1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:21,480 Who can tell us the truth about life after death? 2 00:00:21,480 --> 00:00:26,500 This American minister who claims he was swallowed up by the fires of hell? 3 00:00:26,500 --> 00:00:31,700 This girl who says she saw her grandmother in the gardens of heaven? 4 00:00:31,700 --> 00:00:41,220 Or this Air Force doctor whose revolutionary experiments point to a more down to earth solution? 5 00:00:41,220 --> 00:00:47,260 Mysteries from the fires of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications 6 00:00:47,260 --> 00:00:48,260 satellite. 7 00:00:48,260 --> 00:00:53,740 Now in retreat in Sri Lanka he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds. 8 00:01:18,260 --> 00:01:28,660 All religions face the greatest of mysteries, what happens when we die? 9 00:01:28,660 --> 00:01:32,780 The Buddhists believe we may be reincarnated in this world. 10 00:01:32,780 --> 00:01:37,900 Other faiths believe the soul discards the body and enters a spiritual realm. 11 00:01:37,900 --> 00:01:43,780 However, a growing number of people claim they have already glimpsed an afterlife. 12 00:01:43,780 --> 00:01:48,620 When they were revived after having been pronounced dead by doctors, they speak of 13 00:01:48,620 --> 00:01:54,180 floating peacefully down a dark tunnel towards a shining light. 14 00:01:54,180 --> 00:01:57,780 Sometimes they meet dead friends and members of their family. 15 00:01:57,780 --> 00:02:03,460 Dr. Melvin Morse was inspired to investigate when child patients told him extraordinary 16 00:02:03,460 --> 00:02:07,140 stories of their near-death experiences. 17 00:02:07,140 --> 00:02:11,420 Many of them were too young to describe what they had seen, so Morse encouraged them to 18 00:02:11,420 --> 00:02:13,340 explain in pictures. 19 00:02:13,340 --> 00:02:17,220 The innocent artists produced graphic glimpses of childhood heaven. 20 00:02:17,220 --> 00:02:24,460 Here are some drawings that children have drawn for me of their near-death experiences. 21 00:02:24,460 --> 00:02:30,740 This is a six-year-old boy who nearly died during a routine tonsillectomy, had three 22 00:02:30,740 --> 00:02:37,900 cardiac arrests, and here we see a long tunnel then leading to a rainbow bridge. 23 00:02:37,900 --> 00:02:59,220 This is a five-year-old girl who nearly died of bacterial meningitis here at Valley General 24 00:02:59,220 --> 00:03:00,220 Hospital. 25 00:03:00,220 --> 00:03:05,100 A great wealth of detail here that she was not able to articulate. 26 00:03:05,100 --> 00:03:09,220 Then we see her floating out of her body. 27 00:03:09,220 --> 00:03:14,220 Here is Jesus wearing a little red hat, who she said was very nice. 28 00:03:14,220 --> 00:03:16,860 There's three angels. 29 00:03:16,860 --> 00:03:23,940 This rainbow, she said, is a light who told her who she was and where she was to go. 30 00:03:23,940 --> 00:03:27,740 She also said this was a door where the dead people were. 31 00:03:27,740 --> 00:03:32,700 This door here, she said, was where grandpas and grandmas and babies who were waiting to 32 00:03:32,700 --> 00:03:34,980 be born. 33 00:03:34,980 --> 00:03:41,340 Now this is another patient of mine, Jesse Lott, and she nearly died of fulminant liver 34 00:03:41,340 --> 00:03:44,420 failure from mononucleosis. 35 00:03:44,420 --> 00:03:49,340 She had to have a needle stuck into her heart to resuscitate her, so that's near-death by 36 00:03:49,340 --> 00:03:52,700 anyone's criteria. 37 00:03:52,700 --> 00:03:57,700 Jesse bounce back to health, but vividly remembers her brush with death. 38 00:03:57,700 --> 00:03:59,700 Well, I was just sick. 39 00:04:00,140 --> 00:04:05,220 Then all of a sudden, there was white lights or white cloud-type thingies around me, and 40 00:04:05,220 --> 00:04:09,420 I saw my grandmother, and she was just sitting there in this wooden chair, and she was smiling, 41 00:04:09,420 --> 00:04:12,780 and she didn't say anything, but she looked happy. 