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May 4, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
47:14
Edition 541 - Dr Jim Tucker

Dr Jim Tucker in Virginia, USA has given a large part of his life to researching and collecting details of astonishing , and often moving, cases of children who clearly recalled past lives

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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.
Very many thanks for all of your nice emails.
I've had so many and I've tried to reply to as many as I can.
If your email requires a response, don't forget when you get in touch through my website, theunexplained.tv.
And if you require a response, then please let me know and I will make sure that you get one.
And if you haven't had one, please remind me.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody that I've wanted to speak with for quite a while.
And I saw him recently on the Netflix series Surviving Death and redoubled efforts to get him on the show.
We were able to get him on the radio show.
He's named Dr. Jim Tucker.
And he is one of the leading researchers in this world of the stories of children who come into this world with memories of a previous life.
We've talked about these things before, but Jim Tucker has done intensive and extensive research about all of this.
So we're going to hear from him in just a moment.
Thank you very much to my webmaster, Adam, for his continuing hard work through this year of lockdown and all the years that he's been working with me.
Thank you, Adam, a creative hotspot.
Also, thank you to Haley for booking the guests on the online show.
Thank you to you for being part of this.
You know, I don't know whether you will ever know how much your communications to me have meant during the year in isolation and lockdown.
And now I have to make some decisions about my life and do a few things, which I talked about in a previous edition, one of which is trying to make a plan to move out of the place where I live.
God knows where I'll go or what I'll do while it is necessarily refurbished and brought up to date, because that work has to be done and I've left it for an awful lot of years.
But, you know, you've helped me through all of my deliberations and cogitations during this time.
You know, the silent hours when I'm not working, and that's a lot of the time, are times when you think, aren't they?
So, you know, thank you very much.
And you've been telling me the stories of how you've got through and how your life is from every part of the world.
And I'm really grateful.
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Okay, from my radio show recently, a very welcome guest, Dr. Jim Tucker.
And we're going to speak about children's past lives.
Jim, thank you very much for so patiently listening to all of that.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks very much for having me on.
This is a fascinating area of study, isn't it?
Well, I think so, since I'm devoting much of my work life to it.
So how did you, you know, in the field that you're in, how did you go down this particular path?
How did you find this?
Well, yeah, I'm a child psychiatrist, and I was actually in practice just doing routine child psychiatry work when I became intrigued by the question of life after death, and it has to do with when my wife and I got married and our various interests.
I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia is, and I had heard about a man named Ian Stevenson.
He had been the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry way back in the 1960s at UVA when he became intrigued by these cases of young children reporting that they remembered a past life and had eventually stepped down as chair to focus on this work full time.
So when I got intrigued by the question, I just called up his division to see if he needed some volunteer help studying these cases or near-death experiences or whatever.
And eventually, after just going an hour a week to a research meeting, eventually I started doing the work.
I eventually gave up my private practice.
And for the last 20 years, I've been at the university studying these cases as well as continuing to do child psychiatry work.
It is utterly fascinating.
And it clearly has gripped both you and Ian Stevenson.
And he seemed to become very intense about this research.
One of his books, I understand, had 2,000 pages in it.
That's right.
It was a two-volume effort.
Yeah, I mean, he devoted decades of his life to this work and would travel thousands of miles around the world studying these cases.
So, yes, it was quite a passion for him.
I want to talk about some of the generalities first.
How common do you think this is?
If I tell you my story, when I came into this world, and I can still remember some of these memories, but most of them are gone for me.
I kept telling people when I was four years of age that I was an American.
I had recollections of 1950s America, pink and light blue cars driving down what I later, years and years and years later, discovered was the Pacific Coast Highway.
When I actually went there, it was not unfamiliar to me, but I'd never been there before.
That was my story.
Now, I don't know whether I'd lived before or whether I'd just experienced television.
I don't know when I was a little kid.
But these cases of children recalling something before, how common do you think they are?
Well, it's a very good question.
