The person interviewed in this article is an expert who has studied hundreds of cases of reincarnation, psychologist Jim Tucker from the University of Virginia in the United States.
NPR: When did you first become interested in this topic—the idea of reincarnation being ripe enough to become a scientific exploration?
Psychologist Jim Tucker: I became interested in it in the late 1990s. However, this work has actually been conducted at the University of Virginia for 50 years. Over the decades, as of 2014, we have studied over 2,500 cases of children reporting memories of past lives. What we try to do is determine precisely what the children have said and whether their accounts match the life of someone who lived and died before. When I got involved, I started focusing on cases in the United States. I have explained several cases in a published book, and indeed some reincarnation cases in the U.S. are quite compelling.
(Image: Alan AI Voice lab)
NPR: Let’s talk about some of them. You mentioned your recent book titled Return to Life. You chronicle the stories of many children, including one that captured national attention in the United States. That’s the story of James Leininger—a boy who remembers being a fighter pilot in World War II. Can you walk us through this case?
Tucker: James Leininger (born 1998) is the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana. As a child, he loved toy airplanes. However, as his second birthday approached, James began having nightmares 4 to 5 times a week about a plane crash. He talked about this crash all day, claiming he had been a pilot who took off from a ship. When asked by his father the name of the ship, James said it was Natoma. He stated that he had been shot down by the Japanese and died at Iwo Jima, and that he had a friend named Jack Larsen on the ship. It turns out there was a carrier named the USS Natoma Bay stationed in the Pacific during World War II, which was indeed involved in Iwo Jima. A pilot who was lost there—a young man named James Huston—had his plane crash in exactly the manner James Leininger described: engine shot, exploding in flames, falling into the water, and sinking quickly. At the time, the pilot of the adjacent plane was named Jack Larsen.
NPR: How old was James when he asserted these things?
Tucker: Just turning two.
NPR: That’s astonishing.
Tucker: Like most other cases, the memories faded over time as the boy reached ages 5, 6, or 7, which is normal. But it was certainly a strong memory for a period of time.
NPR: How do you know these children are not exaggerating what they heard from their parents or fabricating stories through imagination when discussing dreams they may have had?
Tucker: Certainly regarding imagination, if we could never verify whether what the child said matched someone who had died, we could only consider it as fantasies. But in cases like James, the previous life of James Huston is too obscure. I mean, he was a pilot killed 50 years earlier, and he was from Pennsylvania, while James is in Louisiana; it seems absolutely impossible that the boy could have gathered this information through any normal means as a 2-year-old. The fact is, the boy’s father spent years—exactly 3 or 4 years—tracking everything down and found that indeed everything James said matched the case of the deceased pilot.
James Leininger (right) claims his past life was pilot James Huston (left)
NPR: Analyze this scientifically for me, because many people hearing this will think it’s impossible.
Tucker: I think it’s very difficult to simply map these cases onto a materialistic understanding of reality. I mean, if matter is what matters, if the material world is all there is, then I don’t know how you could accept and trust these cases. But to me, there are intriguing reasons to believe that consciousness can be seen as a distinct entity from material reality. In fact, some leading scientists in the past, such as the father of quantum theory Max Planck, have stated that he viewed consciousness as fundamental to matter arising from it. Thus, in this case, consciousness does not necessarily have to depend on a physical brain to exist and may continue to exist after the physical brain and body have died. In these cases, it seems that—at least at first glance—a consciousness can attach itself to a new brain and manifest itself as memories of a past life.
NPR: This might be a silly question, but I’ll ask it anyway. Does that mean consciousness needs to reside in a body?
Tucker: Of course, we don’t know for sure. But in the case of James Leininger, I want to mention the 50-year gap between the two lives. Now, who says he didn’t reside in another body in the interim? But my guess would be no. Perhaps a physical body is necessary for us to express ourselves in this world, but it could also be that our brains are conduits for consciousness, and the truth is consciousness has been created somewhere else.
NPR: So, what are you trying to uncover or prove? In your opinion, what constitutes significant scientific progress in this field?
Tucker: I don’t know if I have to prove anything, but I am trying to understand for myself what seems to be going on here. And I believe these cases contribute a lot of evidence that consciousness, at least in some cases, may exist after the death of the body; that life after death is not merely an illusion or something based on faith but that we can also approach the issue analytically and evaluate this perspective based on its merits.
NPR: It’s clear you’ve been interested in this topic for a long time, and that’s what drives your work. But I wonder, after years of examining numerous cases, how has your understanding of the afterlife and what happens after death evolved? Ultimately, has it changed anything for you?
Tucker: Absolutely, I am convinced that there is more than pure material reality. I think that perhaps if we survive, there is not just one experience that any of us have, and the afterlife may be as diverse as life in this world.
Dr. