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NARRATOR: Who can tell us the truth about life after death?
This American minister who claims he
was swallowed up by the fires of Hell,
this girl who says she saw her grandmother in the gardens
of Heaven, or this Air Force doctor whose
revolutionary experiments point to a more down
to earth solution?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communication satellite--
now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
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ARTHUR C CLARKE: All religions face
the greatest of mysteries-- what happens when we die?
The Buddhists believe we may be reincarnated in this world.
Other faiths believe the soul discards the body
and enters a spiritual realm.
However, a growing number of people
claim they have already glimpsed an after life.
When they were revived after having been pronounced dead
by doctors, they speak of floating
peacefully down a dark tunnel towards a shining light.
Sometimes they meet dead friends and members of their family.
NARRATOR: Dr. Melvin Morse was inspired to investigate when
child patients told him extraordinary stories of
their near-death experiences.
Many of them were too young to describe what they had seen,
so Morse encouraged them to explain in pictures.
The innocent artists produced graphic glimpses
of childhood heaven.
Here's some drawings that children
have drawn for me of their near death experiences.
This is a six-year-old boy who nearly died
during a routine tonsillectomy.
He had three cardiac arrests, and here we
see a long tunnel and leading to a rainbow bridge.
See the long, dark tunnel, and then
this very spectacular rainbow bridge to a place
he thought was heaven.
This is a five-year-old girl who has
nearly died of bacterial meningitis
here at Valley General Hospital.
A great wealth of detail here that she was not
able to articulate, and then we see
her floating out of her body, so out of her body.
Here's Jesus wearing a little red hat, who she said
was very nice.
There's three angels, and then this rainbow she said
is a light who told her who she was and where she was to go.
She also said this is a door where the dead people were,
and this door here, she said, was
where grandpas and grandmas and babies
who are waiting to be born.
Now this is another patient of mine, Jessie Lott,
and she nearly died of a fulminate liver failure
from mononucleosis.
She had to have a needle stuck into her heart
to resuscitate her, so that's near death
by anyone's criteria.
NARRATOR: Jessie bounced back to health
but vividly remembers her brush with death.
Well, I was just sick, and then all of a sudden,
there was white lights or white cloud type thingies around me,
and I saw my grandma, and she was just sitting
there in this wooden chair.
And she was smiling, and she didn't say anything,
but she looked happy.
MELVIN MORSE: And here's her grandmother
sitting on a brown chair.
Her grandmother had already died.
And then we see her grandmother surrounded
but this white light.
When I think about it, it just gives me that warm feeling
inside, and it just touches me just
to think about it to know that if I was near death,
my grandma was there.
She was there to be there with me.
Now this is a patient of mine named Crystal Merzlock,
and she was seven years old when she nearly drowned
in a community swimming pool.
And she said that she floated out of her body
and went down a long tunnel, and here we
see the ground, which interestingly enough,
she draws blue as the sky.
And then she said a hole opened up in heaven,
and she can see down to her brother.
And she loves him very much, so she indicates
that with a red heart.
And as this hole opened up in heaven in which she could see
her brother was a big factor in her
deciding to return to her body.
[CHILDREN PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Crystal is now grown up.
She was the first of Dr. Morse's patients
to describe an afterlife.
CRYSTAL MERZLOCK: He asked me what
it was like to be in a coma, and I said, oh, it was fun.
Heaven was fun.
I was asked by Elizabeth, my guardian angel,
whether I wanted to stay or come back, and I said, no, why would
I ever want to leave this place?
It's so beautiful.
There's so much love here.
And she said, OK.
And I thought about it for a second, and I thought, no.
I want to go back.
I thought, I wouldn't ever be able to hug my mom again
or anybody I really loved.
And for that sole reason, I decided to come back.
NARRATOR: Within the covers of a family
photograph album lay a forgotten picture which dramatically
backed up Crystal's story.
We came to a page, and I came to realize
that my great-grandma, Dora, was the grandma
that I saw up in heaven.
And I pointed to here, and I said, that's her.
That's who I saw up in heaven, and that's my grandma Dora.
And they were very surprised, because she
died before I'd been born.
Near death experiences tell us everything about death.
The fact that when we die, our body just doesn't stop,
as I used to think before I started near death experiences.
We just check out into the darkness.
