Suppose a friend of yours told you that years ago he was in a plane crash. This friend is known for telling tall tales, so you just say that he’s full of it. But he insists that he’s telling the truth—in fact, he’s willing to prove it. He tells you what type of plane it was, where it took off from, where it went down, and who he was with before it crashed.
You still think he’s bluffing, so you decide to investigate his story. To your surprise, the facts that you uncover confirm what your friend told you, even down to the details. Your friend hasn’t talked to the witnesses in years, but when interviewed they confirm his story as well.
In the above example, most people would agree that the friend is owed an apology. With such detailed, and corroborated, knowledge, the best explanation is that the person actually experienced these events and is giving you a recollection.
A tale similar to the above actually played out. James Leininger recounted how during World War II, he flew his Corsair fighter off of a ship he called the Natoma, got into a dogfight and crashed near Iwo Jima. If you learned that the first time he publicly told this story was in the year 2000, you might think that an aged veteran had finally decided to tell his war-stories before it was too late. However, this is something a little different.
James Leininger was born in 1998.
Around the time of his second birthday, James started having repeated and violent nightmares about becoming trapped and burning to death in a plane. When the nightmares wouldn’t stop, his parents, Bruce and Andrea, became concerned. They asked him for more details. He told them that the plane was a Corsair, that it had flown of an American “boat” called the Natoma, a fellow pilot named Jack Larsen was his friend, and that he had been shot down near Iwo Jima.
The Leiningers were surprised at the level of detail their son provided. They came to the conclusion that there were only two possibilities: either James was remembering a past life as a WWII fighter pilot, or had a very vivid imagination. Bruce, a devout Christian, firmly did not believe in reincarnation, and set out to investigate so that he could prove that James was imagining things. What he found, however, was that James’ story was accurate. After exhausting what he could find from secondary sources, Bruce talked to veterans of the USS Natoma Bay. They corroborated James’ story.
At one point, Bruce brought his son to meet some of these veterans. One walked up to James and the first thing he asked was if he knew who he was. James answered that he was Bob Greenwalt (which he indeed was), and that he knew because he recognized his voice. Based on their investigation, the Leiningers and researchers discovered the identity of James Leininger’s previous life—James McReady Huston Jr., a Pennsylvania-born fighter pilot who served on the Natoma. The full story of James’ case can be found in Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot, a memoir written by Bruce and Andrea about their investigation.
While their story is fascinating, if isolated it could have just been an interesting mystery. However, this is simply one case of this type. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist, was guided by his clinical work to believe that there was a third force, apart from genetics and upbringing, that impacted the psychological development of a person—impressions brought from a past life.
If there was any chance for his hypothesis to be correct, he knew that he would first have to establish credible evidence for reincarnation. He did this by attempting to find cases of people, usually children, who had memories of their past life. But Stevenson didn’t accept just any memory to make his case. First, he confirmed that a claim was detailed, objective, and verifiable. If a claim was vague or subjective it was immediately rejected. If there was a high probability that the information was gained by some other means, then that case was also rejected. If someone’s testimony was later disproven, the case also didn’t make the cut. Even with such stringent standards, Stevenson collected a hundred such cases. Later, more researchers were brought in, and Stevenson founded the Department of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia’s medical school.
Stevenson’s rigorous methodology made the scientific world take notice. The psychologist Remi Cadoret, writing in The American Journal of Psychiatry, praised Stevenson’s “painstaking protocol to sift facts from fancy.” A review of one of his books in The Journal of the American Medical Association said he recorded a plethora of data that “can’t be ignored.” Even noted skeptic Carl Sagan praised Stevenson’s methodology, and recommended that more work be done to investigate what appear to be past life memories.
And more work was done. There are now approximately 2500 reincarnation cases compiled by DOPS.
Such case studies form the backbone of the scientific case for reincarnation. In certain case studies, additional evidence is available in tandem that indicates a connection between a subject and their previous life. In some cases, subjects have birthmarks or birth defects that are in the same location of the previous life’s fatal injury. When researchers have investigated children who both remember a past life and have an intense phobia, they find that the phobia is often related to the manner of death in the past life. In very striking cases, some children can understand a language that they have never been exposed to, but that was spoken in their previous life, a phenomenon called xenoglossy.
The best hypothesis available for the plethora of verified cases where people remember the actions, habits, attitudes and relationships of a previously living person is that some non-physical essence survives death and moves from one body to another—reincarnation.
Despite such an accumulation of evidence, many people refuse to even consider the possibility of reincarnation. There are standard objections that they make but, as I will discuss next week, they tend to be based on misrepresentation and double standards.
The reincarnation hypothesis is the best fit for the evidence. If a skeptic wants to reject it, then the onus is on them to come up with a better hypothesis to explain the data. I will be clear about what this means—they would need to show that there was systemic and persistent error in the research (not just one-off mistakes or a few less-than-ideal case studies), or propose an alternative that fits the data.
To date, none have. Reincarnation remains the best explanation for the facts.
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