OTHER LIVES

A two year old American boy, James Leininger of Lafayette Louisiana, was having nightmares again. It was a nightly occurrence in which the boy thrashed around screaming as though trying to fight his way out of bed. “In the throes of these nightmares you couldn’t work out what he was saying” said his mother, “but two or three months in I was walking down the hall and I heard something that chilled me to the bone. James cried out: 'Airplane crash, plane on fire, little man can't get out’.

As James became more able to express himself, he began to describe things that his parents could hardly believe. He began to detail his life as a fighter pilot and how he died when he was unable to get out of the cockpit of his Corsair, which had been hit by enemy aircraft in the battle for Iwo Jima in 1945

His parents Bruce, 59, and Andrea, 47, were initially skeptical about the idea of reincarnation. His father’s initial reaction to his son’s chilling assertions were that they were ‘bullshit’, but he was impressed by the boy’s apparent memories of the war and he became a sort of detective, determined to find out whether there was any validity to his son’s stories. A search of the internet led him to the ship Natoma Bay, a small beat up aircraft carrier in service in the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr Leininger found that just one pilot died from that ship during the battle: James M Huston Jnr, 21. Shot down on March 3, 1945, while on his 50th mission, his last before he was due to go home.

Bruce and Andrea were at first unable to rationalize James’ behavior. They could not explain his vast knowledge of airplanes, crew members, or his recollection of actual events which had taken place during the life of James M. Huston Jr.  Flicking through a book, the two-year-old pointed at a picture of Iwo Jima in the Pacific and said that was where his plane was shot down. At the age of four, James was able to name crew members who had died before him.

The Leininger’s systematically verified and put all the pieces together, with the help of James’ surviving fellow shipmates into an undeniable catalogue of facts that rocked their solid Christian beliefs.

As with many cases of children who recall previous lives, the memory of it, like much of childhood memory itself, began to disappear.  James, now 11, said, "I think the story is incredible. I don't remember any of it now but hearing about what happened when I was two, it is incredible.”

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Dr. Ian Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia have collected two and half thousand cases from all over the world of children who persistently talk about having lived before. Dr Stevenson is a remarkable man who, for forty years has been researching and documenting – not so must past lives per se, but children who show clear signs of such recall. Two and a half thousand cases adds up to a lot of evidence and these are the ones who have passed his controlled recognition tests that methodically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories. 

His evidence comes from the plain accounts of children, some as young as three or four. These children supply names of relatives, occupations, and details of houses and locations they lived in, often of places far removed from their present home and which were unknown to their present family. 

From the moment these children can talk, they will speak of people and events from previous lives – not vague lives of centuries ago, but lives of specific, identifiable individuals who may have died just months, weeks, or hours before the birth of the child in question. These children often express an intense desire to revisit their former home and are able to identify specific details that adds up to a convincing picture. This was just the effect it had on skeptic journalist Tom Shroder who accompanied Dr. Stevenson, then going on 80, on one of his journeys to collect stories. After the trip Shroder wrote Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives.

With deliberately limited research Dr Stevenson advances no theory about reincarnation in general. Nancy Hurrelbrinck writes: ‘Dr. Stevenson, who came to University of Virginia in 1957 to chair the psychiatry department, began his reincarnation research at that time. "I was dissatisfied with current theories of personality such as psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and genetics," he said in an early interview. "I don't think these alone or together adequately explain the uniqueness of human beings."

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