Book Review: Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (2017). Leslie Kean.

It was an odd coincidence to me that Leslie Kean, the New York Times award-winning journalist whose book UFOs I previously reviewed, has also written a book on the other “mysteries of life” topic I have found most challenging to my otherwise rational and scientific view of life. That subject has to do with the question of whether our consciousness may survive in some form and transcend our mortal bodies and lifetimes.

As regular readers of this blog know, there are widely known and well-documented cases of very young children who appear to have detailed knowledge of recent individual past lives which are not easily explainable through rational means, and where fraud or trickery do not seem to be likely explanations.

Kean’s book begins with summaries of a few of the best-known of those cases, and the history of academic and scientific research into this strange phenomenon (prominently led by Dr. Ian Stevenson and then Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia Medical School). She then moves on to evaluate research into several other related types of "near death" and "beyond death" experiences, both contemporary and historical.

In the course of exploring academic research into other categories of reported “beyond death” phenomena, such as near death experiences (NDEs), apparitions, and mediums, Kean regularly probes the quality and meaning of the reports, the reporters and the data. She also regularly raises and considers the possibility of psychic communications between living people (rather than between the living and the dead) as an alternative explanation for some of the strange events and experiences reported, particularly in cases where subjects report detailed information they shouldn’t have been able to know, which the subjects believed had been conveyed from “beyond life” sources or experiences.   

It's a very intriguing and often hair-curling inquiry. She started to lose me in the later chapters, where it seemed she might be starting to move too much into the realm of New Age belief, especially as she began sharing some of her own personal experiences, which often seemed lacking in verifiable evidence, and which she relates with less of the apparent level of skepticism and critical analysis she typically displays toward paranormal topics in her writing.

I’m always on the lookout for that, because being open to the possibility of paranormal phenomena can easily lead one down some bizarre and perhaps absurd rabbit holes. But there was still much to ponder, and much of interest in this very unusual book.

This world and our existence in it may yet be stranger than they appear. Or then again, perhaps not.  But the essential mystery of our being, where we came from, and where if anywhere our consciousness might go when we depart, make it almost obligatory for many of us to speculate about it, and see if there is more to know.  This book is an interesting and reasonably rational exploration of recent academic research and literature on reported phenomena related to this most universal set of human questions. Recommended.

Book Review: Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999). Tom Shroder.

In previous reviews I discussed the research and books by two successive University of Virginia psychiatrists over the past fifty years who have done extensive research around the world into the strange phenomenon of small children who appear to remember significant details about previous lives recently lived.   

These two doctors are the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, who started the ongoing study at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, and Dr. Jim Tucker, who was a student and the eventual successor to Dr. Stevenson.  Both of these doctors have written books about their careers, their research, and the many "solved" and "unsolved" cases in their case files.  

Old Souls, written by a career journalist with long tenures at the Washington Post and the Miami Herald, is an "outsider's" account of his own investigation into Stevenson's work and research methods, which he pursued by accompanying the 79-year-old Stevenson on his last two major foreign research trips, first to Lebanon after the civil war there, and then to poverty-stricken rural parts of India.  

 

It's a  fascinating journalistic account by a skeptical observer, who by the end was forced to a very similar position regarding these cases of children's memories of past lives as that expressed by both Stevenson and Tucker: that is, that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this phenomenon is real and not fabricated, that Stevenson's and Tucker's research methods and protocols are scientifically sound, repeatable and appear most likely to be evidence of reincarnation, but that we may well never be able to understand or scientifically prove it, or understand it, unless we can somehow learn far more about the scientific nature of consciousness and of reality itself. Recommended.

Book Review: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019). Diana Walsh Pasulka.

I heard about this book a couple of years ago, when Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, interviewed the author on his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

Dr. Pasulka is a PhD Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of North Carolina, who stumbled into the world of UFO believers and researchers when she realized that there were extensive Biblical and historical references in her own Vatican archives research to stories of miracles going back to the early Middle Ages, which, if stripped of the belief system of whatever religious perspective was at play in these accounts, seemed remarkably similar to modern-day UFO sightings.

This led her to begin to explore modern UFO believers and their claims, and to take their stories more seriously as real physical or psychological phenomena which should be studied scientifically as well as philosophically. She was also fascinated with new forms of religious belief and experience in the age of “miraculous” technologies, such as we’ve seen since the mid-20th century.

In the process of researching and investigating the history of the modern UFO era, she discovered for herself (before the New York Times revealed it to the world in 2017) that there were many very serious scientists, government officials and wealthy tech individuals pursuing UFO research, but that until recently they almost uniformly refused to admit it publicly, for fear of being ridiculed or undermining the more conventional parts of their careers.