And we don't really know because, you know, at least in the West, a lot of people don't talk about it.
And families don't tell anyone if their kid is saying this weird stuff about a past life.
We did a preliminary survey of five different counties in Virginia in which we asked parents if they had a child who had talked about a past life, and 6% of them said yes.
And that was so much higher than we expected that I'm not sure I believe the results.
So what we're hoping to do at some point is a more involved survey, a national survey, where we can also talk with The parents afterwards and confirm that what they are calling the past life is what we would call a past life, and just making sure.
So, I mean, if it's anything close to that, then you know, it's far more common than anyone has any idea.
There was once a survey done in India where there are a lot of cases because you know there's a big belief in reincarnation.
They got a number of one out of 450, but they acknowledge that they may well have missed cases.
So it's not something that most kids talk about, but certainly a fair number of them do.
So you've partially answered my question.
Actually, is this an international phenomenon, bearing in mind that some cultures, and you talked about India, have ingrained within them the idea that there is a circle of life we go around and come back?
Right.
Cases have been found wherever anyone has looked for them.
They've been found on all the continents except Antarctica.
They are certainly easiest to find in places with a general belief in reincarnation because people talk about them more.
But now that with the internet, we don't have to find American cases because they find us.
So last year, we heard from over 100 American families about their children talking about a past life.
So it's certainly out there.
We sometimes hear cases of people having organ transplants.
People who perhaps, I don't know, who've never played baseball in their life and they receive an organ transplant, maybe a kidney from somebody who was an avid baseball fan.
And suddenly, anecdotally, we hear they become a baseball fan.
Do you think that these cases may be genetic or could there be something else at work?
Well, those cases are quite intriguing.
I don't have an explanation for the transplant cases, but there are certainly some that are quite impressive.
With our work, it's not genetic in the sense that most of the children describe a past life of someone other than a direct ancestor.
And also, three-quarters of them describe how they died.
And obviously, people have passed on their genes before they die.
So genetic memory, I mean, people have wondered if somehow there's some connection, but that would not explain our cases of past life memories.
And you talk, and I saw evidence of this on the wonderful Netflix series that I saw very recently, the Surviving Death series, that sometimes these kids are quite happily talking with you about the details, some of which are very traumatic of their departure from this life.
And they'll talk to you a little bit about that, and then they'll go and play quite happily.
It's a remarkable phenomenon that you're studying here, it seems to me.
Well, that's right.
Many of these kids, they only seem to access these memories when they're in a particular frame of mind.
And it'll often be during relaxed times, like after a bath or during a long car ride, the parents say that they'll start coming out with these things.
But then there are kids who can talk about it anytime.
So you're right on the Surviving Death series that there's a boy that I visited, and he was quite able to accurately point to pictures from the identified past life.
And he was able to do that on demand as I asked him about it.
So it's great when we get that.
There are a lot of kids who don't give us any information directly when we're, you know, a stranger shows up and tries to ask them about a past life.
So then we're dependent on the parents to convey to us what the child has been saying.
Of course, in the field that you're in, you have been trained to work with children in this way.
It's a very difficult thing to do, isn't it, to go into the family unit in many cases and be this third party who comes in suddenly asking questions about something that's been within the family, probably, is quite private.
I mean, do you find that some people believe that this is and tell you that they think this is a little invasive, a little intrusive?
No, because, I mean, by the time they've allowed us into their home, you know, they're open to talking with us.
But certainly if people are uncomfortable, I mean, we never press them and we certainly never press the children to talk if they're at all uncomfortable.
And again, many times the children really do not talk to us about their memories.
No, I was very impressed by on the TV program, your ability to go with the flow on this.
You know, that's something that obviously takes some training.
You say that two-thirds of cases, if I heard this figure right, are quotes, the word that you use is solved.
In other words, verified.
That sounds like a high number.
Well, it is a high number considering we've studied over 2,500 cases.
So yeah, the term solved, what we mean by that is that there has been when the child talks about a past life, that we've been able to identify somebody who actually lived and died in the past whose life fits the statements that the child has made.