42 00:04:12,780 --> 00:04:15,660 And here's her grandmother sitting on a brown chair. 43 00:04:15,660 --> 00:04:20,860 Her grandmother had already died, and then we see her grandmother surrounded by this 44 00:04:20,860 --> 00:04:21,860 white light. 45 00:04:21,860 --> 00:04:25,940 When I think about it, it just gives me that warm feeling inside, and it just touches me, 46 00:04:25,940 --> 00:04:30,460 and just to think about it, to know that if I was near-death, my grandma was there. 47 00:04:30,460 --> 00:04:32,660 She was there to be there with me. 48 00:04:32,660 --> 00:04:38,500 Now this is a patient of mine named Crystal Merzlach, and she was seven years old when 49 00:04:38,500 --> 00:04:41,740 she nearly drowned in a community swimming pool. 50 00:04:41,740 --> 00:04:48,180 And she said that she floated out of her body and went down a long tunnel, and here we see 51 00:04:48,180 --> 00:04:53,900 the ground, which interestingly enough, she draws blue as the sky, and then she said a 52 00:04:53,900 --> 00:04:58,540 hole opened up in heaven, and she could see down to her brother. 53 00:04:58,540 --> 00:05:02,540 She loves him very much, so she indicates that with a red heart. 54 00:05:02,540 --> 00:05:07,580 And as this hole opened up in heaven, in which she could see her brother, it was a big factor 55 00:05:07,580 --> 00:05:14,380 in her deciding to return to her body. 56 00:05:14,380 --> 00:05:16,300 Crystal is now grown up. 57 00:05:16,300 --> 00:05:20,300 She was the first of Dr. Morse's patients to describe an afterlife. 58 00:05:21,100 --> 00:05:26,140 He asked me what it was like to be in a coma, and I said, oh, it was fun. 59 00:05:26,140 --> 00:05:28,460 Heaven was fun. 60 00:05:28,460 --> 00:05:35,100 I was asked by Elizabeth, my guardian angel, whether I wanted to stay or come back, and 61 00:05:35,100 --> 00:05:38,380 I said, no, why would I ever want to leave this place? 62 00:05:38,380 --> 00:05:39,380 It's so beautiful. 63 00:05:39,380 --> 00:05:41,580 There's so much love here. 64 00:05:41,580 --> 00:05:43,540 And she said, OK. 65 00:05:43,540 --> 00:05:48,660 And I thought about it for a second, and I thought, no, I want to go back. 66 00:05:48,660 --> 00:05:55,780 I thought, I wouldn't ever be able to hug my mom again or anybody I really loved. 67 00:05:55,780 --> 00:06:00,980 And for that sole reason, I decided to come back. 68 00:06:00,980 --> 00:06:05,660 Within the covers of a family photograph album, Leia forgotten picture which dramatically 69 00:06:05,660 --> 00:06:08,660 backed up Crystal's story. 70 00:06:08,660 --> 00:06:15,620 We came to a page, and I came to realize that my great-grandma Dora was the grandma that 71 00:06:15,620 --> 00:06:16,620 I saw up in heaven. 72 00:06:16,620 --> 00:06:18,780 And I pointed to her and said, that's her. 73 00:06:18,780 --> 00:06:22,220 That's who I saw up in heaven, and that's my grandma Dora. 74 00:06:22,220 --> 00:06:27,020 And they were very surprised because she died before I had been born. 75 00:06:27,020 --> 00:06:30,740 Near-death experiences tell us everything about death. 76 00:06:30,740 --> 00:06:36,780 The fact that when we die, our body just doesn't stop. 77 00:06:36,780 --> 00:06:40,380 As I used to think before I started near-death experiences, we just sort of check out into 78 00:06:40,380 --> 00:06:41,780 the darkness. 79 00:06:41,780 --> 00:06:43,540 That clearly is not the case. 80 00:06:43,540 --> 00:06:46,380 We will all have a near-death experience when we die. 81 00:06:46,380 --> 00:06:49,860 In fact, they're the dying experience. 82 00:06:49,860 --> 00:06:54,780 The impact of standing on the brink of death has left its mark on the members of this Seattle 83 00:06:54,780 --> 00:06:56,460 support group. 84 00:06:56,460 --> 00:07:01,780 The annual near-death picnic provides a chance to compare notes. 85 00:07:01,780 --> 00:07:09,100 Bill Vandenbush was hit by shrapnel in a Vietnam airstrike. 86 00:07:09,100 --> 00:07:14,380 And as I moved in the tunnel, I suddenly came into this bright white light. 87 00:07:14,380 --> 00:07:20,340 And once I entered the light, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced. 88 00:07:20,340 --> 00:07:22,140 It was just wonderful. 89 00:07:22,140 --> 00:07:28,980 I was able to have knowledge of everything, why we're here, why we exist. 90 00:07:28,980 --> 00:07:33,540 It's by far the most incredible experience of my life. 91 00:07:33,540 --> 00:07:36,820 Doris Jackson nearly died of dysentery in India. 92 00:07:36,860 --> 00:07:40,180 Change to life. 93 00:07:40,180 --> 00:07:46,860 I was walking up this path and I saw this light and I realized that there was a presence 94 00:07:46,860 --> 00:07:54,900 there and this presence was warm and it was all loving, all forgiving. 95 00:07:54,900 --> 00:08:02,860 And to walk into that presence is totally, it's indescribable. 96 00:08:02,860 --> 00:08:11,180 Having no feelings that we have here can match that feeling. 97 00:08:11,180 --> 00:08:15,300 For Paul Carr, life's priorities are clear. 98 00:08:15,300 --> 00:08:22,260 The most important thing I think in life is knowing that this isn't it. 99 00:08:22,260 --> 00:08:27,620 If anything, this is the illusion and that the reality is something larger. 100 00:08:27,700 --> 00:08:33,940 Georgina Boyson used to suffer from depression, but now has hope. 101 00:08:33,940 --> 00:08:39,300 I should probably say that before the experience, I considered myself an agnostic. 102 00:08:39,300 --> 00:08:45,060 And since the experience, I would say that there's something out there. 103 00:08:45,060 --> 00:08:51,980 Kind of whatever it is, but there is something out there. 104 00:08:51,980 --> 00:08:56,820 Some controversial researchers claim success in the search for proof that the human soul 105 00:08:56,940 --> 00:08:58,860 can survive death. 106 00:08:58,860 --> 00:09:04,660 In 1907 Dr. Duncan McDougall of Boston weighed patients as they died. 107 00:09:04,660 --> 00:09:09,740 When one lost an answer and a half, McDougall argued the weight loss was caused by the soul's 108 00:09:09,740 --> 00:09:12,260 departure. 109 00:09:12,260 --> 00:09:17,700 French psychical researcher Dr. Henri Baradouk found his guinea pigs closer to home. 110 00:09:17,700 --> 00:09:24,180 As his son Andre died of consumption, Baradouk tried to photograph his departing spirit. 111 00:09:24,180 --> 00:09:28,500 Six months later his wife sighed three times as she breathed her last. 112 00:09:28,500 --> 00:09:34,380 Baradouk claimed he'd captured his loved one's souls on film. 113 00:09:34,380 --> 00:09:39,900 The idea that we all have a soul independent of the body is reinforced by another quite 114 00:09:39,900 --> 00:09:44,140 common but uncanny type of experience. 115 00:09:44,140 --> 00:09:49,140 Survivors of accidents or people recovering from operations report having had a bird's 116 00:09:49,140 --> 00:09:52,500 eye view of themselves during this crisis. 117 00:09:52,500 --> 00:09:59,500 Some even claim to have seen things that they couldn't possibly have known about otherwise. 118 00:10:06,260 --> 00:10:10,700 At Arnhem in the Netherlands an emergency admission turned into a classic case of an 119 00:10:10,700 --> 00:10:15,780 out of body experience. 120 00:10:15,820 --> 00:10:23,700 Nurse Ton Goessens was called to the coronary care unit to resuscitate a heart attack victim. 121 00:10:23,700 --> 00:10:31,980 A short while later, just a week or so, the patient came back on our CCU unit and he 122 00:10:31,980 --> 00:10:34,780 had recovered very well. 123 00:10:34,780 --> 00:10:41,580 And when he saw me for the first time entering his room, he was very astonished and he said, 124 00:10:41,580 --> 00:10:46,340 you got my teeth, you know where my false teeth are. 125 00:10:46,340 --> 00:10:52,140 And I was very astonished, I didn't believe what he said because the time I had seen this 126 00:10:52,140 --> 00:10:55,220 man he was unconscious. 