1968. Vietnam. Smoke fills the air as shots ring out in the distance. Young
Bill is looking forward to some R&R in Thailand. After 10 months of fighting,
he’s seen enough death. He’s already lost some good friends.
He’s in charge of a squad when he gets a call on the radio. A helicopter has just been shot down.
Can he and his men look for survivors and ensure any valuable equipment is destroyed?
Close to where the helicopter lies, they come under heavy fire. They’re pinned down
as bullets kick up mud from the ground. Suddenly jet planes fly overhead. The sound is deafening.
Bill realizes an airstrike has been called. For a moment, he feels relief. And then it happens.
Shrapnel from one of the bombs rips through his face, taking off part of his cheek and
tearing out an eye. Then the thought comes to him, “I’m only 19, and I am going to die.”
What happens next is nothing short of mind-bending. Let’s just say that Bill
had the trip of his life, even getting to see his dead grampa.
We’ll tell you about this insane experience a bit later, but first, we should explain a few things.
Bill is not some guy we just made up. He was severely injured that day. He still bears the
wounds today. He now wears an artificial eye and speaks in the tone of a toad.
He wrote a book about his life-changing experience,
discussing what happened that day in great detail.
As we said, we’ll come back to that later. Many, many people have had what are called
Near-Death-Experiences, which from now on, we’ll call NDEs. It’s lucky for us
that many scientists have studied them and written about them, and the people
that have experienced them have written down and published what happened to them.
While some of you might be thinking, hmm, I’m skeptical, you should know that most people in
the medical community don’t doubt people really do experience them. They’re still a bit of a mystery,
in that why people all over the world tend to have similar ones. From India to Indiana,
from a Buddhist to a Mormon, from ancient times to the present, NDEs almost always share a
similar narrative. No one dies and just dreams of going to the toilet or making a cheese sandwich.
They often involve walking through a door toward a bright light. They often consist
of meeting a God-like figure, traversing solar systems, talking to dead relatives,
and almost to a T, the people feel really, really, really great. The words bliss, beauty and ecstasy
are often invoked when people describe them. As you’ll see today, people who have had an
NDE feel reinvigorated after the experience. They feel their lives have a purpose. They
feel that they now understand the meaning of life. One of the reasons we know so much about them is
because of the hard work done by the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. It
has been researching NDEs and letting people publish their NDE stories on its website since
1998. The last entries on their website were uploaded just before the making of this video.
As an example, the last one, written in mid-September by Constanza from Argentina, says:
“I was aware of everything that had happened, as I fell from that dark tunnel with a light at the
end. A light that was cold and warm at the same time, that gave peace. I was thinking about my
mom, and it all happened too fast, I guess not in real-time. I felt my soul fall into my body and
I didn't open my eyes. I felt peace and despair.” She’d been hit by a car just after walking out of
her school gates. After that, her buddies liked to call her “The girl who flew."
To get a story published on the site, you have to fill in a questionnaire and provide as many
details as possible, including medical records if you had your NDE in a hospital. Moreover,
the foundation looks at all the NDEs and then chooses to investigate many of them in detail.
As we said, scientists and doctors don’t deny NDEs exist. Many of them just say they are a result of
something physiological, like the brain having a last few zaps as the person clocks out. But those
people will still admit that NDEs are mightily strange, given that they are so often so similar
in nature. Also, some people have actually had their brains scanned as they died, and it seems
there really was no activity when in their heads they were, what’s the expression, tripping balls.
One medical expert that has studied NDEs is a psychiatrist named Bruce Greyson.
He’s spent decades doing research, interviewing people, talking to neuroscientists,
and publishing books and papers. Not many people know NDEs like Bruce does. Importantly,
Bruce is not a believer in God. His research is from a scientific
point of view. He’s a realist, a materialist, a man who wants empirical evidence. This is why
NDEs fascinate him so much. They make little sense when it comes to science. They can’t be explained
rationally, not in any absolute way, anyway. He did say this, though, which might make some
of you feel a bit better about your life, “I grew up without any kind of a spiritual
background. And I’m still not sure I understand what spiritual means. I am convinced now,
after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies.”
One reason he started his research is that he was working in a hospital when a patient
he had been trying to revive in the emergency room temporarily died. Notably, he had spilled
spaghetti sauce on his tie at the time. The patient survived, and the next day
he went to the intensive care unit to talk with her. She recognized him from the night
before. He said, “I’m surprised you remember me because I thought you were unconscious.”
She replied, “Not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall.”
The hall where indeed he’d talked with Susan was quite far from the ER. How was this possible? She
then told him he was hard to miss since he had a great big stain on his tie. Ok, wow, he thought.
