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April 29, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:18
Edition 294 - Leslie Kean

Acclaimed New York journalist/author Leslie Kean - on her new research "SurvivingDeath"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much indeed for all of the emails and for the great response and thank you very much for listening to the last couple of shows and telling me what you thought about them.
I'm going to do some shout outs on a future edition.
Lot to get into this time.
We have a fascinating tale and a fascinating person.
You may have heard the name Leslie Keen to do with research into UFOs and ufology.
But her new book and research is to do with something that is going to affect all of us.
You know, in our lifetime, we may not be abducted by aliens or see a saucer.
But inevitably, unless there's something they're not telling us, we are all going to die.
So when I got a news release telling me about some research by journalist Leslie Keene into surviving death, that's the title of the book, that is a title that most of us would find impossible to resist, I think.
I've got a lot of details about the book in front of me here, and Leslie Keene has clearly done an awful lot of research.
She is a New York Times best-selling author, internationally acclaimed journalist, and she does what is claimed to be a remarkable investigation of life after death.
It is a subject we've tackled here before, but I think you may be about to hear something new about all of this.
Like I say, thank you very much for all your emails.
Keep them coming.
If you want to email me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
I know I always say that.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv, managed, honed, maintained by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and there you'll be able to reach me.
Whatever you want to say, if you've got guest suggestions for the show, any reflections on the way that it's being done or could be done better, anything you want to say.
You've been particularly lively and active lately.
And wherever you are, whether you're in Haboka, New York, or whether you're in Halifax, UK or Halifax, Nova Scotia, or Sydney, Australia, or in New Zealand or Japan or the other places that our listeners reside, and that's most countries on earth, I'd love to hear from you.
It really is, for me, it's lifeblood keeps me going.
So thank you very much indeed.
All right, let's get to the US now to journalist, author, researcher, Leslie Keen, who's going to talk about surviving death.
A journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife.
Leslie, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Howard, it's so great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Now, two things.
You know, you're a journalist and so am I. So you've got to get the basics right.
Number one, your first name is Leslie, and that's spelt, you know, my middle name is Leslie, right?
And, you know, it's I-I-E.
And I always thought the girl's way of spelling it was E-Y.
That's one thing.
You're going to tell me that's not right.
And your second name is Keene, K-E-A-N.
Am I saying that right?
Well, it's actually pronounced Kane, Howard.
It's a Scottish name, and I've lived with it all my life.
And it's always, you know, nobody would ever know from reading it that it was pronounced Kane, like C-A-N-E, but that's how it's pronounced.
So I'm stuck with that.
It's your name, and you're allowed to say it however you like.
And how about the spelling then?
Of my name, my last name?
Your first name.
Well, I think in America, I mean, you're right.
Lots of times it is spelled E-Y, but I also see it I-E a lot too.
So I think in America, it's both ways.
All right, well, let's say Leslie was my grandfather, and he was a fine man.
So any Leslie is a friend of mine.
Oh, mutual.
That's a mutual feeling.
Yeah, from one Leslie to another.
Okay, you are a journalist, and I've got to start this off here partly for a personal reason.
You know, I've taken a certain amount of flack in my career recently for moving, not moving, I still do mainstream journalism.
You'll hear me reading the news in one part of the country on a couple of mornings a week.
And, you know, I still keep my hand in with those things, with mainstream stuff.
But I've also moved across to doing all of this.
I've been doing The Unexplained for, what is it now?
I'd lose track of the years.
13 years this year.
So that's an awful long time inspired by people like Art Bell.
Now, you are a journalist.
Did you have a problem making a transition to start investigating things like your last topic was UFOs and surviving death?
Because still people in the journalistic profession, not as many, but they look down their nose a bit at you when you do these things.
It's true, unfortunately.
And it was a little bit of a transition when I first started reporting on the UFO topic.
As you mentioned, that's really what got me started in sort of these more unexplained areas back in 1999.
And at the time, I was working at a public radio station just producing and hosting a daily investigative news program and covering, like you said, all the sort of mainstream stories and the not-so-mainstream stories, but nothing like this.
And when I received this report from France written by all these military people about studies they had conducted on UFOs, I just thought, you know, this is a huge story because here you had military generals and admirals saying that we are likely being visited by something extraterrestrial.
That was the only way they could explain these in-depth studies they had made of very official cases.
And so I thought, you know, as a journalist, isn't that a big deal?
I mean, you've got generals saying we might be being visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft.
So I jumped on it and quickly learned that you're right, excuse me, that there are negative attitudes about it.
So in the beginning, I was very quiet about my interest in this topic.
I didn't want to even tell my colleagues about it because there were, you know, it had sort of this ridicule component.
When I finally published a long story in the Boston Globe, which was very serious about it, that was the point in which I sort of came out of the closet, if you want to call it that, as a journalist because the story was so well received.
And actually, people were very happy that somebody had actually taken this seriously and, you know, was reporting on it as a journalist would, not just sort of from a sensationalistic kind of conspiracy-oriented perspective.
So, yeah, the transition was difficult, but once I sort of got on a roll with this topic, it really became less so, and I was not ridiculed very much by people.
I really wasn't because I think the way I covered the subject was different and was serious and had journalistic integrity to it.
So, there was really not a lot they could jump on me about.
And I was not making claims that we had anything, any proof of extraterrestrial visits or anything like that, which most people do, that are sort of the UFO fanatics.
So I think it all depends on how you go about covering these topics.
I think it does.
But it was a transition.
It definitely was a transition, no question about it.
Yeah.
A lot depends on the rigor that you bring to it.
And I think if you've had a journalistic training, it does give you a little something that the others don't have.
There are loads of woo-woo shows out there and loads of people doing gee-wiz investigations.
But to put it under the spotlight a bit is something different.
I absolutely agree.
And as I, you know, I think that you can apply the same standards of journalism to topics like these than you can to anything else.
And I think that's what's important to do.
And it's the only way to really, you know, give people facts.
You want to present facts and you want people to make up their own minds as to how they're going to interpret the facts.
But the job of a journalist is to provide credible, documented information from multiple sources, from, you know, credible sources, and provide the information and let people determine what they want from it.