And so with the other third, sometimes the children talk with great emotion about what they say is a past life.
But if they don't have the right details, like names of people or places, then often no one's able to verify that it actually corresponds to a past life.
But in two-thirds of the cases, we have been able to make that verification.
And it's interesting the depth that you can, we'll get into some of these cases a little later, but the depth that you can go into where you can actually identify a person and you can then get photographs and maybe class records from high school and that sort of thing.
And you can do proper testing where you have photographs that aren't the person you think it is and photographs and details that are.
And you can get the child to pick out the ones that he or she believes is correct.
And your hit rate in that, certainly from what I've read about you, is pretty high.
Well, that's right.
And the tricky part is we have to get to the case soon enough where the child is still having the memories and still talking about it, but where they haven't been exposed to the information from the past life.
But yeah, recently we've, one was on the Netflix series.
We've had a couple where I was able to do picture tests With them, and both of the children did actually did perfectly.
They were able to correctly identify, for instance, which person was from the past life out of two pictures, one being a control picture and one being from the past life, and they picked the correct one every time.
In the research that you've done, has it been possible to work out, Jim, what the span of time is between passing in whatever circumstances you go, whether it's a violent death or an accident or whether it's of natural causes in old age, what the span of time between leaving and returning might be?
Well, it certainly varies, but on average, the kids are remembering a very recent life.
So the average interval between the death of the previous person and the birth of the child is only four and a half years.
Now, we've got cases where it's 50 years, and of course you would expect a range, but it appears that for intact memories to come through, you know, if these cases are what they appear to be, then typically it would be one from the very recent past.
And do you get a sense from the accounts that you've had, all of those accounts, of what the interval might be like?
What happens in that interval period, four years, 50 years, whatever?
Well, we get different reports on that.
Most children don't say anything about the interval, but about 20% of them will.
And some of them will describe what sounds like basically a near-death experience, how they float over their body after they died.
They may hang out either near where the previous person died or hang out with a previous family.
Some of them will then talk about going to another realm like heaven.
The American kids may use the word heaven, where they may see other beings or animals or God.
And then some will talk about preparing to come back to their next life.
And some talk about choosing their next parents.
Some talk about being guided to the parents.
Some will give some accurate details about things their parents were doing before the child was born.
So it varies.
I mean, some of the reports sound fairly fantastical as they're describing a heaven-like place, but, you know, kind of who's to say.
But all of it, of course, is being filtered through the mind of a very young child and trying to describe these things.
But they're certainly intriguing reports to hear what people might experience between lives.
And do those accounts chime in with reports of near-death experiences?
You know, my mother had a near-death experience when she was 10.
And she told us until she died about that experience of going to this beautiful place that was like the most fabulous garden you've ever seen with the most amazing colors.
And she was told that she had to return, and she didn't want to.
Do the accounts of children between lives chime in with near-death experiences?
They do in many ways.
In fact, we wrote a paper on that a few years ago, looking at the similarities, and there are a lot of similarities.
There can also be differences as well.
For instance, many people with near-death experiences talk about reaching this point of no return and choosing to, or being told they have to come back.
Whereas, of course, in our case, people don't come back to that same life.
But overall, they both seem to be part of this general phenomenon of people with memories of experiences outside of this space-time, outside of this lifetime.
And last question in this segment.
Does it appear that you get some kind of choice as to what you might return as?
Well, some of the children say they had choice, but others, frankly, the children are so miserable in the families they're in that it's hard to imagine that they chose it.
So I think control over the process actually may vary from individual to individual.
Now, this is all speculation, of course, but we do get varied reports.
And Jim, if it's okay in this middle segment, I'd like to talk about the case that absolutely captivated me on that television series from Netflix that I saw you in.
And this is the case of Ryan, who had been, it appeared, and there was a welter of evidence to suggest, who had been a Hollywood movie star and later agent, Marty Martin.
This is a fascinating story.