127 00:10:55,220 --> 00:11:01,820 But he saw himself laying in bed out of a corner in the small room where the resuscitation 128 00:11:01,820 --> 00:11:03,740 was being done. 129 00:11:03,740 --> 00:11:11,420 And he saw himself above in that room, in that small corner, he saw everything what happened. 130 00:11:11,420 --> 00:11:19,100 He saw us doing the heart massage, he saw us giving infusions and he saw actually me 131 00:11:19,100 --> 00:11:24,900 removing his false teeth and put them on the shelf of just a crash car. 132 00:11:24,900 --> 00:11:29,740 And it was so remarkable because this man couldn't see at all, he was clinically dead 133 00:11:29,740 --> 00:11:32,620 at that moment. 134 00:11:32,620 --> 00:11:38,460 Such astonishing stories have persuaded mainstream doctors to take near-death experiences seriously. 135 00:11:39,020 --> 00:11:43,140 Dr Van Lommel is one of Holland's top cardiologists. 136 00:11:43,140 --> 00:11:49,300 He interviewed heart attack survivors and found one in ten had floated out of their body. 137 00:11:49,300 --> 00:11:55,300 Van Lommel has designed an experiment to verify stories of bird's eye views from the ceiling. 138 00:11:55,300 --> 00:11:59,020 It's set in a resuscitation room. 139 00:11:59,020 --> 00:12:04,740 When the people get their cardiac arrest, then the heartbeat stops, the pulse stops, 140 00:12:04,740 --> 00:12:05,740 the blood pressure. 141 00:12:06,220 --> 00:12:08,860 There's no blood pressure anymore, there's no breathing. 142 00:12:08,860 --> 00:12:14,300 And we start our resuscitation, that means heart massage, that means electrical shocks, 143 00:12:14,300 --> 00:12:16,580 that means drugs. 144 00:12:16,580 --> 00:12:21,140 And when we look through the monitor, you see what happens to the heartbeat. 145 00:12:21,140 --> 00:12:27,980 It goes on and you get a flat line on the ECG. 146 00:12:27,980 --> 00:12:31,140 And this is the moment that people get unconscious. 147 00:12:31,140 --> 00:12:36,020 They are clinically dead and that's the moment they can have their out-of-the-body experience, 148 00:12:36,020 --> 00:12:41,060 that they float around somewhere out of the body, above near the ceiling and they can 149 00:12:41,060 --> 00:12:49,980 see how people are doing the resuscitation on their own body and they can recognize everything. 150 00:12:49,980 --> 00:12:55,980 And in our research we put a sign somewhere up on a lamp that they can see a sign during 151 00:12:55,980 --> 00:12:59,660 the resuscitation, during the period of clinical death. 152 00:12:59,660 --> 00:13:03,700 The message was designed and hidden by an independent researcher. 153 00:13:03,700 --> 00:13:09,460 So far no patient has found it, but Van Lommel believes it's just a matter of time. 154 00:13:09,460 --> 00:13:14,860 I think it will be clear that sometime we will meet somebody who saw that sign. 155 00:13:19,700 --> 00:13:26,500 In 1992 a firestorm devastated homes and businesses on the hills of Oakland, California. 156 00:13:26,500 --> 00:13:32,620 Twenty-five people were killed, but psychiatrist Katherine Klassen of Stanford University believes 157 00:13:32,620 --> 00:13:39,100 the disaster may have provided a clue to the root cause of out-of-body experiences. 158 00:13:39,100 --> 00:13:44,420 She met shocked survivors as they left federal relief centers and asked them to fill out 159 00:13:44,420 --> 00:13:46,180 questionnaires. 160 00:13:46,180 --> 00:13:51,300 An astonishing number had felt the sensation. 161 00:13:51,300 --> 00:13:57,980 I wasn't surprised that people had this sense of floating above their bodies because people 162 00:13:57,980 --> 00:14:04,460 will do whatever they can to protect themselves and if they can't physically protect themselves 163 00:14:04,460 --> 00:14:08,780 they will attempt to protect themselves psychologically or mentally. 