And so I think the public deserves that because otherwise it's just this hodgepodge of anecdotal stories and theories and people jumping to all kinds of conclusions.
And it's just, it's chaos and nobody knows what the facts are about these kinds of topics.
So that's why I've jumped in and tried to pull together the best, most credible information.
Now, Leslie, not wanting to sound like Casablanca or something, but of all the subjects in all the world, what is it that made you, a journalist, want to tackle surviving death?
Let's face it, if you go to any of the bookstores in New York and you look at the sections dealing with these things that we talk about here on The Unexplained that you like to investigate, there are a zillion books about life after death and various theories of it.
Why did you want to weigh in?
Well, I think, as I was saying earlier, Howard, it's really because I wanted to provide a rigorous journalistic perspective or a journalistic approach to the whole topic, which I don't think has been done in my experience by anybody with a lot of training in journalism.
And most of the books that you see out there, they're fascinating, but a lot of them are personal stories about near-death experiences or collections, you know, a whole book about one aspect of this research.
And what I was interested in doing in this book was bringing the very best information, the most essential, most very, very most evidential information from a range of different areas of research, rather than focusing on one or two areas, which I think a lot of the books do.
And I was very interested in, and so that's one of the reasons why it was such a difficult project, because I studied so many different areas of investigation.
And I wanted to pull them all together in one book so that anybody who wanted to get a sense of this would only have to read one book.
And it's kind of geared towards people that may not know a lot about this, people that might be skeptical about it and need very factual kind of information in order to open them up to it.
It's not so much focused on, well, if you go meditate, you're going to have experiences.
It's much more about just look what this scientist did or look what this medical doctor discovered.
And it opens up your mind to the strong possibility that there is some kind of survival past death or certainly that consciousness can function independently of the body.
So I kind of wanted to bring that kind of rigorous approach to this topic in a way that I felt was fresh and hadn't really been done before.
And I also integrated into the research personal experiences that I was having that happened actually during the research that I conducted on this topic.
And I never expected these things to happen in the way that they did.
So it was sort of, there was a personal story for me that was woven into all the research that I did, which I think also is kind of unusual for a journalist to have that component.
I felt very vulnerable, actually, Howard, you know, in exposing a lot of this personal information.
And I felt, but I also thought deeply about it and felt that it wouldn't have been honest not to and that it was probably very interesting to people.
And as long as they're willing to hear my voice as a credible, objective voice, then I think these experiences that I personally can share also mean a lot to people and show that these things, and I'm talking about things that happen to lots of people.
So those are sort of what make it unique, those qualities.
But as a professional communicator, one of the hardest things we ever have to do, and usually it comes with getting more mature, I think, is to share the experiences that we personally have.
You know, it's a strange example to give, but it's relevant, I think.
I remember listening to Howard Stern being interviewed, right?
Now, you wouldn't, I think it's the first time in all the shows that I've done online, and that's 300 hours worth and all the shows that I've ever mentioned Howard Stern.
But, you know, he basically said that when you're communicating with people, you have to give of yourself.
And, you know, I've got to tell you, and you've just said it, when you're doing stuff like this, you have to give of yourself because otherwise you have no other starting point.
That is the starting point.
Now, I noticed that one of the review lines on the press material for your book is from a guy called Harold E. Putoff.
I hope that's pronounced properly, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, presumably that's Austin, Texas, who says, Leslie takes us on an engaging, personal, and transformative journey that challenges the skeptic and informs all of us.
Why is it so personal?
Well, what's personal about it, I think maybe he was talking about, well, I guess he was talking about my journey, I guess, as being personal, was that I had a number of things happen to me during the process of researching this book.
One of them being that I wanted to test physical mediumship and mental mediumship, which you can do.
You know, with a UFO subject, you can't go out and decide to see a UFO.
You've got to just report on what Other people tell you, but with this topic, you can jump in and actually personally test and experience some of the things out of choice.
So, I think what he's talking about is the fact that I did that and I actually wrote about these experiences that I had with mediums.
And the other component was that I lost my brother in 2013 very suddenly and very unexpectedly.
He was younger than I am.
Yeah.
And during the year or two following that, and again, this was while I was working on this book, I had lots of events happen to me that seemed to be communications from my brother.
And I, you know, and I really, they meant a great deal to me, Howard, and I actually tried to facilitate them as best I could through my meditation and so on.
But some of them were very dramatic and they were physical manifestations and things like that.
And so I think that's also part of the personal story that's integrated into the book.
And so I think that's probably what he's referring to.
And actually, yeah, Harold Puttoff was involved with the studies of remote viewing at Stanford Institute in California a number of years ago, which people may be familiar with there.
I don't know.
But he's been involved with this kind of information and this kind of research for a long time.
He's an outstanding, brilliant physicist.
And he found this book to be very personally meaningful to him in dealing with some losses that he had in his life.
So I think the fact that my personal story is included just gives it a certain richness and a certain depth that it might not have otherwise.
Otherwise, it would just sort of be objective research.
Well, I can relate to what you're saying.
I mean, look, the closest people to me were my dear mother and father, and we were a very, very close family.
They were very important to me.
I've lost both of them.
And certainly in my mother's case and also in my dad's case, I'm sure that there have been communications through dreams and things that have happened that are, I mean, we won't go through them here because this is about you, not me, but they have been way, way beyond coincidence.
How did your brother communicate with you, do you think?
Well, there were a number of incidences, you know, and I mean, each one is very rich in itself, but there were incidences in which there was one situation in which I literally heard his voice, which I think, you know, I've heard other people describe that.
You hear a voice and it's not from inside your head.
And there's just a different quality to it from a thought.
And it really feels like it's external.
And this was extremely dramatic.
And then other incidences were things like lots of manipulation of electrical equipment.
And one of the more dramatic ones was when I wrote about this in the book, you know, and just to give you the thumbnail version of it, I was cooking in my kitchen and I had, you know, I had been going through a process, Howard, of actually asking my brother for communication through my just kind of very earnest, heartfelt mental requests because mediums had told me that, you know, once they cross over, they can hear your thoughts.
And I thought, well, I'm going to put that to the test.