How did you hear about this?
Well, I heard about it because Ryan's mom wrote to us when he was five and said that for the last year, her little boy had talked about this past life in Hollywood.
And they were in Oklahoma and they're just ordinary folks.
The mom worked in the county clerk's office at that as a police officer.
But this kid was making these claims and was also quite upset by it.
He was crying and begging his mom to take him back home to Hollywood.
So to try to help him kind of process this, she checked out some books in the local library about Hollywood.
And they were looking through one one day when they came to this picture from an old movie called Night After Night.
And Ryan pointed to one of the men in the picture and said, hey, Mama, that's George.
We did a picture together.
And then he pointed to one of the other men and said, and that's me.
I found me.
Well, the first man he pointed to is George Raft, who was a well-known movie star back in the day.
But the one that he said was himself, it turned out was an extra with no lines in the movie.
So Ryan's mom wrote to me to see if I could help identify who this fellow was.
And so I went to Oklahoma, visited the family, and talked with Ryan.
And then as we're trying to figure this out, his mom was emailing me, someone's on a daily basis with all these statements that Ryan was making about a past life, which, to be honest, I thought was probably, it was unlikely that this guy with no lines in the movie had had such an extraordinary life.
Eventually, with the help of a Hollywood archivist, we were able to identify this man.
The archivist went to the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, got all the materials about the movie, most of which was about the stars.
Mae West was also in the movie.
But she found one picture of this guy, and it identified him.
And like you say, it was this guy, Marty Martin, who was actually, he wasn't a star, but he was in movies.
And we were then able to confirm both with his family as well with records we were able to unearth that Ryan's statements about his past life turned out to be eerily accurate.
So Ryan said how he had danced on stage in New York and Marty Martin danced on Broadway.
Ryan said that he then went to Hollywood where he worked in movies, which Marty Martin did, working mostly on dance and movies.
Ryan said that he then worked at an agency where people changed their names.
Marty Martin started a successful talent agency.
Ryan said how he had seen the world from big boats and talked about going to Paris.
We found a picture of Marty Martin and his wife in Paris.
They had gone there on the Queen Mary.
Ryan said how he had a big house with a swimming pool, which Marty Martin did.
And he said the street address had the word rock or mount in it.
And Marty Martin lived on Roxbury.
And Ryan also said one time that he didn't know why God would let you get to be 61 and then make you come back again as a baby.
Well, Marty Martin's death certificate said that he was 59 when he died, but both his daughter and his stepson said, in fact, he was 61.
So I looked into it and found a passenger list, three census records, and two marriage listings that all gave ages for Marty Martin that meant, in fact, he was 61 when he died.
So even though the death certificate had said 59, Ryan was correct with 61.
That's very revelatory.
Was that because Marty Martin had, like a lot of people, a showbiz age?
Presumably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shaved off a couple of years.
Sometimes a good idea.
So what an astonishing story.
Well, yeah, and I mean, I'm sorry, but all together, we were able to verify 55 of Ryan's statements matched Marty Martin's life.
Okay.
And what about Ryan himself?
Because on the TV program, which I understand was a snapshot of your investigation.
So what can you show in a few minutes on television?
But it seemed to me that Ryan perhaps was at the age and the stage where he was getting a little bit tired of all of this.
Right.
So, yeah, I mean, I first got involved with the kids when Ryan was five.
That's when I met him.
Well, he's 16 now, and he's moved on, which is what kids should do.
And in fact, that's what the vast majority of them do.
So, yeah, he doesn't, like most of these kids, he doesn't have any specific memories anymore from Marty Martin's life.
And I think he's a little bit unsure about the whole thing.
And again, that's often what we see as these kids grow older.
Right.
And you introduced him, didn't you, to a relative, I think the sister, didn't you say, of Marty Martin?
The daughter, actually.
Yes.
And then with the Netflix, he met with her again.
We first introduced him to her when he was little.
And frankly, it was quite an awkward meeting.
He seemed very overwhelmed by it all.