164 00:14:08,780 --> 00:14:14,620 And so floating above the body, if you can't run away, if you can float above your body 165 00:14:14,620 --> 00:14:19,540 it's a way to remove yourself from the event. 166 00:14:19,540 --> 00:14:28,740 What our study has to say is that it is possible that people in experiencing the ultimate trauma, 167 00:14:28,740 --> 00:14:36,220 which is dying, are using the out-of-body experience as a way to protect themselves. 168 00:14:36,220 --> 00:14:41,380 So it's a defensive response to this possible event. 169 00:14:41,380 --> 00:14:48,700 For the person concerned, out-of-body experiences seem real, but in one case the idea that the 170 00:14:48,700 --> 00:14:52,580 sole source free of the body hit the ground with a bump. 171 00:14:52,580 --> 00:14:56,820 Graham Tarr was racing a friend through the streets of Newcastle. 172 00:14:56,820 --> 00:15:01,780 I was about 17 at the time and I was coming up Osborne Road here on my motorcycle, far 173 00:15:01,780 --> 00:15:02,780 too quickly. 174 00:15:02,780 --> 00:15:06,900 And as I came up to this corner I overshot the white line and crossed on the wrong side 175 00:15:06,900 --> 00:15:07,900 of the road. 176 00:15:07,900 --> 00:15:12,180 As I came round I realized I was coming straight into the path of an oncoming car. 177 00:15:12,180 --> 00:15:17,340 The next thing I knew really was that I was being thrown into the air over the car and 178 00:15:17,340 --> 00:15:19,220 I was flying up above it. 179 00:15:19,220 --> 00:15:25,100 As I was flying above the car, after watching my helmet slowly fly away from me and land 180 00:15:25,100 --> 00:15:29,740 in the garden, I turned back round and realized that I was inevitably heading over the car 181 00:15:29,740 --> 00:15:35,100 and towards the ground and decided that wasn't a good idea and that I'd much rather stay 182 00:15:35,100 --> 00:15:36,860 precisely where I was. 183 00:15:36,860 --> 00:15:39,340 So in effect that's what I did. 184 00:15:39,340 --> 00:15:44,100 Floating comfortably above the scene, Graham heard the hallelulia chorus. 185 00:15:44,100 --> 00:15:49,620 He saw his body on the road, his bike to one side and his panic-stricken friend. 186 00:15:49,620 --> 00:15:51,820 Gradually he regained consciousness. 187 00:15:51,820 --> 00:15:56,580 The first thing I noticed obviously was the burning pain was coming from the fact that 188 00:15:56,580 --> 00:16:01,820 my motorcycle, rather than being as I'd seen it crumpled up at the front of the car, had 189 00:16:01,820 --> 00:16:06,260 in fact followed me through the air and it landed on top of me with my leg through the 190 00:16:06,260 --> 00:16:07,260 frame of it. 191 00:16:07,260 --> 00:16:10,180 I was burning the back of my leg on the exhaust. 192 00:16:10,180 --> 00:16:13,140 I looked around and said I could see my friend anywhere because I'd seen him stop and come 193 00:16:13,140 --> 00:16:16,860 back and be over me but I couldn't see him anywhere. 194 00:16:16,860 --> 00:16:21,580 The two of them all did, I'd seen all the pavements, looking at them with all the terribly 195 00:16:21,580 --> 00:16:25,820 concerns, working there and I just realized that the whole thing had been a fantasy, a 196 00:16:25,820 --> 00:16:33,140 dream of hallucination. 197 00:16:33,140 --> 00:16:38,100 The leader of this devout congregation is loved and respected by his flock. 198 00:16:38,100 --> 00:16:43,500 About ten years ago, the Reverend Howard Storm was a university art professor and not the 199 00:16:43,500 --> 00:16:48,380 man he is today. 200 00:16:48,380 --> 00:16:56,100 Personal philosophy was to be the biggest, baddest bear in the woods and I tried to promote 201 00:16:56,100 --> 00:16:58,940 an image of being harsh and mean. 202 00:16:58,940 --> 00:17:02,460 I know a lot of people didn't like me and were afraid of me. 203 00:17:02,460 --> 00:17:06,900 On summer Howard and his wife Beverly went on holiday to France. 204 00:17:06,900 --> 00:17:10,780 Howard became critically ill with a hole in his stomach. 