I mean, I was exploring all of this stuff for the first time.
So I was deeply, earnestly asking my brother for some kind of a sign that he was really there.
And the next day I was cooking and I had a bottle of sesame oil on the counter.
And I poured some into the pan and then I put the top loosely on top of the jar, you know, just sort of sitting on the top, but not screwed.
And suddenly the top just went flying up into the air as if there was, and made a sound like a champagne bottle, as if there was something inside that bottle that was forcing the top to fly off.
And there wasn't anything there.
It was just a half empty bottle of oil.
And that was really dramatic for me.
And then I asked again later that day, I asked him again, was that you?
You know, I just, I was so earnest and so eager to have some kind of physical proof of something here.
So I was just, I said, if that was you, show me, was that really you?
You know, and I was just, it was very moving, very, very moving.
And the next day I had the oil out and the exact same thing happened again.
Of course, my skeptical listeners will say, well, it's just air pressure or, you know, whatever.
But if these things happen often enough, then they cease to be coincidental.
I know.
I mean, and it's true.
I mean, skeptics can say that, but I can tell you, I'm a skeptic.
You know, I'm objective.
I'm not into trying to convince anybody of anything.
I took that bottle of oil and I mean, I looked at it.
It just, it was a small bottle with a little air in it and some oil.
Now, how, how, there's no, there's nothing in there that could have caused that to happen.
It's just not possible because it flew off with such force.
It also made a sound and it wasn't even screwed on.
It wasn't even attached to the top of the bottle.
So what made that sound?
And think about it.
It's me.
There you are asking for communication.
Well, what's going to grab your attention?
That is something that would certainly grab your attention.
I think, you know, and I also think a very legitimate skeptical argument would be that I myself created that experience, that it was basically an experience of psychokinesis.
There's no way that I can know objectively whether that was something coming from, you know, my discarnate brother or whether my own desires and my own earnest kind of interest in wanting that to happen so much created it somehow.
And that is the stumbling block.
That is the Berlin Wall, isn't it?
That's exactly what it stops research getting any further.
Right.
There's always the question of, are these things created by the psychic abilities of human beings or are they created by the discarnates on the other side?
But even the fact, even if they are created by human beings, the phenomena are still amazing and extraordinary and fascinating and we don't understand how they happen.
So to me, that alone is fascinating enough because it challenges the scientific paradigm and it's providing data that scientists don't accept as even possible, a lot of them.
So you do, but it does boil down to that question.
Is it being generated by me or is it being generated by some force from another world?
And I can't answer that.
I have no way of knowing, really.
But it certainly is more meaningful to interpret it as coming from the deceased person, as all of us do when we get these kinds of experiences that happen.
And so, why not?
Why not allow it to be that?
That's the way I look at it.
And for those of us who tend to think of American mediums as all being like Whoopi Goldberg in that movie, Ghost, all slightly theatrical and slightly, as we say here, dodgy, did you try and then, after you'd have those experiences, in the course of your research, did you go to mediums and say, okay, I want you to firm up that connection?
Yeah, I mean, I actually had done two readings with mental mediums before this event happened that I do write about in the book, and they were really extraordinary because these mediums were so accurate in bringing through not only my brother, but a very close friend of mine that had died a few years before that.
And so I, you know, the accuracy of the information was just mind-boggling.
And so those things actually, that happened before this incident with the bottle cast.
But another thing that happened during one of the readings was the mediums said that my brother was going to have a sign for me, which was a red balloon, that this was going to be his signal that he was there.
You know, I was going to see a red balloon.
And I thought, you know, this is ridiculous.
I didn't think anything of that.
And then what happened about two weeks later, I was asking my brother again for a sign.
I was saying, can you send me something?
Can you do something physical, you know, in the evening?
And when I woke up in the morning, there was a bunch of red balloons stuck outside my tree, in a tree outside my window.
I mean, and I'd never seen that before and I've never seen it since.
So, you know, make of that what you will.
You could certainly argue, well, it was just a coincidence, but I certainly didn't feel like that in the moment when something like that happens.
One of the I once interviewed somebody from the British Society for Psychical Research, one of the leading members who looked into all of these things and met many mediums.
The gold standard of proof is a piece of information from your departed dear one, close one, that you didn't know and that you can only verify by taking that piece of information to a third party.
Did anything like that happen?
No, I mean, that's ideal.
I agree with you.
It didn't happen to me personally, but I do report in my book on cases in which that has happened and sometimes where cases with mediumship where the sitter isn't even present.
You know, they have proxy sitters.
There's all kinds of very, very advanced studies that have been done on some of the historical medians, especially, that have just been way more extraordinary than anything I experienced.
And so that's why I think the research is really important.
I don't know if you've ever interviewed Alan Gold.
Yes, I have.
He was one of the first people I ever spoke to a very, very, very long time ago when I was very young starting all of this.
I was a student and I met him.
Fantastic voice, fantastic delivery.
And in fact, Alan was the person who told me what I've just told you.
Yeah, exactly.
And I consider him one of the leading experts, and he's been investigating this for years and years.
He actually wrote a chapter in my book because I did invite other experts to write some chapters in my book.
And he wrote a beautiful chapter about some of these mediumship tests that I've been talking about with famous mediums like Mrs. Piper, where all kinds of information was brought through that wasn't known to the sitter, where the sitter wasn't even present, and the medium didn't even know the name of the sitter.
So you have to look at some of the most evidential cases.
And that's why I think really those are more important than my own experiences.
I was happy to have those experiences, but that's why I think the research is really, really what's important.
Okay, can you hit me with one or two of those accounts?
My listeners always want stories.
Oh my gosh, if I can.
Yeah.
Hit me with one.
If I can get from Alan's chapter, I think Mrs. Piper, you know, there was one family that came in who had lost their child.
This family was actually present, I believe, for the reading.
And the information that it's a very famous reading that she did, and their little girl had died, and just this flood of information.
She was in a, Mrs. Piper had this communicator, I think she was in a trance when she delivered her readings, but just this flood of the most incredibly personal, specific information from this child speaking like a child, using all the sort of nicknames and, you know, very, very obscure information that only the family would know.