American Cosmic is somewhat unique among UFO books, in that it is a scholarly and philosophical exploration of UFOs and UFO literature in the context of religious experiences going back to ancient times, and forward into our modern technological era. It makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read on this puzzling phenomenon. Recommended.

Book Review: Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001). Ian Stevenson.

Some years ago I heard about the work of a University of Virginia Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, who has spent his long academic career (up to the present) researching thousands of cases of the phenomenon of very young children who claim to remember details of previous lives, which has been reported in societies around the world. I then read two earlier books he had written, recently combined into one, Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2021), which I reviewed here. From this I learned that Dr. Tucker is almost certainly the world’s current leading academic authority on this unusual phenomenon.

However, as I learned from Dr. Tucker’s books, an earlier researcher, Dr. Ian Stevenson, was actually the original study founder, and Dr. Tucker’s predecessor, mentor and academic advisor in the long-running University of Virginia research study of children with previous life memories, which has now been underway continuously for the past fifty years.

In Dr. Stevenson’s book, which is remarkably dry, clinical and scientific for a topic which you might expect to be eerie, sensational and speculative, he presents an intellectual defense and report on his life’s work, his approaches to compiling and analyzing reports, and the rigorous research and interviewing methodologies he devised early on, with which the study has been conducted.

He begins by describing how the study came into being. He lists all the countries around the world where he and his colleagues have collected reports, and discusses cultural factors and differences between sets of reports from different countries. He delves into many aspects of solved and unsolved cases (a solved case is one where the deceased person whose memories the child claims to have is identified, so that the facts claimed by the child can be compared to official documents, and usually the memories of families and friends of the deceased).

Stevenson reviews the frequency and characteristics of many of the common elements of reports, such as: average time between lives in reports from different cultures, familial connections between current and reported previous lives, birthmarks coinciding with circumstances of death of reported previous lives (such as birthmarks or deformities in the same place on the child’s body as the site of wounds on the deceased), frequency and behavioral effects of sex change between lives, presence of vivid “announcing dreams” to pregnant mothers of children who subsequently report memories of a past life, and many other commonly-occurring features of cases.

Stevenson also evaluates alternative explanations to reincarnation in these cases, the effects of widespread cultural belief or disbelief in reincarnation on the frequency of reporting and the characteristics of reports taken from different parts of the world, and considers philosophical and religious implications of differing proposed explanations relative to the major world religions.

Most importantly, he makes it clear that as a scientist, he doesn’t claim to know whether this phenomenon and his study of it “proves” reincarnation. But he does suggest based on exhaustively documented reports from thousands of case histories, and the fact that young children don’t have the experiential knowledge or the access to information to make up the detailed, very specific sets of facts they frequently recount (which are often verified in solved cases), that reincarnation may provide the least convoluted and perhaps most likely explanation to fit the inexplicable nature of this phenomenon.

This book is an important foundation for understanding the study of children who remember past lives, by the leading and original scientist in this unusual research field. It can be heavy going in parts, because of Stevenson’s dry, dispassionate and unsensational writing style, but that in fact lends to its credibility. Recommended.

Book Review: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021). Bruce Greyson, MD.

This recent book by one of the world’s leading scientific experts on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) is an account of what is now known about NDEs, based on his career of collecting data about them, analyzing the data, researching historical NDE anecdotes and beliefs, and working with other researchers. It is also an account of his personal journey in deciding to study them, and then dedicating a major portion of his career as a physician to designing and carrying out this unusual research on what he knew from the outset was a controversial topic.

Dr. Greyson faced many of the same sorts of institutional skepticism and resistance to his pursuit of understanding of this phenomenon that other researchers have confronted in what I call “mysteries of life” topics (i.e., frequently-reported phenomena that are “paranormal” or unexplained by conventional materialist science). Nevertheless, as a practicing psychiatrist, he kept hearing descriptions of these strange and psychologically impactful experiences, many of them sharing common features, and ultimately couldn’t avoid trying to understand this puzzling reported experience which kept turning up in patients he treated who had been through serious medical emergencies.

It was intriguing to me that although he has taught at several different prestigious university medical schools during his career, he ended up at the University of Virginia, working closely with both Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, two of the leading psychiatrist researchers into the phenomenon of young children who appear to remember details of past lives.

All three of these doctors, and others among their colleagues, seem to share a deep curiosity about what is behind the shades of what we normally accept as material reality, and particularly the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, which has been a central philosophical and religious issue since antiquity.

As with recent attempts to study other “paranormal” phenomena using scientific methods of interviewing via a structured approach, and applying quantification and analysis of frequently recurring aspects to patients’ stories (techniques that Greyson pioneered with respect to NDE research), at the end we’re still left with unresolved questions. Do minds exist independent of physical bodies and brains? We still don’t know, but Greyson’s account adds more evidence to the possibility that they do.

