Synopsis:

A national Gallup Poll found 93 percent of Americans believe in one or more paranormal phenomena that Science can't explain and won't accept. Chances are, you're one of them. Despite being reared on Science and skepticism, as we begin the 21st century people of every country and culture continue to experience paranormal phenomena that “shouldn’t” exist. Veteran journalist and business writer Michael Schmicker tracked down the best scientific evidence for these phenomena which refuse to disappear. No National Enquirer nonsense here. Schmicker puzzled over statistics-stuffed psychokinesis studies from Princeton University and reincarnation research from University of Virginia; searched through professional journals and papers presented to the Parapsychological Association; collected and read through 140 books from the 1894 classic ghost and ESP study Phantasms of the Living to a year 2000 study of near–death and out-of-body experiences in the blind, Mindsight; discovered surprising endorsements of psychic research from Freud and Jung, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell; tracked fiery academic debates on the Internet; exchanged email with poltergeist hunters; and even spent an astonishing evening at a mind-bending, spoon-bending PK party in Nevada. If you don’t believe in the paranormal, Best Evidence may shake your disbelief. If you do, Best Evidence will give you a scientific basis for continuing to believe.

Book Excerpt:

Can consciousness survive death? The experience of "Pam Reynolds" (a pseudonym used by Dr. Sabom) offers a well-documented case of someone "seeing" and "hearing" things during an out-of-body (OBE) experience that were physically impossible to see or hear but were later verified as accurate and true. Sabom himself has called it "the most incredible case I have come across in the 20 or so years of researching near death experiences." While her body was unconscious on the operating table, Pam left her body and floated up to the ceiling where she could look down and "see" the surgeon as he cut open her skull with a pneumatically-powered bone saw, and "hear" nurses talking about how small her veins and arteries were. Her visual observations in this OBE state were not vague or general, but rather extremely detailed and specific. For instance, she described the Midas Rex bone saw as resembling an electric toothbrush with a grove or dent on top where it went into the handle; and interchangeable blades stored in a neurosurgery instrument case which to her looked like a socket wrench case. Sabom provides in his book photos of both the saw and instrument case to illustrate how accurate Pam's OBE "sight" was.

But the real value of Pam's case lies in the fact that her consciousness continued to function during the 1991 operation while she was in a state of stone-cold death. In fact, you probably can't get any deader than Pam was during her NDE. For her amazing "standstill" brain operation, doctors had put her in full, hypothermic cardiac arrest. They dropped her core body temperature to 60 degrees, then completely drained all the blood from her head, and left her with no measurable breathing, heartbeat or brain waves. Verifying this absence of life, or vital signs, were just about every medical measuring device available, including instruments which monitored her blood pressure, blood flow, oxygen level in her blood, core body temperature, urinary temperature, and cortical brain activity. Her NDE (near death experience) was actually by all known standards a "DE" (death experience). Yet while in this verified (by full instrumentation) state of extreme clinical death, Pam progressed through a typical NDE, through a tunnel, into the light, were she met her cousin, grandmother, grandfather, great-great aunt, and other people. When it was time to return, her uncle took Pam back through the tunnel to her physical body. This NDE case perhaps comes closest to providing solid, scientific evidence suggestive of post-mortem survival of consciousness.

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Topics/Categories:

death-bed visions, ESP, Ghosts, mediums, mind-body medicine, near-death experiences, poltergeists, psychokinesis, Reincarnation

Type of Work:

Book

Publishers:

iUniverse, Inc.

Purchase From:

Amazon.com
Barnes and Noble.com

Original Publish Date:

2001-04-01

ISBNs:

0-595-21906-3

Formats:

Paperback, Paperback 2nd Edition