Later in life, he looked at the research of a woman named Jan Holden at the University of North
Texas. She’d studied about one hundred cases of NDEs that could be corroborated by other people,
in that what the person saw was later confirmed by others. She wrote that 92 percent of what
the person said had actually happened. We should say here that there haven’t been
many rigorous studies on this because you’d have to film people dying and
then hope the person had an NDE. You’d need permission. It’s not exactly easy to do that,
so it’s really hard to study them seriously. Still, when Bruce had already been a doctor for
30 years, he spoke with a truck driver named Al, who’d had an NDE during quadruple bypass
surgery. Al told Bruce that he came out of his body and saw himself on the operating table. At
his side was a surgeon. Al said the surgeon was “flapping his arms like he was trying to fly.”
Oookaay, said Bruce, and then he decided to go and see the surgeon who’d performed the surgery.
He said this surgeon was a serious man with an excellent reputation,
so he felt a bit stupid talking about NDEs and arm-flapping. This is the answer he got:
“Well, yes, I did do that. I developed this habit of letting my assistants start the procedure while
I put on my sterile gown and gloves. And then, I walk into the operating room and watch them
for a while. And I don’t want to risk touching anything not in the sterile field, so I place
my palms flat against my chest where they won’t touch anything. And then, I point things out to
my assistants using my elbows, so I won’t accidentally touch something with my fingers.”
The surgeon then showed Bruce what that would look like. It looked the same as
when Al had done it in front of him. Just so you have some more input from
professionals, this is what another scientist wrote in a paper that was
published in the US National Library of Medicine: “Considering NDEs from both a medical perspective
and logically, it should not be possible for unconscious people to often report highly lucid
experiences that are clear and logically structured. Most NDErs report supernormal
consciousness at the time of their NDEs.” Okay, we think you’ve heard enough theory.
You know they happen. They are real, or at least, people think they are
real. Now you need to hear about some of them. The first experience we’ll talk about now is sure
to get you skeptics out there shouting at your screen. That’s because the NDE in question was had
by a baby that was no older than three months. The baby had pneumonia. It died, and it came
back to life. Then when she was about four years old, she told her mother that she had
a memory of being in a room and watching a baby die. She knew the baby was her.
She told her mom that the room the baby was in had wallpaper with ships on it. The curtains
were an olive green color. Out of the window, she could see two large houses. She said the
room she was in was the dining room. She was floating around the room as another entity, not
the baby. She actually felt sorry for the baby. The woman wrote, “I described the room to a tee,
including the vaporizer that I can still describe. It had a rick-rack pattern around it, like Charlie
Brown's shirt. My mother asked me several times ‘who told you this?’ because we had moved from
that house when I was still very young.” We understand if you say this woman is lying
because, really, how do we prove she isn’t? By the way, what she had was what’s called an
out-of-body experience, which is only one type of NDE. Some folks don’t see themselves dying,
they just go off to a kind of light-spangled LA-LA-Land. Or, as the dearly departed
neurologist Oliver Sacks once said, they are having “extremely complex” hallucinations.
That doesn’t explain everything, though. That woman’s story is one story of many
that are similar. In fact, people have been having NDEs since humans started writing down
stories. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote that his teacher, Socrates,
told him about one he’d had. The Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that when he
kicked the bucket for a few seconds, he felt blissful and went off to some place where he
met his dead brother. Even stranger is that fact that he didn't know his brother was dead.
NDEs have been recorded for centuries. It doesn’t matter what country they happened
in or what religion the person belonged to; they all sound very similar: Bright lights,
heavenly figures, speaking dead folks, other worlds, floating in the air, etc., etc.
Not everyone meets Gods, though, as a guy from Canada named Aaron described something completly
different. On his mad journey into different worlds, he came across what he said looked
like a cross between a buffalo and an orangutan. A guy named Rick, who said he used to work at the
Georgia Department of Corrections, fell eighty feet while he was hunting. He then blacked out
and found himself somewhere else. He wrote:
“I was traveling at a high rate of speed upwards through the atmosphere! As I left the atmosphere,
I looked back and could see the Earth! Such a beautiful sight! It was so brilliantly lit! As
I looked ahead, I could see the planets! I thought to myself, this couldn't be!”
This is pretty normal for an NDE. People go down black holes. They kick planets
like they are soccer balls. They attain endless knowledge and feel universal love. Some watch a
screen where their whole life story unfolds. But what we like about Rick’s story is that
he went to crystal city and met a man with no pupils in his eyes. Rick then knocked on a door,
and someone shouted in a booming voice, “ENTER!”. The room became incredibly
bright when Rick walked in there. Then that same voice asked, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR LIFE?”
Rather than say, er, get pee pee thrown at me by angry men behind bars, he kept quiet. Then
he saw his mother give birth to him. He saw many things. He wrote, “I turned and saw the Earth in
turmoil! Wars and death, terrible sights! Cities fell, and new ones were built! I saw the United
States and a volcano exploding, covering many cities in darkness! I looked on and saw the
collapse of our government as we know it. People killing for food and water, horrible sights!”