I believe they were present at the time, but there are many examples of cases in which, as you say, information comes through in which the families are not, the people aren't there and they have to go find it from somebody else.
Cases where they might bring in an object.
I think there were some couple of cases with Mrs. Piper where an object was brought in and she was reading off of like a gold watch that belonged to somebody else or something.
And the person who brought the watch in, who had a relative that it belonged to, she would give all this information and that person didn't know whether it was true or not until they went back to the relative later and found out.
Things like that.
All right.
Now, you go the whole nine yards with this book and look at all the aspects of it, which is why it's so good, I would suspect.
One of the things flagged up here is accounts of actual death journeys into an afterlife dimension.
Now, when my mother was 10 years of age, she had pneumonia, which a lot of children did at that time.
It was very, very common.
She hovered between life and death for a while, and she went through a crisis.
The doctors said she will either make it through this night or she won't.
She survived, thank goodness, because I wouldn't be here, and we wouldn't have had her for as many years as we did, bringing light into our lives.
But she discussed with the people, she was only 10, she discussed with the people who were with her when she was conscious.
She discussed a place she went to.
And it was like a beautiful garden, the most beautiful green land that you could ever imagine with sunshine.
But they told her that she couldn't stay there and she had to come back.
Now, that, I understand, is a very common experience.
You're absolutely right.
I think especially the part you were saying about not wanting to come back, but being told you have to go back.
I mean, people do describe going into some kind of dimension.
And I think the most evidential cases, Howard, are the ones where the person literally has no brain activity.
I mean, your mother was unconscious, but these are, this happens with people who are under cardiac arrest in a hospital, say, and they have no brain function and no heartbeat.
They're essentially dead.
And they will describe all these things that are happening, and also they will report events that are happening in the operating room, which in some ways to me is more evidential because as a journalist, because it doesn't involve a sort of subjective story of what happened, where they went to in this other realm, which I think are really important too, because there's a lot of similarities between these people's reports.
But when you have somebody who is supposed to be dead, and they can report to the afterwards when they revive, that they were up on the ceiling and they can describe what people were saying in the room, what they saw, what kind of materials were being used when they were being operated on, say.
And sometimes they'll even talk about things in other parts of the hospital that they witnessed.
So the only way that, you know, I mean, the way that, it's not the only way, but it certainly suggests that their consciousness was somehow independently existing from the brain.
You know, it was functioning while they were supposed to be dead.
And there is one scientist, we talk about actual death.
I'm very interested in the work of Dr. Sam Parnia, who is an expert in resuscitation science here.
He's an emergency room doctor, yeah.
Yeah, and he has since, you know, in recent years, he's come to feel that we need to rename these experiences, not near death experiences, but actual death experiences.
Because he has discovered that people can be what he calls dead for a long time, an hour or two hours, and then they're revived.
And it didn't, people never used to think that way.
People used to think, oh, you have five or ten minutes and then you're brain dead for the rest of your life.
But in these cases, they involve the body being cooled down significantly.
So if somebody falls into an icy stream in Pennsylvania, like we have one case of a small boy that did that, or another person is left out in the woods and it's very, very cold.
These people can be dead for a long time and still come back.
And as far as Parney is concerned, they are actually dead during that time.
They're a corpse and nobody knows whether they're going to be revived or not.
And when they come back and talk about these experiences, it's got to mean something because they were as, as far as he's concerned, they were as dead as the person who dies and doesn't come back.
Sam Parney, I'm very pleased that you mentioned him.
I interviewed him when The Unexplained started on radio, which is a lot of years ago, and I found what he had to say very compelling.
But isn't it interesting that some of the people you would expect to be the most toughened by the experiences that they have, they have to be.
The people who work in hospital emergency rooms, you would expect them to be hardened and toughened because they have to see all human life in all conditions.
They are often the people who will be most ready to confirm these experiences to you because why?
They see them every day.
Exactly.
And they're the ones that are there when the patient wakes up.
And they're the ones that the patient talks to if they dare.
Some people don't feel that anyone's going to believe them and they don't talk about it.
But absolutely, there's a lot of medical doctors, people who work in hospice are also very interesting.
They don't deal with near-death experiences of this type, but they deal with people at the end of life.
So yes, it's the people that are actually on the ground with the dying person that have a lot to teach us.
And some of the leading experts who have studied near-death experiences, one of them, Pim von Lummel, is a cardiologist.
He's been working in hospitals for decades.
So these are the ones that I think know a lot more about this than maybe some of these more distant skeptics who just kind of love to try to debunk everything, but really haven't been on the ground and haven't talked to the people themselves who have had these experiences.
And when you make the connections between the similarities, as you said, the veritical OBEs, which are the experiences of when they can report what's going on in their environment, are really evidential that consciousness exists independently of the brain.
They're not evidential that we survive death, but they're a step towards that because they show that consciousness seems to be able to function that way.
And the near-death experiences are fascinating too because of the similarities of what people describe from all over the world, all walks of life.
So it's up to anybody how they want to interpret this information, but it's highly suggestive that something's going on and that there is some kind of functioning that's going on in some other realm when people are dead for a while and then come back.
In your research, did you learn anything about what happens around the point of death?
In other words, if you're in hospital and you're getting close to that point, what happens at the point where you're crossing over?
In other words, when does the suffering stop?
And when do you start to realize that you're on the way to something else?
Oh, that's a great question.
I wish I knew, because I've never done it.
I've never been there myself, Howard, but, you know, there...
It's a barrier because we're not going to know until the time.
We're not going to know, but there are people who like in hospice who are present during that process.
And Peter Fennec, who's one of the leading experts in studying end-of-life experiences, also read a chapter in my book.
He's a medical doctor.
He actually works at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK.
Very, very highly experienced.
And he's been studying these events that do happen when people are dying consciously.
Of course, if you're unconscious, if you're on a lot of medication, you're not going to be aware of what's going on.
But lots of really interesting things happen that actually sort of relate to the experience that people have in near-death experiences, which I find really fascinating because when you can link one area of research to another area of research, and when they're sort of showing you the same thing, to me, that's more evidence for some kind of objective, possible objective reality that exists.