But they had quite a pleasant visit this time now that he's a teenager.
And he also met with one of Marty Martin's nieces.
So yeah, he's now connected a little bit with Marty Martin's family.
And did there appear as an observer, professional observer, you?
Did you notice any kind of apparent bond, you know, more than strangers meeting between these people and Ryan?
No, certainly not when he was young.
He had said beforehand, so Marty Martin died in 1964.
So his daughter is now, you know, solidly middle-aged.
She was eight when he died.
But Ryan had said beforehand, he didn't believe us when we said it had been so long because he didn't think he'd been gone that long.
So when he sees this middle-aged woman, you know, it's very different from an eight-year-old girl.
And again, he was just sort of overwhelmed and kind of confused by the whole thing.
So is he, you know, completely, has he completely progressed from this now?
Is he not interested in taking this any further?
Do you think there is any further it can be taken?
I don't think there is.
And I mean, he's doing very well, very well in school, has a lot of friends.
I mean, he's doing great now.
And frankly, is it the kind of thing where he should let it go and just focus on experience in this lifetime?
And that's what he's doing.
Absolutely.
Does he have any of Martin Martin's proclivities?
Can he dance?
That's a good question.
I mean, he would certainly dance around when he was five.
I don't know what he's like now as a dancer.
I mean, one thing that he said when he was little was that he felt like in his past life, he had been too greedy or selfish.
And apparently, Marty Martin did certainly like the finer things of life.
So Ryan is not greedy in this life, and I think feels like that's progress for him.
Wasn't there an intriguing story about a tie or a piece of clothing?
I'm only half remembering this.
Yeah, there's also Marty Martin was really into sunglasses and Ryan was as well.
And he would talk about all the glasses that he had, and that certainly turned out to be accurate.
And yeah, there were other little bits and pieces of things, ties.
Also, there was a green car that Ryan talked about a lot.
So there are all these little details, daily details, some of which we weren't able to confirm, but a lot of them that Marty Martin's family did confirm, that Ryan's little glimpses of memory, in fact, were accurate for Marty Martin.
I guess a question that flows from all of this, and I'm sure, I'm sorry for asking this because you must have heard it dozens of times from people talking with you.
But Marty Martin comes back, but Kerry Grant doesn't, and John Wayne doesn't, and Marilyn Monroe doesn't, as far as we know.
Well, of course, we don't know.
I mean, our cases of intact memories coming through, it doesn't say anything about whether other people have been reborn or whether we get reborn at all.
So, you know, if in fact Marty Martin has been reborn, perhaps Carrie Grant or Marilyn Monroe, perhaps they were as well.
But for whatever reason, either the child had no memories or the memories had faded by the time the child was verbal enough to express them.
So, I mean, it's a good question why, you know, this kid in Oklahoma would remember this sort of nondescript guy from Hollywood.
And we don't have the answer to that.
But again, we don't know about people from the past that no one has talked about.
I guess there's a physiological question here.
And I wonder if you or associates are studying this.
You know, what portal is it?
Assuming that this happens, you know, pretty routinely and this is the way of life, where we go around this life, then we come back again, and then we come back again, which is always intriguing and fascinating to me and somewhat moving too.
But some people remember this as kids and a lot of people don't.
So what is it within the brain or wherever it might be that opens that door for some people?
Well, it's a great question that we don't have the answer to.
And it brings up even the bigger questions of sort of reality.
And, you know, the sort of the mainstream science view of reality is that the physical is all that there is.
Well, these cases and work in other areas suggest that there's this element of consciousness that may survive separate from the physical brain, separate from the physical world, and then survive and continue on in another life.
So those are very big questions to answer.
I think as far as why it's the particular individuals that have these memories, I mean, we don't know.
We've done psychological testing with some of them.
They don't seem to show any psychological disturbance.
The one thing that comes through in the testing is that the children tend to be very intelligent and very verbal.
And it may well be that there are other young children and perhaps many young children who also have some images from a past life.