But beyond those cosmic questions, Dr. Greyson’s research also yields many fascinating insights into the psychological impacts of NDEs on experiencers, and the people around them. There is an insightful exploration of how NDEs can change the personalities of those who have them, not always for the better in terms of their own happiness, although gaining a heightened appreciation for preserving life and being more kind and loving to others seems to be a common tendency among many survivors. 

He reveals other surprising commonalities across reported NDEs. One category of cases involves people in the near-death state who seem to know about the deaths of other people in remote locations, before it is known to them in their waking state, or to the people around them.

He describes other cases where patients in this NDE unconscious state seemed to have viewed details of what was going on around them and nearby (outside the room where their body was lying) when they were definitely unconscious, including one eerie episode which happened to him when he was first practicing medicine, and played an important part in convincing him to undertake this line of research.

Another fascinating finding he revealed was that while most NDE experiences seem to involve meeting or becoming aware of an all-powerful deity of some sort, there was no consistent correlation between that and the experiencers’ prior or subsequent religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

For anyone interested in NDEs, and how they fit into the other mysteries of our existence, this is an intriguing, compassionate and ultimately comforting introduction. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (formerly two books, Life Before Life and Return to Life) (2021). Dr. Jim Tucker.

I recently reviewed Soul Survivor, the astonishing story of a small Texas boy in the early 2000s who appeared to have detailed memories of a previous life as a World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. 

 

In that review, I mentioned two psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School who are considered the leading experts on the scientific study of the phenomenon of very young children with apparent memories of past lives, and who (between the two of them) have been studying thousands of cases from around the world for over a half-century:  Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim B. Tucker.

 

Dr. Tucker is the latter of these two researchers, who is still alive and actively writing about his research.  He has an endowed Professorship at UVA in Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and is the director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies, an academic unit within the medical school that includes several other noted UVA researchers working in related areas, such as Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and other forms of paranormal mind/brain/body and perceptual phenomena.

 

In this newly combined version of his two earlier books, Dr. Tucker shares some of his most surprising and convincing cases of past lives memories in children, and describes the process by which he conducted and organized his research. 

 

Like his predecessor Dr. Stevenson, he is intent on demonstrating the scientific and repeatable nature of this research, and describing the methods used for objectively collecting and analyzing the data from their case studies. 

 

He also refrains from insisting that these cases are absolute proof of reincarnation, but makes the case for reincarnation as the simplest and most likely explanation for small children being in possession of verifiable facts, personality traits, behaviors and physical stigmata associated with a deceased person, by also considering and comparing the arguments for other possible interpretations of the strange facts of these cases.   

 

This two-volume book is probably the most accessible and engaging account of the state of the academic research into this phenomenon by these two doctors and their colleagues over a fifty year period, and contains remarkable descriptions of a number of the better-documented cases from their files.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010). Leslie Kean.

The author of this book is the award-winning New York Times journalist who later co-wrote the explosive 2017 story on the U.S. government’s admissions that a major naval carrier task force had experienced repeated encounters with UFOs, and that the government had in fact been actively studying the phenomenon for decades while denying its existence.

In this book, the author includes summaries of major reported UFO sightings from around the world since the 1940s, followed in each case by the detailed written statements of some of the many highly qualified observers, such as government leaders, military and commercial pilots, police and astronauts who witnessed them. 

After reading this compilation of so many extremely specific and detailed eye-witness reports, it is much harder to believe that UFOs (or UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as they're now sometimes called) aren't a real, physical occurrence. 

Kean makes the case that UFO encounters and sightings are almost certainly far under-reported due to the social and institutional disincentives to event reporting.  She also highlights how the U.S. government’s policy of constantly debunking and ridiculing them (at that time), while almost certainly maintaining a deniable, highly-classified program to continue collecting data, is at odds with the more open approach of many other countries, and does a disservice to the world's ability to study and investigate UFOs/UAPs scientifically. 

Many other countries in the world (including England, France and many NATO countries) do in fact encourage UFO/UAP reporting, and have open programs for sharing information between countries.  Kean's approach to her material, which is dispassionate, seemingly skeptical and does not assume any particular explanation for UFOs/UAPs, is convincing in making the case for more open scientific investigation of these mysterious phenomena.

This book is probably the best place to start in delving into the current state of knowledge about UFOs, and what our government has been doing (and not doing) for most of the past century to collect and study the phenomenon.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot (2009). Bruce & Andrea Leininger.

Soul Survivor is the story of a modern boy from Texas who had detailed and accurate memories of life and death as a World War II fighter pilot, starting with terrifying dreams at night of burning up and falling that began before he even learned to talk. 

This was the first account I had read about the strange and widespread phenomenon of small children with apparent memories of past lives.  It is considered by experts in this field to be one of the most thoroughly researched and documented of thousands of these cases that have been collected and studied now for more than 70 years. 