And one of the things that happens at the end of life is that people seem to take these little short Journeys into this other realm and then come back.
And they're not dead in the sense that the NDE people are, but they will be out for a while and then they'll come back and describe being in this other realm.
They will often describe seeing deceased relatives who are coming to help them or are coming to welcome them and they'll reach out their arms towards somebody in the room and they'll talk about these very beautiful experiences that they're having at the end of life.
This happened to my own grandfather.
I was 11 years of age and he was in a very bad way, but he talked about relatives I didn't know who'd come to see him.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, he must have been fully conscious then at the end of life.
That's what makes all the difference.
He didn't have a consciousness, yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, when that happens a lot, I mean, you can say, oh, these old people are just fantasizing, but it does happen in some cases where the person will describe meeting a relative that they didn't even know had died.
That's the kind of evidence that I find really fascinating.
Somebody who's dying and says, oh, I just saw my sister and she's coming to welcome me.
And there was one case, I believe, where she was not, the dying person was not informed about the relative who had died because they thought it would be too traumatic for her at the end of her life.
So they didn't tell her about it.
And she didn't even know that the other person was sick.
Yet they will describe seeing these people on the other side.
So there is some sort of intriguing evidence in that sense.
Also with near-death experiences, when you have people who have those experiences, then they come back.
And there was one case of a little girl who said, I want, you know, told her father when she had her near-death experience that she met a little boy over there who said he was her brother.
And she was totally confused by it because she didn't have a brother.
Well, her father then informed her, well, actually, you did have a brother who died before you were born, and we just never told you about it.
So those kinds of cases are pretty intriguing, I think.
Well, that exact same thing happened with my dear grandfather who died many years ago.
My father was with him and he described a brother, I think it was, or a sister.
I think it was a sister, actually, who my father had never known.
They didn't talk about this because this person died as a baby.
And my father wasn't aware of them.
But, you know, my grandfather had met her as part of the process.
So, yeah, how do we think that transition happens?
It's hard to talk generalities, I know, because different religions may experience different things.
But as far as you're able to aggregate it, what's the procedure?
What happens?
That's a good question.
And I really don't cover that too much in the book.
I mean, it's more, you know, what the book has really focused on, what my research has been focused on, is is there evidence that suggests that survival is a reality?
But the actual process of getting from the physical body to the next world, I mean, I can't really speak to that.
People, you know, there are plenty of people who do talk about, you know, dropping the body and then you become this etheric body and you can, you know, but I can't claim any knowledge of that really any more than anybody else.
It's more the, for me, the question is, is there reality?
Do we actually survive our death and how we go about that, what that transition is like?
You'd have to read accounts, I think, of mediumship where they have actually spoken, you know, where mediums have contacted deceased people and maybe they've given information about that.
But then you never know how objective it is.
So it's a hard topic for me to talk about.
But you sound to me as if your research has convinced you that this is not all there is.
Pretty much, Howard.
I mean, I think, you know, there's always the argument that all of it is caused by people's psi, by what we call the psi hypothesis, that all these phenomena are created by human beings.
But there are some cases that are so hard to explain that way that I would say I think it's very, very suggestive.
I think it's really hard to write off this evidence as just being all human created.
And even Alan Gold, who I respect so highly and is so rigorous, has basically agreed that there are certain cases that he deals with in his chapter that suggests that they couldn't.
It's very, very much of a stretch anyway, to interpret them as just pure human abilities.
So by the end of the story, and I kind of, in the book, I build from one type of phenomena to another so that it gets, you know, one thing leads to another, one kind of group of research raises certain questions, and then I go on to the next.
And by the end of the book, I get to physical mediumship, which to me is one of the more extraordinary aspects of all of this.
And by the time you get through all of this, and as I write in my conclusion, I mean, I think it's very, very hard to not accept it, but it's up to the person.
It's up to the person really how they want to interpret this information and how they want to relate to it.
But the information is just so wonderful and so extraordinary.
And unfortunately, it's not acknowledged by the scientific community.
Are there still mediums who cause apparitions or characters or personas or whatever you want to call them to appear?
I asked this for a reason because I recently interviewed Paul Adams, who's written an excellent book about Harry Price, a very famous British paranormal investigator.
And of course, his most famous encounter was the Rosalie case, a girl of six years of age who was made to materialize.
Now, Harry Price, we are told, sealed the room where this happened, made sure that there was no way that there could be fakery or trickery, put powder on the floor.
So if there were footsteps coming in and out, he would have seen them.
There were no footsteps.
But nevertheless, he was able to touch, and the little girl didn't speak, but he was able to feel the pulse of an apparent six-year-old girl who had died.
Yeah, I mean, isn't that just extraordinary, Howard?
And, you know, I think that people need to understand that there are many fraudulent physical mediums, and there have been throughout history.
And I think most people think all of them are.
But you are absolutely right.
They are not.
All of them are not frauds.
And that would be an example.
And there are other cases, and I've researched these too in my book, in which strict, rigorous protocols are followed to make sure that the environment is so tightly controlled that these things couldn't possibly be fake, just like you described in that situation with Harry Price, although I'm not familiar with that specific case.
But there are situations in which, you know, Nobel Prize-winning scientists back in the early 1900s took an interest in this, and they worked with these mediums who were so rigorously controlled.
They had absolute control over the room.
I mean, I give all the details in my book about how tightly they're controlled.
And they witness the physical manifestations of the type that you're describing.
They've documented them.
They've touched the beings themselves as you photograph them.
One of the more fascinating mediums was a Polish medium named Franc Kluski.
And in his situation, there were so many, there were materialized beings in the room.
And again, these were highly controlled situations.
And these beings dipped their hands into molten wax, which was put into the room by the scientists.
They brought in the wax.
They put coloring in the wax that nobody in the room knew was there to make sure that no one had snuck in.
I mean, it was so, I can't go into all the details now, but they were so tightly controlled.
They thought of every possible loophole.
And these beings made molds of their hands.
They dip them in the wax.
The wax would cool, and then they would dematerialize their hands and provide these perfect wax gloves of their hands.
