessly, destroying the equanimity at home.

Then, after a few months, a turning point came when one night words suddenly accompanied the raw screams. Andrea called for Bruce to come. As he describes it:

I stood in my son’s doorway. James was lying on his back, kicking and clawing the covers in his crib, like he was trying to break his way out of a coffin. He flung his head back and forth and screamed over and over: Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!

James had just turned two and was beginning to learn to talk in sentences, yet his words seemed so unchildlike in their desperation. Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out! My concern was to protect him, but I felt frightened and paralyzed. What was happening to my son?

The dreams and the same words repeated themselves over and over again, for months more. Then James started to say the same words when awake. Once, when in the car while Andrea was dropping off Bruce at the airport for a business trip, James turned to his parents as his dad got out of the car. Daddy’s airplane crash! Big fire! he told them. He crashed his toy planes with propellers headfirst into the coffee table so many times that the propellers broke off, damaging the table. And at night it seemed like he was reliving something all too real. It made absolutely no sense to his troubled parents.

One evening before bed, Andrea was reading Dr. Seuss to James. In a very relaxed state, James spontaneously started talking about the dream, and reenacted the crash with his little body while fully awake. His mother, trembling, asked him who the little man was. James said, Me. Bruce came to the room, asked him again, Who is the little man? and he repeated, Me. Bruce describes the conversation:

Son, what happened to your plane?

James replied, It crashed on fire.

Why did your airplane crash?

It got shot.

Who shot your plane?

James cocked his head and looked at me like the answer was obvious. It seemed to strike him as so inane that he rolled his eyes.

The Japanese, he said with disdain, like an impatient teenager.

He was only just two. It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room.

On another occasion, James got even more specific. He told them the little man’s name was James. His parents assumed he was simply repeating his own name, as any two-year-old would, playing out some kind of scenario in his mind involving a pilot. But when they asked him more about the plane, James said that the little man flew a type of airplane called a Corsair. He also said that his plane took off from a boat. His dad asked him for the name of that boat, and he replied, Natoma. Bruce commented that the name sounded Japanese, but James assured his parents that it was American, once again with an annoyed look as if they were idiots. Bruce writes:

I flinched, as if I’d been punched. He knew the plane. How could James know the name of a World War II fighter aircraft, much less with certainty that it was the aircraft in the dream? And how the hell did James know they were launched from aircraft carriers? Nothing that he had ever seen or read or heard could have influenced him to have this memory.

I was convinced that I somehow had to trap James to find the cracks or flaws in his story. I wanted something hard, on paper, providing proof that this was some kind of fantasy. I dismissed the Japanese, the Corsair, and even the boat, as some sort of strange story in his head. But then I went onto the Internet. After reading several pages of hits on the word Natoma, I stared at a black-and-white picture of the Natoma Bay, a small United States aircraft carrier that fought in the Pacific in World War II. Andrea came in and I showed her as we stood there stiffly, frozen, as the hairs stood up on the back of our necks.

In a funny way, this made me mad. He wasn’t even potty trained, and he was telling me something that shook my world. I was venturing into truly unknown territory. I began to panic, quietly. My wife and her family wondered about a possible past life. I told them, Never, not in my house! I needed to be right about this. My spiritual side was ruled by the Christian faith, which did not accept reincarnation, and that was the end of that story. And the world was a rational place controlled by the scientific method. There had to be a logical explanation!

Bruce printed out information on the Natoma Bay from a website, which remains in the case file with the date of 08/27/2000 on the page. This is important, because it provides a time-stamped record of when Bruce conducted the search, in response to James’s statement, making it clear that the statements were made before anything was known about the person James might have been describing from a past life. The Corsair was an American fighter aircraft that was used primarily by the marines, but also the US Navy, in World War II. It’s important to note that there was no Corsair at the flight museum that James visited, and he had not been exposed to anything to do with that aircraft.

By this time, a number of family members had visited and witnessed the chilling spectacle of the nightmares. In October, when he was two and a half, James explained one evening that he could not remember the last name of the little man James from his nightmares. But he said that this James had a best friend. When asked for his name, James said, Jack Larsen, and he was a pilot too. The specificity of the name changed everything. And another important detail surfaced as well. James told his parents that his plane was shot in the engine, in front, where the propeller was. Strangely enough, all of his single engine toy airplanes had the propellers broken off their front ends from James’s continued reenactments of the crash.

And finally, James provided another piece of the puzzle, out of the blue, on Thanksgiving weekend. He was waiting for cartoons to come on, and when he became impatient, his dad asked him to come sit on his lap. They started looking through the book The Battle for Iwo Jima, which Bruce had ordered as a Christmas present for his father, a former marine. (James’s grandfather lived fourteen hundred miles away in Pennsylvania and was only at the house once during these events.) When they turned to a page with a photo of Iwo Jima, James pointed to it and said, Daddy, that’s when my plane was shot down and crashed. He used the word when rather than where while pointing to a photo of Iwo Jima and an accompanying diagram, never mentioning the island by name.

Each time a new clue was revealed, Bruce became more deeply unnerved. The more I learned from James, the stronger my mission became to prove that the nightmares and everything else were simply the coincidental rants of a child, he writes. I was hardened into a committed skeptic. Now that I had the name Jack Larsen, I could find out about him and this would make my point, I reasoned. I had to represent the voice of reason within the family.

At this point, Bruce assumed that the person in the dream, who died in the crash, was Jack Larsen. When Bruce asked James for the name of the little man in his dream, he always said James, which was simply his own name. Since Bruce didn’t accept that James was dreaming about a past life, he concluded that therefore Jack Larsen was the important name, and that Larsen was likely the subject of the dream. (In retrospect this reasoning seems odd, but it made sense to Bruce at the time as he struggled to deny what was happening.) So, if Larsen was the person crashing in the dream, he was now dead. Bruce began to search for records. He found the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) website, which listed US soldiers who were either missing in action or buried abroad. On that list, there were 170 Larsons or Larsens killed in World War II, but only ten of them had a first name of Jack, James, or John.

Bruce then spent many months diligently researching anything he could find to help explain what James was saying. He found that the USS Natoma Bay had been commissioned by the navy in October 1943, so the Jack (or John) Larson