Western reincrnation cases: Taylor excerpt #21

Greg Taylor writes: One of the initial criticisms of Dr. Stevenson’s research had been that the cases he reported were all from locations in which reincarnation was part of the religious culture. He addressed this issue in a paper in 1983 in which he documented 79 American cases – many of which occurred in families who did not have a belief in reincarnation – noting how they resembled cases from elsewhere in many ways, such as the early age at which they were reported and the effect on the child’s behavior.cxliii In recent years DOPS has concentrated on investigating more American cases, and according to Dr. Jim Tucker researchers “can now say with certainty that this is not purely a cultural phenomenon that takes place in areas with a belief in reincarnation.”

For instance, one of the most prominent American cases so far recorded is that of James Leininger, born in 1998 into a middle-class, Protestant Christian family in Louisiana, with his father in particular being quite opposed to the idea of reincarnation. At age 2, James began saying the phrase “airplane crash on fire,” and also slamming his toy plane nose first into the family's coffee table. He also began having nightmares multiple times a week, kicking his feet in the air and screaming “airplane crash on fire, little man can’t get out.” Not long after, his parents were able to have conversations with him where he told them his plane had crashed on fire, he’d been shot down by the Japanese, and that he flew a Corsair. When he was 28 months old, he said his plane had flown off a boat, and when his parents asked him what the name of the boat was, he said “Natoma”. It turns out there was a USS Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Pacific during WWII. When his parents asked him if he could remember anyone else’s name, he responded with “Jack Larsen.” When he was 30 months old, James’s father purchased the book The Battle for Iwo Jima. On looking in the book, James pointed at a photo and said that was where his plane was shot down.

Through his own searching, James’s father found that there was indeed a pilot on the Natoma Bay named Jack Larsen, and that he was still alive. Additionally, there was only one pilot from the ship who was lost during the Battle of Iwo Jima: a 21-year-old named James M. Huston, Jr. Huston died in exactly the manner, and location, that James claimed to remember. Additionally, James appeared to have knowledge from the past life experience that a young child would not know (e.g. that Corsairs got flat tires all the time), and was able to discuss personal details of his life with Huston’s surviving sister Anne. “The child was so convincing,” she said in a 2004 interview, “coming up with all these things that there’s no way in the world he could know, unless there is a spiritual thing.”

In reviewing the case, Dr. Tucker was able to rule out mundane explanations:

He could not have learned from the people around him, because they knew nothing about either the ship or Huston when he began talking about them. James had made all of the documented statements by the time he was four years old, so he could not have read about them. Regardless, no published materials about James Huston are known to exist. No television program focusing on Natoma Bay or James Huston appear to have been made either.

“On the face of it,” Dr. Tucker concluded, the most obvious explanation was that James “experienced a life as James Huston Jr. before having his current one.”

Other recent American cases with evidential weight include that of Ryan Hammons, who had memories of a past life in Hollywood – not as a famous star, but as an extra. Researchers verified over 50 of Ryan’s statements as matching with the previous personality, Marty Martins, despite many of them requiring archival searches to uncover. Another case, of a little boy who remembers dying in an explosion in Vietnam, also has strong evidence to back it up. The boy gave his (unusual) surname, the state he was from, and the age he died (21). Dr. Tucker conducted a picture test with the boy when he was five years old, showing him images that were relevant to the previous life – such as a photo of the school the previous personality attended, and family photos he had obtained from the previous personality’s sister – along with similar, but non-connected images as controls. Altogether, Dr. Tucker showed him eight pairs of pictures, and while he didn’t make a choice on two of them, he correctly chose six from six with the others.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.