205 00:17:10,780 --> 00:17:15,620 Because he was far from home, he was left untreated for 11 hours. 206 00:17:15,620 --> 00:17:19,620 Doctors say it's a miracle that he survived at all. 207 00:17:19,620 --> 00:17:23,380 Back in Cincinnati, Howard confided in his doctor. 208 00:17:23,380 --> 00:17:27,780 He told him his survival had been remarkable in more than just medical terms. 209 00:17:27,780 --> 00:17:36,580 He described a very horrifying experience of going through a tunnel and these little 210 00:17:36,580 --> 00:17:44,340 demon-like creatures were coming at him and ripping off pieces of his skin until they 211 00:17:44,340 --> 00:17:47,500 had really torn away all the skin from his body. 212 00:17:47,500 --> 00:17:51,300 I was sure that I was never going to be back in the world again, that I was lost to the 213 00:17:51,300 --> 00:17:58,780 world and I'd ended up in this horrible, awful place full of meanness and absence of 214 00:17:58,780 --> 00:18:05,020 anything good or nice or decent, just a place of cruelty and torment. 215 00:18:05,020 --> 00:18:14,140 I recalled myself as a little child singing Jesus Loves Me and I grasped at that out of 216 00:18:14,140 --> 00:18:20,620 desperation and called out for Jesus to save me, not knowing or believing but only hoping 217 00:18:20,620 --> 00:18:22,500 that there might be something to that. 218 00:18:22,500 --> 00:18:27,220 And with that, a person of light came to me, carried me out of there and took me into a 219 00:18:27,220 --> 00:18:30,460 world of light. 220 00:18:30,460 --> 00:18:33,180 Howard had escaped from the jaws of hell. 221 00:18:33,180 --> 00:18:34,180 He was transformed. 222 00:18:34,180 --> 00:18:44,580 He gave up his old ways, resigned from his job and joined the church. 223 00:18:44,580 --> 00:18:48,580 My wife said to me several times after the experience that the man that she had married 224 00:18:48,580 --> 00:18:53,500 and had been married to for over 20 years died that day in Paris and I was a complete 225 00:18:53,500 --> 00:18:56,500 stranger to her. 226 00:18:56,500 --> 00:19:00,420 Bob and Margaret Vitz have known Howard for over 20 years. 227 00:19:00,420 --> 00:19:04,340 His radical change of character still amazes them. 228 00:19:04,340 --> 00:19:08,980 If someone had told me this 10 years ago, I would have been astounded to even imagine 229 00:19:08,980 --> 00:19:11,100 that this would happen to him. 230 00:19:11,100 --> 00:19:15,780 I would have never imagined that he would give up being a professor at the university. 231 00:19:15,780 --> 00:19:21,700 He studied religion very hard and of course now as a minister, I would have never pictured 232 00:19:21,700 --> 00:19:24,900 any of this. 233 00:19:24,900 --> 00:19:30,540 Of all the people whom we knew, I think Howard would have just about been the last one we 234 00:19:30,540 --> 00:19:37,180 would have thought that would go through this transformation. 235 00:19:37,180 --> 00:19:41,780 As far as I'm concerned, I went to that edge and beyond it. 236 00:19:41,780 --> 00:19:45,860 I've been close enough that I've been where most people haven't. 237 00:19:45,860 --> 00:19:50,460 I've been to the edge of death and back. 238 00:19:50,460 --> 00:19:53,940 Many scientific discoveries are made by accident. 239 00:19:53,940 --> 00:20:01,060 A possible explanation of near-death experiences was stumbled upon by American aviation doctors 240 00:20:01,060 --> 00:20:09,140 testing pilots to find the limits of human endurance. 241 00:20:09,260 --> 00:20:14,100 The Naval Air Warfare Centre, the pilots take their turn on the world's largest and most 242 00:20:14,100 --> 00:20:19,420 powerful centrifuge. 243 00:20:19,420 --> 00:20:25,180 It can spin round more than 48 times a minute and stimulate the massive gravitational pulls 244 00:20:25,180 --> 00:20:28,540 the G-forces produced in a fighter jet. 245 00:20:28,540 --> 00:20:34,860 These can knock the pilots unconscious and produce symptoms just like near-death experiences. 