He was told to go back and help fix things. When he woke up, he was paralyzed. He was picked up and
later had many surgeries on his back. He wrote, “Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Then
one morning, I felt a tingling in my feet!” He says these days, he does as he was told
and tries to live his life helping others not as fortunate as him. This is actually pretty common.
There are accounts of soldiers and cops having NDEs and then going into a totally different
profession, mostly care services and working for charities. We don’t mean to say being a cop, or a
soldier is necessarily bad, but these jobs often require you to hurting or even killing people.
This next story is downright crazy. It happened to Valerie in 1968. It’s strange,
to say the least, and includes what is called an ADC: After-Death Communication.
So, Valerie was in the US about to watch stock car races with her buddies. She was still only
in her late teens. She went to get her jacket from her bedroom when suddenly she was in a
forest close to a bunch of American soldiers. She knew right away that she was in Vietnam.
We warned you this was weird. Make of it what you will. She wrote:
“Then I realized that a very close friend of mine was the soldier in the lead. (He
was the only soldier there that I knew.) I excused myself from the companionship of the
two soldiers walking with me and started to walk to the front of the line to talk to my friend.”
As she was about to get to him, another soldier grabbed hold of her. She heard a clicking sound
and then BOOM! The force sent her flying backward into a tree. Her face and body were covered in
blood that blood belonged to her good friend. He’d just been blown apart by a land mine.
We’ll let her tell you what happened next because it is just so unbelievable:
“The next instant found me again in the doorway of my apartment, I heard the sound of feet running as
my friend and the two boys waiting for me came to see what had happened. They found me standing in
the doorway with my hands braced against the door jam on each side. I had blood and dirt
splattered on my clothes and face, and my right shoulder was painfully swollen and turning black.
It had been dislocated when I hit the tree.” She didn’t bother with the stock car races that
day, still feeling the pain of hitting the tree during her ADC experience. Then two weeks later,
she was told that the guy’s family had received a letter. He’d been blown up
by a landmine while walking through a forest in Vietnam. Valerie said it happened at the
exact time and date when she had had her ADC. Again, more rational people would just think
she made that up, or maybe she had been fond of the odd LSD trip in 68, but as we said earlier,
there are just too many NDEs out there to discount the phenomenon completely.
Still, hers is waaaaay out there. Then you’ve got Rudi’s story. In 1975,
he was working as a plumber in Holland. He fell 10 feet from a ladder, and as luck would have it,
he landed on what he called a “cauldron of tar.” If his day couldn’t get any worse, he said:
“A wave of hot tar spilled out over me. Lying there on the street, I was conscious and felt
no pain but very warm. I cannot remember the ride to the hospital. At the hospital,
the doctors started working on me right away. Because they thought I was in tremendous pain,
they gave me a shot of morphine.” He said he had an out-of-body
experience. He saw the nurses struggling to take off his t-shirt and put bandages on him. Then a
doctor walked in and screamed at them. He told them this is not what you do when someone is
covered in tar. They were pulling off his skin. Rudi said the doctor was absolutely
furious. The nurses should have known better. He said they kept him in a glass-cased room for
about a week, and he was so full of morphine that he was pretty much comatose. Rudi wrote:
“The funny part is that I can remember everything that happened at the intensive care. I know my
parents came to visit, that my father had to throw up when he saw me, that my mother did
not know what to do and could not stop crying.” All this time, he said he knew which nurses were
treating him and saw exactly what medication they were giving him. He might have had his
eyes closed, but he somehow knew. He also heard the nurses talking together. He wrote:
“When I told the nurse what she was studying for and how far she had progressed,
she was incredulous. Afterward, I never saw her again; she avoided me as if I were some
sort of pariah. Another nurse I told of the medication patients were getting,
and she also reacted very strangely. After this, I did not mention it again.” He also learned
that the doctor had indeed shouted at them. It's funny because, for a man who was covered
in hot tar, which was torture in the past, when he was asked how he’d felt, he answered, “Wonderful.”
He said during that week, he was often standing next to the nurses and could see
himself unconscious in the bed. He was never a religious man, but the happiness he felt
in death changed him. He now thinks we have a special connection with the universe. He wrote,
“I now believe a person does not lead one life but a few, maybe even several.”