But by the time they get really verbal, those images have faded.
Whereas with these kids, they talk about them early and they get more set in their mind.
So then they're able to recall more and have sort of the full story.
And for a lot of people, these memories will simply pass.
I mean, you know, I'm sure that my parents would have smiled at me when I talked about Cadillacs and the Pacific Coast Highway when I was four.
But maybe I needed investigation and maybe that goes for an awful lot of other people.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're right.
Typically, by the time the kids are six or seven, they have stopped talking about these things.
And it's the same age when all of us lose our memories of early childhood.
So it sort of makes sense that these memories would fade as well.
So there's this kind of narrow window for the child to convey as much information as they can.
And then typically they can move on with their lives.
If a child of yours, Jim, had come into this world with recollections and memories, would you have recommended that that child gets themselves analyzed and checked and studied?
Well, we certainly encourage parents to be open to what their children are saying and to write it all down so that we have a record of it.
But we don't think that parents should get too focused on this stuff.
I mean, again, the goal is that the children fully experience this life.
But I will say, I mean, it can be quite difficult for the child and for the parents while the child is going through this because the child can be quite distraught about missing people and crying about the previous family or traumatized by a violent death.
So it is not a fun thing to go through.
So, you know, we don't encourage parents to try to get their kids to dig up these memories.
The people may well be better off letting them settle down and not having them.
You know, I've never thought of that.
What on earth do you say to a five-year-old or a six-year-old who says, I'm missing my wife or my husband?
Yeah.
So, I mean, what we encourage the parents to do is to, again, be open to say, yeah, this sounds like this happened to you before, but now you're here with us and you're safe and, you know, we're going to have a good life together now.
And again, it can be especially upsetting to the children because 70% of the past lives ended by some sort of unnatural means.
Murder, suicide, combat, accident, that sort of thing.
So they're often troubling memories that they're part of this experience.
Dr. Jim Tucker, we're talking and have been talking about children who it seems have lived before.
And Jim, you talked about the number of cases that you've experienced and investigated where people died perhaps in traumatic ways.
And one of the things that your research comes out with is that some children are born with birthmarks or marks on their bodies that actually match fatal wounds from the previous life.
Yes?
Yes.
In fact, earlier you mentioned Ian Stevens' 2,000-page work.
That was on 200 such cases where, yeah, the child is born with birthmarks or full birth defects that match wounds, usually the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person.
And some of them are quite striking.
And also, Ian listed 18 cases where the child was born with double birthmarks, wounds that match both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of a gunshot victim.
So, you know, those offer tangible physical evidence of this link to a previous life.
And it is gruesome.
I think there was one case I heard you talking about somewhere of somebody who'd been shot, I think, in the head, and the child had a sort of defect, a kind of birth defect in the ear that was exactly parallel to the place where the person in the previous life had been shot.
Well, that's right.
Yeah, it was one who was apparently or supposedly accidentally shot by a shotgun, a blast to the side of the head by a neighbor.
And yeah, the child was born both with just a stub for an ear and actually even an underdeveloped right side of his face.
So that was quite a graphic birth defect.
It makes you wonder, and I don't expect you to have an answer to this, how that can be.
You know, what's the point of birthmarks replicating the death wounds and those sorts of things might be and how that works.
Yeah, I mean, the way that I look at it is that it's not necessarily literally the physical injury on the previous body, but more of how that injury affected the consciousness and sort of imprinted the consciousness.
And then if that consciousness survived and carries over into a developing fetus, then that image then gets projected onto the developing fetus, resulting in a defect or a birthmark that's very similar to the wounds.
What a fascinating thought.
Do you think that the work that you do and the conversations that you have with these children are maybe cathartic or therapeutic in some ways?
We know that if in life, if we have a trauma or an issue and we don't talk about it, we bury it.
That just stores up problems for the future.
So do you think in some ways what you're doing by talking to these kids and getting the stories out there can actually be therapeutic for them?
Yes, it is at times.
