Memories of past lives: Rawlette excerpt #14

Ian Stevenson

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of having lived a previous life in a different body don’t get nearly as much press as near-death experiences, even though the literature documenting the accuracy of past-life memories is much vaster and more thorough than the literature on verified paranormal perception in NDEs. Much of the documentation related to memories of previous lives is due to the monumental work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who beginning in the 1960s spent several decades traveling the world conducting extremely thorough investigations into the past-life memories spontaneously reported by young children.

Similar work, with similar results, has been conducted on a smaller scale by several other researchers, including Satwant Pasricha, Antonia Mills, Jürgen Keil, Erlendur Haraldsson, Jim B. Tucker, and James G. Matlock. These researchers have sought to determine whether there are actual deceased people whose lives correspond to the past-life memories children report, how closely the children’s memories correspond to the details of these people’s lives, and whether the children could have learned these details in some non-paranormal way. 

For many of these cases, the correspondences between the memories and the lives of the deceased are so accurate and detailed, and the possibility of the children learning such details in a normal way so remote, that the best explanation appears to be some sort of “reincarnation”: the continuation of a deceased person’s consciousness in a new body. By 2001, the University of Virginia already had in its collection over 2,500 cases that investigation showed to be suggestive of reincarnation.

There has also been a lot of interest in the past 70 years in retrieving past-life memories through hypnosis. However, the number of hypnotic regression cases in which the existence of the specific individual remembered has been verified is much smaller than the number of spontaneous cases where this has been achieved, and there is debate within the parapsychology community over the accuracy of memories evoked by hypnosis. For this reason, I’ll restrict my attention in this essay to spontaneously occurring memories.

One of the most striking cases of past-life memory investigated in the United States in the last couple of decades is that of a boy named James Leininger, who at age two began having terrible nightmares during which he would scream, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following months, James began talking about the content of his nightmare while awake. His parents asked him for more details about what had happened to the plane he was in, and James said it was shot, by the Japanese. Later, James added that his plane was a Corsair. James also told his parents that he had flown his plane off a boat. When asked for the name of the boat, James replied, “Natoma.” His dad said that the name sounded Japanese, and James looked “perturbed” at this comment. He corrected his father, telling him it was American.

James’s father, Bruce, had strong Christian convictions and at the time of James’s first comments had a negative reaction to the idea that they might be indicative of reincarnation. However, Bruce was open-minded enough to try to investigate the things his son was saying. Through a web search, he discovered that there had indeed been a U.S. escort carrier named “Natoma Bay” in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Over the following months and years, James went on to produce further details about his apparent memories of another life. When asked who the little man in the plane was, James would say either “me” or “James,” which didn’t seem very helpful. When they asked if there was anyone else in the dream with him, he gave the name Jack Larsen and said that Jack was a pilot, too. At another time, James saw a picture of Iwo Jima in a book and said, “My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.” And, on still another occasion, James told his dad that his plane had been hit at the front of the engine, right in the propeller.

Bruce eventually learned that pilots from Natoma Bay had participated in the Iwo Jima operation and that only one pilot had been killed during it: a pilot named James Huston. When Bruce was finally able to get his hands on the aircraft action report for the day of Huston’s death, he saw that, flying right next to Huston was a pilot named Jack Larsen. Bruce was also able to talk to four men who had actually seen Huston’s plane go down that day. They all confirmed that Huston’s plane had been hit head-on, in the engine.

James had also reported that “Little Man” had two sisters, Ruth and Annie, and he specified that Ruth was four years older than Annie, who was four years older than he was. It turned out that James Huston did have two older sisters with these names, and their ages were spaced in the way he indicated.

One thing James said that didn’t seem to be quite right was the fact that his plane had been a Corsair, as there had never been any Corsairs flying from Natoma Bay. James Huston had died in an FM-2. And yet it was later discovered that James Huston had flown a Corsair before coming to Natoma Bay. His surviving sister Anne had a couple of pictures of him in front of a Corsair, and it was confirmed that Huston had previously tested the Corsair for the Navy.

This case has been carefully researched by Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, among other researchers. And while it is certainly one of the most strikingly detailed of the American cases of apparent past-life memories, it is far from the only one of its kind. As previously mentioned, similar cases have been collected and studied in countries all around the world, and they show remarkable consistency in their features. 

For instance, children nearly always begin speaking about their memories of another life between the ages of two and five, and they generally stop talking about them between five and eight years old, although there are some adults who retain spontaneous past-life memories as well. Another consistency is that past-life memories tend to be of things that happened close to the end of the previous life, and almost 75% of children with past-life memories make statements about how they died.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.