It is also very powerfully told, through the experiences of the child’s parents, as they began to piece together the meaning of what their son was saying to them and doing in his early childhood, and then slowly validated dozens of specific factual statements made by their son about his memories of his previous life as a young fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, despite their own resistance to accepting as true what they were hearing from him, and their own religious discomfort at the outset with the whole idea of reincarnation.

Most of the books I have read by now on this topic concern the work of two eminent psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson (who began the study of this phenomenon in the 1970s, and worked on it throughout his long career there, traveling all over the world to gather case histories from different cultures), and Dr. Jim Tucker, who began as a student of Stevenson’s, then became an expert on the subject in his own right. 

Between the two of them, they continuously collected and studied thousands of case histories from around the world for more than fifty years.  Many of those cases, which they gathered with meticulous care under research protocols originally developed by Stevenson to screen out falsification and bias, are considered “solved”, which means they believe with a high degree of certainty that they have identified the past life (the person) to which the child subject refers, even though those people were not typically public figures or celebrities that would likely have been known to the child or the family involved.

The boy and family in Soul Survivor were not among their many astonishing cases, but as a starting point for reading about and understanding the phenomenon of children who remember past lives, it is excellent – moving, almost like a novel in style and persuasive enough to make you want to know more about it.  Very highly recommended.

Personal Notes: About Mysteries of Life

In this blog's Topics list, you will now see a new item called "Mysteries of Life". 

 

The sorts of topics to be included and discussed in my Mysteries of Life section are those that deal with aspects of the "paranormal".   Some will disparage and dismiss these topics as new age, mystical, pseudo-scientific, hocus-pocus, fantasy, or otherwise just absurd within the modern scientific and rationalist worldview.  I understand that reaction and that skepticism, and am quite sympathetic to it.  Skepticism is a necessary part of any rational thought.

 

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, organized religions, cults, magical thinking, or other non-rational and unscientific belief systems.  I am a strong believer in reason, logic, and the scientific method, which over the past five hundred years have given us a powerful set of tools for evaluating, testing, proving and disproving ideas about the reality we inhabit, through a process of repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation. 

 

With that said, though, I have occasionally stumbled onto well-documented facts and events, and even had a few personal experiences, that challenged aspects of the scientific and materialist consensus as well as my own beliefs, and raised disturbing questions that are not easily explained by our current understanding of "objective" reality.

 

Two such evolving stories that have particularly caught my attention in recent years are the strange reports of many young children around the world who appear to have detailed and often-verifiable memories of recent past lives; and the newly-rehabilitated status of the UFO phenomenon, which had been denied and ridiculed by the U.S. government for three generations, only to be suddenly acknowledged and confirmed a few years ago by that same government, after the New York Times reported on a series of encounters between UFOs and a U.S. Navy carrier task force that were witnessed and recorded by many of the pilots, officers and sailors who were there when it happened.

 

After starting down this road, I also noticed that once I had begun to delve into the history and scientific study of these two particular areas of investigation, I soon discovered other types of curious phenomena and widely reported psychological and paranormal experiences that seemed to be similar, or at least somehow related. 

 

One possibility to explain this proliferation of weirdness is that once you head down the rabbit hole of giving any credence to the paranormal, you'll inevitably be drawn deeper into it, much like other forms of irrational belief and madness.  But it is also conceivable that there are real common threads or unknown forces involved in many of these unexplained mysteries.  These perceived similarities between different paranormal phenomena often seem to suggest the same need to probe our limited understanding of the true nature of our human minds (as distinct from our brains), and our consciousness and perceptions.

 

For example, I recently discovered that the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDEs), when studied in a scientific manner across a large data set of patient reports, raises many of the same sorts of age-old questions of mind, body and soul, and of space and time, as are found in attempts to understand the meaning of accounts of apparent reincarnation, or of UFOs and reported alien encounters. 

 

Meanwhile, some of our contemporary physicists, still looking for a grand unified theory of existence, suggest with increasing frequency that quantum physics, and its postulation of an endless multiverse determined by consciousness, choice and observation, may offer explanations for some of the paranormal phenomena that have been reported recently, and throughout most of recorded history for that matter.  What are we to make of that?

 

It may be that none of these questions can ever be convincingly answered, explained or proven.  I'm very open to that possibility.  But the process of documenting and cataloguing strange facts and events, the study of puzzling and often traumatic or transformative experiences many people have reported that don't seem to be "normal", and the search for greater knowledge and understanding of these odd phenomena, is still intriguing to me. 

 

Therefore, I will occasionally report on good books, movies and TV shows by and about people who are exploring "mysteries of life" from a scientific and academic perspective.  The more we can know about what's really going on in these lives, minds and world of ours, the better, don't you think?  And besides, it's fun!  Who doesn't love a good eerie mystery?