Now, a human hand could not have removed itself from this wax without damaging it because it had a little wrist, narrow wrist.
The only way these hands could be removed without damaging the wax was through dematerialization.
So these molds were, these gloves were, you know, rescued from, were taken out of the seance room, and then they poured plaster into them and stripped off the wax.
And they now have plaster casts, which reside in an institute in France today of these materialized hands.
And to me, you know, there's no better evidence than that for the reality of these physical manifestations.
I mean, they have occurred and they do occur, just in rare cases.
But as, you know, how much proof do we need?
One case, it's like if there's one UFO that's extraterrestrial, then we've proven it.
If there's one case of physical mediumship in which physical beings have materialized and we can prove that, we've proven something.
You get no disagreements from me about that.
One thing, just the skeptic in my head, the one that comes to work with me every day when I do news.
Well, it's good to have that.
So you understand that.
So that skeptic is saying to me, it can't be just a coincidence that the better the technology of debunkery has become, the more ability we have to spot trickery, the lesser the incidence of physical mediumship appears to have become.
In other words, the great era of physical mediumship.
I remember being told a story by a deputy headmistress of a school in Liverpool, a woman called Lola McNaught, who had been through the great era of the Liverpool physical mediums.
We're talking 1930s, 1940s.
And she was quite old then, but she had a mind like a razor blade.
She was sharp and she remembered every detail.
She went to sessions where things and people manifested themselves, trumpets appearing in the midair and a little boy appearing in front of her who actually was tangible, could be felt.
But the fact of the matter is that you don't get that much of those things happening these days because we've got technology that will spot fakery.
Well, I'm not sure if that's the only reason, Howard.
I mean, I think it's true.
There's definitely less valid physical mediumship now than there was.
And there's a lot.
People have discussed there's a lot of possible reasons for that.
Given the climate that we live in, given the fast-paced world that we live in, what's required to develop physical mediumship is years and years and years of very slow processes and sitting in small groups with people.
And it just doesn't happen like it used to.
And I think the other issue, I mean, there could be some truth to that, that at least the fraudulent ones aren't out there.
But a lot of the mediums, there's also, it's a very delicate situation about bringing cameras into a room and bringing a lot of technology into a room because sometimes that affects the phenomena and makes it impossible for them to occur.
And skeptics can say, well, ha ha ha, but I think you have to, this is something that really needs, you know, someone has to really read about it.
You can't just sort of analyze this aspect of it in five minutes.
It's just, it's very complex.
And I can tell you that personally, I have witnessed, I have been in a seance room with one medium who's in England, who's living and practicing right now, in which the environment was controlled.
And I have no doubt that what I experienced was genuine.
And this person, his name's Stuart Alexander, he does not want to have cameras in his room, for one thing.
But many, many, many people have been invited in to witness what he has produced.
But the cameras are risky.
And I can't, I'm no expert on that.
Well, of course, these days we have infrared, not infrared, we have night vision cameras that can see if there's jiggery pokery going on, as we say here.
Maybe some physical mediums don't like the cameras there just in case things are being unearthed.
Well, I don't think that's true with, I mean, Stuart Alexander actually wrote a chapter in my book in which he addresses this very question of photography in the seance room.
So I think people need to read that.
And, you know, skeptics can always argue that, oh, yeah, he's just trying to get out of this or something.
But I have sat in that room and I know that this is, he's not faking anything.
Well, I would love to meet and talk with him.
If he's in this country, I would be very keen to speak with him.
That would be great.
And he's got a memoir that he wrote.
And there's also a long video online, which I can say in the link for, of him talking about his development as a medium and so on.
And he's an absolutely lovely, lovely person.
He's 70 years old.
He's been doing this for 40 years, sitting in a small room with the same people year after year after year with no money involved.
And, you know, he's not faking phenomena to this little tiny group of people that he's worked with.
And you've just given me two reasons why a lot of people wouldn't bother.
He's 70, number one.
He doesn't need to do this now, and there's no money changing hands.
So where's the incentive?
There's no incentive.
I mean, he just, his incentive is to help people realize that we survive death.
I mean, he is absolutely convinced of that reality.
And that's why he does what he does.
He does it because it's so meaningful to the people that come and sit with him.
And that's, that's it.
You know, he has no other motivation.
And the rest of the time, he's just living a normal life.
A lot of mediums, Howard, you know, they make a sort of career out of it.
And they're like 24 hours a day.
They're mediums and they're traveling all over the place.
And they never stop their process of being, you know, tuning in or whatever you want to call it.
But Stuart is very much, he does his seance every week.
He's totally devoted to it.
He'll do lectures and he'll do things when he's invited to speak somewhere or something like that.
But basically, the rest of the time, he's a family man living a full life just as a regular person.
He's not overly identified with this in any kind of way that's bringing any gain on him.
In fact, he doesn't even like publicity, really.
Well, I need to be asking him this question myself, but I'm sure that you will have asked him this.
Does he feel differently about his own mortality now that he's discovered what he's discovered?
Absolutely.
And, you know, Howard, I think it would be fascinating for you to interview him.
I would very, very much like to do that.
So we'll arrange.
I'll give you the information and I can be a go-between if you'd like.
That would be fabulous.
Okay.
Now, one of the things that is being increasingly researched, and there is more and more hard evidence about, as far as you can get that, is the idea that we die and then we come back.
The number of young children, and I know this is in your book, who report having been somewhere before.
I mean, there are staggering cases.
There was one case from America recently that I included in a program just as an example, but it stuck with me.
This was the case, and I know you're going to know which one this is.
This was in the 90s, and I can't remember the specific city.
I think it was Chicago.
But there was a little boy who remembered being a black woman in her 30s who died because there was a fire in a hotel she was staying at, and she jumped out of a window sadly to her death.
And they researched the story the little boy of three or four had been telling.
Guess what?
The name, the details were absolutely 100% correct.
Yeah, although actually, that's very interesting you brought that case up, Howard, because I actually went with Dr. Jim Tucker, who's the psychiatrist now, leading psychiatrist in America who investigates the cases of children with past lives.
I went to the home of that child and interviewed him and his family and was very involved with trying to get to the, to trying to, to actually find out who that previous person was so that we could confirm it.