That clearly is not the case.
We will all have a near death experience when we die.
In fact, they're the dying experience.
NARRATOR: The impact of standing on the brink of death
has left its mark on the members of this Seattle support group.
The annual Near Death Picnic provides
a chance to compare notes.
Bill Vandenbush was hit by shrapnel
in a Vietnam airstrike.
And as I moved in the tunnel, I suddenly
came into this bright white light,
and once I entered the light, it was the most beautiful
thing I'd ever experienced.
It was just wonderful.
I was able to have knowledge of everything--
why we're here, why we exist.
It's by far the most incredible experience of my life.
NARRATOR: Doris Jackson nearly died of dysentery in India.
It changed her life.
DORIS JACKSON: I was walking at this path,
and I saw this light, and I realized that there
was a presence there.
And this presence was warm, and it
was all loving, all forgiving.
And to walk into that presence is
totally-- it's indescribable.
No feelings that we have here can match that feeling.
NARRATOR: For Poole Carr, life's priorities are clear.
POOLE CARR: The most important thing, I think,
in life is knowing that this isn't it.
If anything, this is the illusion.
The reality is something larger.
NARRATOR: Georgina Boyson used to suffer from depression
but now has hope.
I should probably say that before the experience,
I considered myself an agnostic, and since the experience,
I would say that there's something out there,
kind of whatever it is.
But there is something out there.
NARRATOR: Some controversial researchers claim success
in the search for proof that the human soul can survive death.
In 1907, Dr. Duncan McDougal of Boston
weighed patients as they died.
When one lost an ounce and a half,
McDougal argued the weight loss was
caused by the soul's departure.
French cyclical researcher, Dr. Henri Baraduc,
found his guinea pigs closer to home.
As his son, Andre, died of consumption,
Baraduc tried to photograph his departing spirit.
Six months later, his wife sighed three times
as she breathed her last.
Baraduc claimed he'd captured his loved ones' souls on film.
The idea that we all have a soul independent of the body
is reinforced by another quite common
but uncanny type of experience.
Survivors of accidents or people recovering from operations
report having had a bird's eye view of themselves
during this crisis.
Some even claim to have seen things
that they couldn't possibly have known about otherwise.
NARRATOR: At [INAUDIBLE] in the Netherlands,
an emergency admission turned into a classic case
of an out of body experience.
Nurse Tom Goossens was called to the coronary car unit
to resuscitate a heart attack victim.
TOM GOOSSENS: A short while later, just a week or so,
the patient came back on our CCU unit,
and he had recovered very well.
And when he saw me for the first time entering his room,
he was very astonished, and he said, you got my teeth.
You know where my false teeth are.
And I was every astonished.
I didn't believe what he said, because the time I had seen
this man, he was unconscious.
But he saw himself laying in bed out
of a corner in the small room while the resuscitation
was being done.
And he saw himself above in that room in that small corner.
He saw everything what happened.
He saw us doing the heart massage.
He saw us giving infusions, and he saw actually
me removing his false teeth and put them on the shelf
of just a crash cart.
And it was so remarkable, because this man
couldn't see at all.
He was clinically dead at that moment.
NARRATOR: Such astonishing stories
have persuaded mainstream doctors to take near death
experiences seriously.
Dr. Van Lommel is one of Holland's top cardiologists.
He interviewed heart attack survivors and found one in 10
had floated out of their body.
Van Lommel has designed an experiment
to verify stories of bird's eye views from the ceiling.
Its set in a resuscitation room.
WILLEM VAN LOMMEL: When the people
get their cardiac arrest, then their heartbeat stops.
The pill stops the blood pressure.
There's no blood pressure anymore.
There's no breathing, and we start our resuscitation.
It means heart massage.
That means electrical shocks.
That means drugs.
And when we look to the monitor, you see
what happens to the heartbeat.
It goes on, and you get a flat line on the ECG,
and there's just a moment of people get unconscious.
They are clinically dead, and that's the moment they can have
their out of the body experience where they float
around somewhere out of the body above near the ceiling,
and they can see how people are doing the resuscitation
on their own body.
And they can recognize everything.
And in our research, we put a sign somewhere on our land
that they can see a sign during the resuscitation,
during the period of clinical death.
NARRATOR: The message was designed and hidden
by an independent researcher.
