Tucker's study of the "third James"

When James Leininger was two years old he “began having terrible nightmares about a plane crash. By the time he was three, he had told his parent that before he was born, he was a pilot who flew from a boat. His plane was shot in the engine by the Japanese and crashed in the water.”

Two years later ABC interviewed James and his parents, who said on the air that they had confirmed much of what their son had told them. “He said he had been a pilot named James on the boat Natoma, he had been shot down and killed at Iwo Jima, and he had a friend named Jack Larsen. His father had discovered that a James Huston from the USS Natoma Bay had been shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Another pilot on the Natoma Bay was named Jack Larsen.”

“Soon after his third birthday, James began drawing pictures. He drew battle scenes with ships and planes over and over again—his parents report he drew hundreds of them. James began signing the pictures, James 3. When his parents asked him about it, he said, ‘I’m the third James. I’m James 3.’ What it may refer to is that James Huston was a junior. That would make James Leininger the third James.

“When James turned three, he got his first G.I. Joe and named it Billy (or Billie, as it turned out). When he received his second one that Christmas, he named it Leon. Two Christmases later, when he was five and a half, he received his third, which he named Walter. These G.I. Joes were his buddies, and he took them everywhere. He played with them in the tub and slept with them at night. When his parents asked about the names Leon and Walter, he told them that was who met him when he got to heaven.

“Ten men from Huston’s squadron aboard Natoma Bay were killed before he was. The names of three of them were Billie, Leon, and Walter. The day after James’s comment about meeting them, his mother brought up the topic again and asked James if there was really a heaven. When he said yes, she asked where it was, and he spread out his arms and said, ‘It’s right here.’ She asked what it looked like, and he said it was the most beautiful place in the world.

“She asked him if there is really a God, and James said yes. She then asked if God is a man or a woman. James’s answer was that God is not a man or a woman; he is whoever you need him to be at the time. When his mother asked him if everyone comes back, James said no, that you get to choose. You don’t have to come back. You can, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” James also told his parents that he had picked them to be his family, after he found them in Hawaii eating dinner on the beach. His parents had been in Hawaii about a year before James was born, and on their last night there they had dinner on the beach.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).