246 00:20:34,860 --> 00:20:39,460 So certainly tunnel vision is one of the most frequent symptoms that we have. 247 00:20:39,460 --> 00:20:44,980 Dreamlets that include seeing family, friends, loved ones, a sense of not wanting to be disturbed 248 00:20:44,980 --> 00:20:47,980 because it's a pleasurable experience. 249 00:20:47,980 --> 00:20:54,140 Those dreamlets and experiences being extremely vivid, our loss of conscious episodes, are 250 00:20:54,140 --> 00:21:00,660 remembered 20, 25 years after their occurrence in crystal-clear detail. 251 00:21:05,860 --> 00:21:10,860 Winnery should know he's had more rides in the centrifuge than any of his pilots. 252 00:21:10,860 --> 00:21:16,860 He knows at first hand what it feels like. 253 00:21:16,860 --> 00:21:21,860 The research team's logo portrays the Grim Reaper because fighter pilots flirt with 254 00:21:21,860 --> 00:21:24,860 death as the G-forces increase. 255 00:21:24,860 --> 00:21:30,860 The tunnel and shining light design reflects the frequency of apparent near-death experiences. 256 00:21:31,860 --> 00:21:37,860 I can relate to you a series of loss of consciousness episodes that I had in which I think I had 257 00:21:37,860 --> 00:21:44,860 six or seven loss of conscious episodes over about a 15 minute period, successively worse 258 00:21:44,860 --> 00:21:50,860 insults to the nervous system on each run. 259 00:22:01,860 --> 00:22:10,860 A video camera in the centrifuge cockpit recorded the moment when Winnery lost consciousness on each run. 260 00:22:15,860 --> 00:22:22,860 As soon as the pilot blacks out, the centrifuge slows, the G-forces reduce and the pilot comes back. 261 00:22:22,860 --> 00:22:26,860 He has to press a button to shut off the alarm. 262 00:22:27,860 --> 00:22:30,860 I think that was enough. 263 00:22:33,860 --> 00:22:41,860 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 264 00:22:41,860 --> 00:22:48,860 no longer, if you will, inside myself. I was up behind myself, looking down on myself at the same time. 265 00:22:48,860 --> 00:22:53,860 And that lasted about, oh, a minute to a minute and a half. 266 00:22:53,860 --> 00:22:58,860 We've seen that on rare occasion in some of our other subjects and our reports that we have. 267 00:22:58,860 --> 00:23:06,860 They're not frequently reported. We would probably anticipate that it might be much more frequent if the insults were greater. 268 00:23:06,860 --> 00:23:11,860 Rob McConnell's abiding memory is of the tunnel and the light. 269 00:23:11,860 --> 00:23:25,860 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. 270 00:23:25,860 --> 00:23:37,860 And it would just be totally dark on the outside and coming into a bright, real light gray, maybe a white area in the center of the vision. 271 00:23:41,860 --> 00:23:52,860 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. 272 00:23:54,860 --> 00:24:04,860 My feelings were just warm and pleasant, almost euphoric feeling of just that everything was okay. There was no problem at all. 273 00:24:04,860 --> 00:24:25,860 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. 274 00:24:25,860 --> 00:24:37,860 For our pilots, the lack of blood flow, of course, is caused by being exposed to high G-forces. And someone who's having a cardiac arrest is just because the heart's not pumping at all. 275 00:24:37,860 --> 00:24:46,860 One thing that the research has done is, certainly makes me less fearful of death, you can't die without losing consciousness. 276 00:24:46,860 --> 00:24:54,860 The last thing that I'll enter is the unconscious state prior to dying. That's certainly not unpleasant whatsoever. 277 00:24:54,860 --> 00:25:07,860 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. 278 00:25:07,860 --> 00:25:16,860 So, near-death experiences may turn out to have a perfectly straightforward physical cause. Yet, this need not disappoint us. 279 00:25:16,860 --> 00:25:26,860 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.