So far no patient has found it, but Van Lommel believes
it's just a matter of time.
I think it will be clear at some time we will meet
somebody who saw that sign.
NARRATOR: In 1992, a firestorm devastated
homes and businesses on the hills of Oakland, California.
25 people were killed, but psychiatrist Catherine Classen
of Stanford University believes the disaster may
have provided a clue to the root cause
of out of body experiences.
She met shocked survivors as they
left federal relief centers and asked them
to fill out questionnaires.
An astonishing number had felt the sensation.
CATHERINE CLASSEN: I wasn't surprised
that people have this sense of floating above their bodies,
because people will do whatever they can to protect themselves.
And if they can't physically protect themselves,
they will attempt to protect themselves
psychologically or mentally.
And so floating above the body, if you can't run away,
if you can float above your body,
it's a way to remove yourself from the event.
What our study has to say is that it is possible
that people in experiencing the ultimate trauma,
which is dying, are using the out of body experience as a way
to protect themselves.
So it's a defensive response to this possible event.
NARRATOR: For the person concerned,
out of body experiences seem real, but in one case,
the idea that the soul soars free of the body
hit the ground with a bump.
Graham Tarr was racing a friend through
the streets of Newcastle .
I was 17 at the time, and I was coming up Osborne Road here
on my motorcycle far too quickly,
and as I came up to this corner, I overshot the white line
and crossed onto the wrong side of the road.
As I came around, I realized I was
going straight into the path of an oncoming car.
The next thing I knew really was that I
was being thrown into the air over the air
and was flying up above it.
I was just flying above the car.
After watching my helmet slowly fly away from me
and land in the garden.
I turned back around and realized that I was inevitably
heading over the car and towards the ground
and decided that wasn't a good idea
and that I wanted to stay precisely where I was.
So in effect, that's what I did.
NARRATOR: Floating comfortably above the scene,
Graham heard the Hallelujah chorus.
He saw his body on the road, his bike
to one side and his panic-stricken friend.
Gradually, he regained consciousness.
The first thing I noticed, obviously,
was the [INAUDIBLE] was coming from the back of my motorcycle,
rather than being, as I'd seen it,
crumpled up at the front of the car.
And it had to have followed me through the air,
and it landed on top of me, with my leg through the frame of it,
and the bone in the back of my leg on the exhaust.
I looked around to see if I could see my friend anywhere,
because I'd seen him stop and come back and be over me,
but I couldn't see him anywhere.
The two [INAUDIBLE] on the pavement,
looking at me terribly concerned, weren't there.
And I just realized that the whole thing had been a fantasy,
a dream, a hallucination.
[CHURCH SINGING]
NARRATOR: The leader of this devout congregation
is loved and respected by his flock,
but 10 years ago, the Reverend Howard
Storm was a university art professor
and not the man he is today.
HOWARD STORM: Personal philosophy
was to be the biggest, baddest bear in the woods,
and I tried to promote an image of being harsh and mean.
I know a lot of people didn't like me and were afraid of me.
NARRATOR: One summer, Howard and his wife Beverly
went on holiday to France.
Howard became critically ill with a hole in his stomach.
Because he was far from home, he was
left untreated for 11 hours.
Doctors say it's a miracle that he survived at all.
Back in Cincinnati, Howard confided in his doctor.
He told him his survival had been remarkable in more
than just medical terms.
JAMES LINNE: He described a very horrifying experience of going
through a tunnel, and these little demon-like creatures
were coming at him and ripping off pieces of his skin.
So they had really torn away all the skin from his body.
HOWARD STORM: I was sure that I was never
going to be back in the world again,
that I was lost to the world, and that I'd ended up
in this horrible, awful place full of like meanness
and absence of anything good or nice or decent.
Just a place of cruelty and torment.
And I recalled myself as a little child
singing "Jesus Loves Me," and I grasp at that out
of desperation and called out for Jesus to save me,
not knowing or believing but only hoping that there
might be something to that.
And with that, a person of light came to me.
He carried me out of there and took me into a world of light.
NARRATOR: Howard had escaped from the jaws of Hell.
He was transformed.
He gave up his old ways, resigned from his job,
and joined the church.
My wife said to me several times after the experience
that the man that she had married and had been married
to for over 20 years died that day in Paris,
and I was a complete stranger to her.