Because you're right, he had all these memories.
They did some research.
They found out there was a woman who jumped out of a building who seemed to match some of the things he said.
But then I, after all of this happened and it was shown on TV and everything, I got in touch with a family member of that, of the actual woman that he thought he was.
And that family member was not able to confirm some of the information that the little boy had provided in terms of how she died and various other details.
And so we kind of had to drop that case because although there were some things that he remembered that were interesting, it was really impossible to be 100% sure that he was accurate.
Just being able to recount a name, though.
I mean, how old was he when he actually came up with a name?
Four.
Yeah, but I'm telling you, Howard, there are some cases that are much better than that one.
And two of them I write about in my book in some depth, where the child remembers, and in one case, the child was only two years old, remembered very, very specific information.
And all of it was later verified when they were able to find who the Huey actually had been.
And this is a long process where if you can find who that person was that the child has, because if the child gives you enough data, you can go through archival records, you can find family members, you can go to census reports and so on, and somehow try to find out who that person actually was.
And if you can do that, you have the opportunity of verifying what the child has said.
And what's really important in these cases is that what the child has said must be on the record before you find that previous person.
And because otherwise, any skeptic, rightly so, could claim, well, how do we know that the facts that he provided were not adjusted later to the case?
There must be no scope for tweaking the facts at a later date.
Exactly.
And so you have to have a case.
And so all of these factors that are required to make a case valid don't happen that often.
But in the case of James Leininger, which is the way I opened the book, because it's such a compelling case, there was so much specific information.
And not only do they remember details, but they relive a lot of it.
And this child had horrific nightmares over and over again, which involved his previous death, in which he was shot down in an airplane in World War II.
And he was just consumed by this and obsessed with airplanes and all kinds of behavioral things that go along with it.
But he had enough specific memories that his father was able to track down through going to veterans meetings and so on who this person, who his child actually was talking about.
But it was all on the record first because they had videos and they had printouts from computers and so on that documented what little James had actually said before they had any idea who the person was.
And so when they can find the person and find out that this child was absolutely accurate in the points that he provided at the age of two, when he couldn't possibly have known anything about World War II or anything that he, you know, he mentioned the specific type of airplane he was flying, for instance.
And when was he saying this?
When was he two?
This was in the 90s.
This was a very recent case.
James Leininger.
So he waited a long time before coming back.
Yeah, that's another interesting point.
Exactly.
And that doesn't, you know, most of the cases that are on record in the University of Virginia, which has this huge database of these cases, there isn't that much time.
You're absolutely right.
It's very interesting that it was he was born in the 90s and this he died.
The previous life was in 1945, which in a way makes it more evidential because there was actually absolutely no connection between this fan, the current family and the previous family.
No connection at all.
So, and the huge space of time is also a really kind of, it makes the case stronger in a way.
And as a kid of two, he's not going to be, you know, buying DVDs and reading books about World War II.
Oh, absolutely not.
I mean, his family was aware, of course, with a two-year-old.
His mom was a full-time stay-at-home mom.
She was with him every minute, and she knew what he was exposed to.
I mean, when he was first learning to talk, he was doing this.
This was like lived in him from the very moment that he could first talk.
And there was nothing that had been given to him that would have generated the kind of behavior and the kind of memories that he had.
And of course, when they did find out who he had been before, everything matched.
So it's very hard to explain that unless you want to, again, argue with through the psi hypothesis that for some reason, this little boy had this psychic ability to tune into some person who died in 1945 and somehow relive that person's death experience and a lot of other things and have all these memories about the childhood.
And, you know, you can argue that somehow it was his psychic ability, or you can argue that he actually was reborn in the way that he felt it to be.
I mean, the child had no doubt that he was that person.
I often think that the little kids who report these things, and there are increasing numbers of them being talked about and documented, they're very matter of fact about it when they're kids.
I often wonder what happens to them later in life.
Does it profoundly affect their way of looking at their own mortality and about their relationships with the rest of the world, I wonder?
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.
And the standard, what normally happens, Howard, is the children will forget their memories when they get to be maybe six, seven, eight years old and they start going to school and they're more out in the world and everything.
They generally forget all about it and they live extremely normal lives.
And so, you know, when you're an 18-year-old, say, and you're thinking about things you remembered when you were four, you don't remember a whole lot about being four, right?
So these children basically just go on and live very normal lives.
Now, some of them may be more connected and it may linger longer for some of the children.
I think especially in cultures like India or Burma, where the whole, you know, where the society accepts reincarnation as being part of reality, it might stay with them longer, but the general rule of thumb is that the children forget about it and they just move on and live completely normal lives.
And it does, I don't think it affects them all that much.
In terms of their belief systems about life after death, that's an interesting question.
I really don't know how much that affects them either.
It certainly affects the parents, though.
In what way, though?
In what way does it affect the child?
I mean, these parents, for instance, James Leininger's parents, his father was absolutely determined to prove that his child was not remembering accurate information from a past life because he felt himself to be a devoted Christian who did not accept that this was possible.
It was not part of his belief system or his religion.
And so, you know, he, so his dad went through this real transformation in having to come to terms with the memories that his child had.
And all during the process, his father would try to prove his son wrong.
And every time he researched something that his son has said, it turned out to be accurate, not wrong.
And so it's very interesting.
I have him in my chapter I've written about this case.
I have the dad's comments throughout because I asked him to sort of talk to me about the transformation that he went through, which I think is what a lot of parents go through.
So where's he at now, Leslie?
Is he with the programmer?
Absolutely.
I mean, he's totally, oh yeah, he has absolutely no doubt that this is what happened.
Yeah, he had no choice because everything turned out to be accurate.
And he finds that it's really transformed him in a positive way that he doesn't see it any longer as being in conflict with his faith.
And he describes that in the book.
So I think, you know, the parents do go through a lot with these cases in various, depending on what their particular, you know, belief systems are.
They're also, it's very difficult for them on an emotional level, too, to come to terms with this.
But I think in some ways it affects the parents more than the children because the children are so young and they just sort of grow out of it eventually.
And what's the general consensus about that process of when you are reborn?
