Thread by @TheUfoJoe

1 R folks just closed minded on the possibility of reincarnation? There's MUCH more evidence for that than there is for #UFOs being from a NHI.

"[Stevenson] went wherever he needed 2 go 4 the research, sometimes traveling over 50,000 miles a year.

researchgate.net/publication/24…

2 "He published individual reports of some of the cases in journals and then began a book series of cases from particular areas. He titled it, 'Cases of the Reincarnation Type' and published four volumes through the University Press of Virginia from 1975 to 1983.

3 "Of the first volume, the reviewer in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, stated: ‘In regard to reincarnation [Stevenson] has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which

4 "'the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.' The reviewer added: '[Stevenson] has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.'

5 "The data were in fact ignored by most in mainstream science, with some notable exceptions. One was Eugene Brody, the editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. He published one of Ian’s papers in 1977, ‘The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation,’ that led to

6 "more than 1,000 requests for reprints from scientists all over the world. Later in 1977 Brody devoted most of one issue of the journal to Ian’s work. He included a paper by Ian and commentaries from several others.

7 "One commentary was by psychiatrist Harold Lief, whose frequently quoted observation of Ian was that 'either he is making a colossal mistake, or he
will be known...as "the Galileo of the 20th century."'

8 "An aspect of the cases that interested Ian greatly was the frequent presence in the children of birthmarks and birth defects that appeared to match wounds, usually fatal ones, suffered by the deceased individuals whose lives they were said to remember.

9 "...in 1997, Ian published Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, a massive 2,268-page, two-volume work that included reports and photographs of 225 cases involving birthmarks or birth defects. Many of them were not the usual

10 "blemishes, either. They were often dramatic and sometimes bizarre lesions, such as malformed digits or missing limbs, misshapen heads, and odd markings. In all of the cases, the defects matched wounds suffered by the previous individual. Ian showed his customary

11 "determination in investigating the cases, getting autopsy or police reports when they were available, or eyewitness testimony of the corpse when they were not, to verify that the marks and defects he was seeing actually did match the wounds the previous person had received.

12 "Another area that interested Ian was the behavior of these children. He wrote a paper about phobias that many of the children showed, usually related to the mode of death from the life they claimed to remember. He reported that 36% of the children in a series of 387 cases

13 "showed such fears. They occurred when the children were very young, sometimes before they had made their claims about the previous life. For example, he described a girl in Sri Lanka who as a baby resisted baths so much that three adults had to hold her down to give her one.

14 "By the age of 6 mos, she also showed a marked phobia of buses & then later described the life of a girl in another village who had been walking along a narrow road between flooded paddy fields when she stepped back 2 avoid a bus going by, fell into the flood water, & drowned.

15 "Ian also wrote about the children’s play (Stevenson, 2000c). He reported that in a series of 278 cases, almost a quarter of the children engaged in play seemingly related to the lives they described that was unusual in their families and had no known role model.

16 "This often involved the previous person’s occupation, such as a boy who became so wrapped up in his play as a biscuit shopkeeper that he fell behind in school and a girl in India who described a life as a sweepstress and who not only enjoyed sweeping

17 "but also happily cleaned up the stools of her younger brothers when they defecated in the house, undoubtedly to the surprise of her Brahmin parents.

"We investigated three American cases together. He was unfailingly polite to the families in a very dignified way, but

18 "he also remained critical minded. Of the three cases, he was quite impressed by one, and we published a report of it in the paper of birthmark cases noted above. He judged one of the other cases to be unsolved (that is, we did not find a deceased individual whose life

19 "matched the statements the child had made) and the third to be almost certainly the result of wishful thinking on the mother’s part.

"He demonstrated a similarly cautious attitude toward the overall phenomenon of young children’s claims of past-life memories.

20 "He wrote that no single case offered evidence that compelled a belief in reincarnation, and he was adamant that the term 'proof' not be used for the evidence he had accumulated or even hoped to find. Nonetheless, although he emphasized that other explanations were
possible,

21 "he wrote that he considered reincarnation to be the best explanation for the stronger cases that he had investigated - including ones in which the two families involved were previously unknown to each other and for which a written record of the child’s statements was

22 "made before they were verified and cases in which a medical record documented a close correspondence between a child’s birthmarks or birth defects and wounds on the body of the previous individual.

"In the end, as he wrote, he produced data that allow those who find

23 "reincarnation a congenial concept to believe in it on the basis of evidence rather than purely on the basis of faith. That group, however, was not the one he was most interested in reaching. He once said - with a smile - that he would die a failure because he had not

24 "achieved his primary goal of getting mainstream science to seriously consider reincarnation as a possibility. Such a goal, in retrospect, may have been quixotic, particularly to be attained in a relatively short time, but as with Galileo, science’s ultimate judgment

25 "on his work may come long after the end of his life. The numerous researchers contributing to this issue who were inspired and supported by Ian, and who attempt to model their own efforts by the standard he set, also demonstrate that he did not die a failure.

26 "There were more books to be written as well, as a life of 88 years was not long enough to exhaust his productivity. Ian finished his last published paper with words that, though not referring specifically to his 40

27 "years of research on children’s past-life memories, might well have applied to them: 'Let no one think that I know the answer. I am still seeking.'"

Read the excellent, full article by Jim Tucker, for free:

researchgate.net/publication/24…