NARRATOR: Bob and Margaret Vitz have
known Howard for over 20 years.
His radical change of character still amazes them.
BOB VITZ: If someone had told me this 10 years ago,
I would've been astounded to even imagine
that this would happen to him.
I would've never imagined that he would give up being
a professor at the university.
He studied religion very hard, and, of course,
now as a minister, I would've never pictured any of this.
Of all the people whom we knew, I
think Howard would have just about been the last one
we would have thought that would go through this transformation.
HOWARD STORM: As far as I'm concerned, I went to that edge
and beyond it.
I've been close enough that I've been where most people haven't.
I've been to the edge of death and back.
Many scientific discoveries are made by accident.
A possible explanation of near death experiences
was stumbled upon by American aviation
doctors testing pilots to find the limits of human endurance.
NARRATOR: At the Naval Air Warfare Center,
the pilots take their turn on the world's largest
and most powerful centrifuge.
It can spin around more than 48 times a minute
and simulate the massive gravitational
pulls the G forces produced in a fighter jet.
These can knock the pilots unconscious
and produce symptoms just like near death experiences.
JAMES WHINNERY: So certainly, tunnel vision
is one of the most frequent symptoms that we have.
Dreamlets that include seeing family,
friends, loved ones, a sense of not
wanting to be disturbed, because it's a pleasurable experience.
Those dreamlets and experiences being extremely vivid
or loss of consciousness episodes
are remembered 20, 25 years after their occurrence
in crystal clear detail.
NARRATOR: Whinnery should know.
He's had more rides in the centrifuge
than any of his pilots.
He knows it firsthand what it feels like.
The research team's logo portrays the Grim Reaper,
because fighter pilots flirt with death
as the G forces increase.
The tunnel and shining light design
reflects the frequency of apparent near death
experiences.
JAMES WHINNERY: I can relate to you
a series of loss of consciousness episodes
that I had in which I think I had six
or seven loss of conscious episodes over about
a 15-minute period, successively worse
insults to the nervous system on each run.
NARRATOR: A video camera in the centrifuge cockpit
recorded the moment when Whinnery
lost consciousness on each run.
As soon as the pilot blacks out, the centrifuge slows,
the G force is reduced, and the pilot comes back.
He has to press a button to shut off the alarm.
I don't think that was enough.
Just after I had left the centrifuge and gotten out
and was walking down the hall, all of a sudden,
I found that I was no longer, if you will, inside myself.
I was up behind myself looking down at myself
at the same time, and that lasted about a minute
to a minute and a half.
We've seen that on rare occasion in some of our other subjects
and our reports that we have.
They're not frequently reported.
We would probably anticipate that it
might be much more frequent if the insults were greater.
NARRATOR: Rob McConnell's abiding memory
is of the tunnel and the light.
ROB MCCONNELL: It was a loss of all peripheral vision,
just if you could imagine losing everything
except for a small area directly in front of you.
And it would just be totally dark on the outside and coming
into a bright, real like grey, maybe a white area
in the center of the vision.
NARRATOR: Rob had been trained to fight to stay conscious,
but the G forces won.
His ordeal looks distressing, but it
seemed quite different from where he was sitting.
ROB MCCONNELL: My feelings were just warm and pleasant, almost
euphoric feeling that everything was OK, that there
was no problem at all.
JAMES WHINNERY: Our research indicates that many
of the experiences that someone with a near death experience
has would be similar to the loss of consciousness episodes we
see, because they share in common lack of blood flow
to the nervous system.
For our pilots, the lack of blood flow, of course,
is caused by being exposed to high G forces,
and when someone's having a cardiac arrest,
it's just because the heart's not pumping at all.
The one thing that the research has done
is certainly makes me less fearful of death.
You can't die without losing consciousness.
The last thing that I'll enter is the unconscious
state prior to dying.
That's certainly not unpleasant whatsoever, so there's
certain reassurance that the dying process is certainly
not an unpleasant one in terms of the unconsciousness
portion of it.
So that's reassuring to a great extent.
So near death experiences may turn out to have a perfectly
straightforward physical cause.
Yet, this need not disappoint us.
Even if they tell us nothing about an afterlife,
they give us hope that death may be far more peaceful and gentle
than we sometimes fear.
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