You know, I'm always fascinated.
You know, I always say to people, it's a joke for me, really, that there is no way, nohow that I want to come back if I have to go through some of the stuff that I've had to go through this time around, forget it.
I'd rather go on to eternity or whatever else comes next.
Do you have any sense of what degree of input you have once you've crossed over in the process of coming back and what you come back as and when?
I mean, it's such a great question.
And again, this sort of goes off the path of journalism, but, you know, from my sense of what, I mean, because some of these children actually remember their experiences before they were born into this life.
So they will describe actually choosing who their parents were or somehow, you know, the process of being born through these particular parents for a reason.
I mean, this is what some of these children have determined that they've come here to learn something and they've come here with these particular family members that facilitate that process.
Now, again, I mean, I can't, that's not something I could verify, but it seems that perhaps not maybe not everybody does, if you're going to accept that this is real, you could argue that maybe not everybody does choose to come back and reincarnate, but maybe there are specific reasons why some people do and some people don't.
And it seems that these children that had these memories, that there was something very unresolved for them.
And, you know, the other interesting point is, Howard, about most of these cases in which children remember these past lives Involve a violent kind of unnatural death, often at a young age, as it was for James.
And so much more, I'd say two-thirds of the cases about involve a premature violent death, whether it be murder or being, you know, killed in a war or drowning in an accident or something like that.
And so you could sort of hypothesize that there was something unfinished about that previous life because the death was so sudden and so shocking.
And that maybe those are the cases that tend to, or maybe those people tend to reincarnate more often because there's something you need to do.
A lot of this is going to be really hard for us to ever know.
Completely theoretical.
The best storytellers, and I'm not saying that I'm one of those people by any means, but they start at a point and they take you on a journey and they bring you back to that point.
We started with your brother, who you sadly lost four years ago, way too young.
How do you feel about him and whether you will see him again, whether you'll all be together, whatever journey you're on?
How do you feel about all of that now you've done this research?
Well, I have to say, Howard, I feel I certainly through the process of receiving communications from him, which appeared to be that of actually seeing an apparition at one point of him, I felt a much greater connectedness to my brother.
I felt through that process that perhaps he isn't gone, fully gone.
And it made the whole grieving process a lot easier.
And so I sort of feel a greater sense of spiritual connection to him.
And in terms of later, I mean, all I can say is that I think this evidence is certainly any rational person, let's say, can look at this evidence, and that includes me, and decide that, well, yeah, it really does look like we survived death.
I mean, it really looks that way.
You can't know, I don't know 100%.
I can't say it's provable, but I've had enough experiences myself, and I've studied enough to really believe that it's highly possible that, yes, when I cross over, I will be reunited with my brother.
And I find that very comforting.
But I have to be honest and say I can't prove it, and I can't be 100% sure.
Sometimes I have more doubt than I do at other times.
But when I'm really honest and really look at this information, I feel very, very hopeful and very open to that possibility that it is real.
And because there's so much stuff that's so hard to explain in any other way.
And it's the conglomeration of it, Howard.
You know, that's why I wanted to do this book where when you pull it all into one place and you show how everything interconnects and how the different areas of research validate and support each other, even though they on the surface appear to be very distinct, they actually all point in the same direction.
And there's a unity that comes out of looking at all these different areas of evidential material.
And when you integrate that with personal experiences that so many of us have had, it makes a very compelling case.
So anyway, it's kind of a long answer, but I certainly am curious to know what's going to happen at the end of life.
And I think there's a really good chance that we will be reunited.
I mean, you know, I'm not, but I'm so, I get so, I try to be so objective that I, you know, on a show like this that I can't say I can know for sure.
But when, you know, when I'm, when I'm in the space of entering into the experience, you know, of dealing, maybe being with a physical medium like Stuart or meditating or something like that, when you go into the experiential realm, you don't have any question about it.
And then when you come back to the more rational day-to-day existence, you can get doubts about things.
But when you're in the moment with it, it feels absolutely real.
But again, that's a human experience.
So ultimately, I think that's what it boils down to, is how everybody's experience and how they want to interpret it.
But I do think intellectual studies, studies and research and data are really, really an important component of that.
And they can certainly reach people who may not have had experiences.
They need this kind of information.
And I think it's just, it's utterly fascinating to study it and to read about it.
So that's why I was motivated to do the book.
Are you going to be doing another one?
Or are you a typical journalist?
You've done this topic, you're moving on to another one.
Are you coming back to this?
No idea.
I still feel, Howard, there's so much I want to learn about this realm.
I have stacks of books on my desk that I want to read.
So I sort of feel like I'm on a journey with this that's continuing because this book was very different for me than UFOs and that with UFOs, I spent 10 years of studying the data and then I wrote this sort of very objective book about it.
But with this one, it's newer for me and it was more personal.
Yeah, well, as we say over here, it's a little close to home, this one.
Exactly.
And it just makes me, I feel like I want to continue with that journey and where it's going to take me.
And I want to study and learn more.
And maybe I'll be able to write some articles or whatever.
But I just don't know at this point where it's all going to lead.
So we'll see.
You and I need to stay in touch.
What is your website if people want to know more about you and your work, Leslie?
My website is Surviving Death Kane.
And so it's the title of the book plus my last name, which is K-E-A-N.
Pronounced K-N.
Exactly.
SurvivingDeathKane.com.
And it's got links if people are interested in buying the books.
I know you can buy this book on Amazon in the UK.
Again, the title of the book is Surviving Death, A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife.
And so I think, you know, you can just Google it.
And you will find, there's a lot of information about the book on my website, though.
This is all good.
It means I don't have to repeat any of the information now.
Leslie, you've done my job for me.
Thank you.
Leslie Kane, thanks very much for speaking with me.
Let's stay in touch.
Thank you, Howard.
Leslie Kane, if you have any views on what you've just heard, then you know how to get in touch with me.
It's through the website theunexplained.tv, designed and owned by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
I would certainly be keen To hear from you about this and maybe your own experiences too.
More great guests, as I always say, in the pipeline.
It remains true here at The Unexplained.
Another show coming soon to you.
So until next, we meet.
As ever, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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