I think partly because just having somebody who is respectful of what the child and the family, what they are experiencing, being respectful of that, I think can be helpful.
Also, often if the child goes to the previous place or meets the previous family, you would think that might stir up more, but often it's kind of the reverse.
The intensity is lessened.
And I think it's partly because they get confirmation that their memories, in fact, are true.
But they also see that the past is the past and that the family has gone on with their lives and they've aged or whatever.
And so it makes it easier for the children to put it in the past themselves and go on with this life.
So perhaps it can be somewhat calming to realize the idea that maybe there is a continuum.
Maybe we're just part of a circle that goes round and round.
And maybe that can be a very calming thing if you discover that.
Yeah, and of course it can be calming to all of us to think that we don't just get this one shot at things, but that there is this continuation that death is not necessarily the end.
Have you ever used hypnosis as a technique?
No, and to be honest, we're skeptical of hypnotic regression for past lives.
I mean, there are many people who go through hypnotic regression that report sort of profound experiences, but whether they're actually recalling a past life is another question.
There are a very small number of cases where most of the person has access to information that's very unlikely they would have learned through some sort of ordinary means.
But most of the cases, I think, are probably sort of the mind's imagination.
And again, it may be quite therapeutic for them, just like dream work or other kinds of therapy work may be helpful, but it's not necessarily literally a past life that they experienced.
One of the most moving cases that you've recorded is Stephen, I think his name was, who talked of dying in Vietnam at the height of that awful conflict at the age of 21 in 1969.
And he gave the last name of this young soldier, which was an unusual name that allowed you to do some research, yes?
Yes, both the last name and the state where he was from.
And it turned out that there was a guy with that name from that state who had died at age 21, as Stephen said.
So yeah, that's one where I was able to do picture recognition tests from this previous man.
Again, showing a control picture and a picture from this man's life.
And there were a couple of pairs where Stephen didn't make a selection.
But for the ones that he did, he was six out of six.
So, you know, it's like flipping a coin six times and having it come up heads every time.
The odds of that occurring by chance are quite unlikely.
It's about 1.5%.
So that was certainly a significant result that we got with him.
I think what moved me about that story was that you showed him two pictures of high schools, one of which was his and one of which wasn't, I think, and he picked the right one.
Yep, that's correct.
And he, again, did similar things with a house in the neighborhood or a house across the street from where the previous man had lived, pictures from the man's high school yearbook.
So, yeah, he was quite good at those picture tests.
And what about his life now?
Having been through that in a past life, how is he now?
Well, he's fine.
Some of these kids seem traumatized by their memories.
They may have nightmares or they may show sort of repetitive post-traumatic play.
But Stephen did not show those things.
So even though the man was killed in a Violent fashion, it doesn't seem to have been overly troubling for Stephen to recall that.
One of the things that you've researched is, and I've never thought of this before, that, you know, if you're a man in this life, you don't automatically come back if you come back as a man.
You may come back as a woman.
You know, you may come back as the opposite sex from what you are now.
And you talk, I know, about how children have brought back feelings from being, you know, the other sex, the opposite sex.
When they've come back here, they've had some of the emotions and the feelings that carry over for a while.
That's right, as well as behavior.
So, yeah, about 10% of the kids will report a past life as a member of a different sex.
And in the general population, about 3% of young boys and 5% of young girls will show what's called gender nonconformity, where their play is more typical of the opposite sex.
Well, in these cases, 80% of the children show gender nonconformity.
So there does seem to be this kind of carryover from the previous gender.
And sometimes those behaviors will fade as the children grow older and sometimes not.
Which brings us back to that question we asked half an hour ago, Jim.
The idea that there's some kind of selection process going on somewhere in heaven or in another dimension or wherever it might be that determines if you're going to come back and what you're going to come back as.
Right.
And we know almost nothing about how that selection process occurs, if there's any control over at all, or if it's just purely kind of a natural process that somehow leads the consciousness onto the next life.