This brings us back to Bill, the guy we introduced at the start of the show. It’s
not easy to kill Bill, that’s for sure. So, as you know, he was looking forward
to his break in Thailand when some shrapnel hit him in the face during an airstrike. He
later said all he wanted right then was someone to comfort him. He wanted his mom. Then it all
went black. He accepted this was the end. He then found himself not feeling any pain
at all. He was walking through a dark tunnel toward a light, later writing that it was the
most “incredibly beautiful, peaceful, calm, loving place I had ever been in my life.” He
saw a being of light walking toward him, and when the being got closer, he realized it was his dead
grandfather. He told Bill to relax; that this was ok, it was natural. So, Bill carried on walking
toward another place. He wrote:
“It was almost this pristine meadow and water, and I wanted to move there. I had this feeling
that I needed to move toward that. But as I did, another being approached me,
one that was obviously someone that was in charge, someone in authority. And that
person said that I couldn’t go on, that I had to return – go back where I’d come from. And he told
me that I had a higher purpose to fulfill.” Sound familiar? Of course, because so many
people are told they have a higher purpose during their NDEs. We are talking about
a large percentage of people worldwide who have been having NDEs for millennia.
Why on Earth does this happen so often? Why do they not visit a place where there are, say,
50 clowns flying around on Harleys made out of strawberry milkshake? Why aren’t there mountains
of weed and chocolate? Why is the experience always quite serious and profound? If NDEs
are dreams or hallucinations, surely not everyone would go for the profound trip? Surely some folks
would want to party it up before they pass on. But no, they don’t. Not ever.
Bill heeded what he was told and walked back to the door. He was bathed in light
all the way and felt unconditional love. He felt peace and serenity. He loved mankind. He wrote:
“So I woke up, I was back on the battlefield. I was conscious again. I was still bleeding,
but now there was no pain, there was no concern, no worry. My right eye had fallen out,
and my face was very badly wounded, and I was wounded down the right side.”
His men couldn’t go over to him since the enemy was still shooting. Then one of his guys crawled
over to him. He’d been shot, and the bullet had exited out of his back. Bill knew then and
there that this guy was about to go where he’d just been. He wrote, “I took him in my arms,
and I held him, and I looked in his eyes, and he died. He passed on right there in my arms.”
Things got even crazier. Bill reckons this guy’s spirit came out of him, and they
communicated telepathically. He later wrote: “And as I started to get back off the ground,
the man that had just shot my friend, my comrade, came out of the bushes and shot me, five times,
through the arm, chest, and through the neck. I saw the bullets coming out of the gun in
slow motion. I could feel them enter my body. I saw the blood, I saw the tissue tear, and yet,
I was not concerned. There was no fear.” He was still able to get hold of his weapon
and shoot at the guy who’d just shot him. He isn’t sure if he hit
him or just scared him. The guy ran off, anyway. Bill then managed to walk. He got all the way to a
medic and then collapsed. He could hear the medic shouting, but he felt a great internal peace. He
wasn’t in any pain at all. When he came to, he couldn’t speak. One of the bullets had ripped
through his neck and damaged his vocal cords. He then passed out again but heard the words,
“This man is probably not save-able. And we have many others that we have to treat.”
He doesn’t know what happened after that, but he knows they eventually got him on a hospital ship
waiting in Da Nang Harbor. When someone started working on him, he was conscious
again and asked if he wanted any pain relief. He said no, he was fine, everything was just fine.
The medic told him, “You shouldn’t be here. You should be dead – look at you;
you’re a mess. And you’re sitting on my table.” Bill spent the next few months in hospitals in
Vietnam and later Japan. He could only communicate with a pencil and a notepad. Even today,
all these years later, he speaks like someone who once had their vocal cords shot out.
He does occasionally talk about his experience. He once said,
unlike some people who’ve had similar experiences, he didn’t feel like he knew what he had to do once
back home. He felt lost and spent much of his life searching for a path he knew he had to take.
He got married, but it didn’t work out. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He wrote,
“My life was really kind of going down the tubes. It was going into the toilet.”
He felt bad because he knew he’d been given another chance. It’s a long story,
but lost Bill got found. One day, he met an Avon lady, and she introduced him to God.
He’d never really been into God in the past, not even after his NDE, but now he started
walking down what he called a spiritual path. He finally found his purpose. He became a
counselor who treated Vietnam vets for PTSD. He then got a degree, a master’s degree,
and later a Ph.D. in psychology. This is a man who’d done very badly in school before his NDE.
He now talks about his experiences all over the place. He wrote, “I’m appearing on television
shows, radio talk shows, people are writing newspaper and magazine articles about me;
I’m speaking at conferences and meetings.” He still follows his spiritual path but says
he doesn’t care if people believe in spirits or Gods or life after death. What matters, he says,
is that he can help people understand that life is beautiful. He only really understood this
after getting his face rearranged and briefly dying. He hopes his story will help others
see some wonder in their existence without having to go through what he went through.
Did Bill actually die, or was his brain merely firing
off some last shots from its neurotransmitters? Well, we think we’ll leave that conclusion up you.
Now you really need to watch “50 Insane Facts About Death You Didn't Know.” Or,
have a look at this classic “Why It Would Suck To Live Through The End Of The Universe.”