I mean, we can say it's not purely random because typically the children will come back fairly near where the previous person was, typically in the same country, not always, but typically in the same country.
So it's not purely random for everyone on earth, but how much control there is over it, we really don't know.
Are there cases of somebody perhaps born in the United Kingdom or the United States who come back in Thailand or Burma or Japan or somewhere?
There have been cases like that.
And I mean, sometimes the children, like an American child, may say, I lived in Africa my last life.
And of course, if we don't get more details, it's unverifiable.
But there have been cases where a child will talk about a past life from another country, but there's usually a geographical connection.
So for instance, there are a number of Burmese children who said they were Japanese soldiers who were killed in Burma during World War II.
Or there have been cases in India where the children described being British pilots who had been killed there during the war.
So some of them seem completely disconnected, and you wonder how they ended up where they are.
But for many of them, there is at least some connection.
And there's the case, we've talked about this on my show before in another context, of James Leiniger from Louisiana.
Boy born to a religious family.
His father didn't have any truck with anything like this.
But the evidence increasingly presenting itself to the family that their son may actually before have been a pilot who was killed in World War II, this is a very involved and very moving story.
Yes, and it's extremely impressive.
I mean, I think it's really about as strong as any case we have because he recalled very specific details that we have documentation of.
So he recalled being a World War II pilot who was killed in the Pacific, and he was able to give the name of the aircraft carrier Natoma, describe, said he was killed at Iwo Jima, describe the details.
There was only one pilot from the ship he named that was killed there, and the crash matched perfectly, the details that James gave.
And James also said he had a friend there named Jack Larson, and Jack Larson was the pilot of the plane next to the pilots on the day that he was killed.
So that one is extremely impressive.
And in that one, James actually, he did have nightmares about this plane crash repeatedly when he was younger.
And eventually the parents were able to determine how that came about.
And wasn't there some kind of reunion?
Didn't he meet a surviving service person?
He did.
Eventually, his father went to, there's a ship, Natoma Bay, and went to reunions and took James with him.
And James also met the surviving sister of the pilot before she passed away.
You're a professional in these things, so I guess you've seen it all in your life.
But are you ever moved?
Are you ever upset by the things that you hear?
Well, sometimes because some of the children are describing past lives that ended in very difficult ways.
And some of them are describing young children who were killed.
And that is difficult to hear.
You know, these previous families, some of them went through very horrible, difficult times.
So that can be upsetting.
But what's more common is occasionally I get really kind of impressed by a case.
I mean, with James Leiniger, the more I investigated it, actually the stronger it became because I saw that we had better documentation than I had realized of all these statements that he had made.
So it can be sort of startling in that way sometimes to see the strength of some of these cases.
Where do you think just finally this research can go now?
You know, I think you're doing very valuable work by compiling these cases, by cross-referencing these cases, by doing all the legwork that that involves.
But do you think that there is any more that we can do beyond compiling the cases?
Yeah, I mean, I think I do want to continue to compile particularly strong American cases, Because if we had 50 cases as strong as James Leiningert or Ryan Hammond's, then I think people would really have to take notice.
But beyond that, we have a database where we record 200 variables for each case, and so then we can do analysis on it.
And I think we can continue to look at the patterns in the cases and try to determine, try to understand more about this process that if we accept the cases as valid, what do they tell us about consciousness and how it may continue on?
And the cases, referrals coming into your office every day?
Not every day, but again, we got over 100 of them last year, so they're certainly coming in frequently.
Wow.
Jim, thank you so much for taking time.
And I wanted to speak with you after I saw you on the documentary.
I'm so pleased I've had this chance to do it.
If my listener wants to check out your work online, do you have a website?
I do, yes.
Well, my individual one is jimbtucker.com.
And you can also link to the university website from there and also see about my new book that's come out.
Your thoughts on this guest and all of the guests we have on The Unexplained, gratefully received.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You can send me an email from there.
And if you want to go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, you are very welcome to do that and be part of the family there.
Thanks very much for being part of my show.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe.
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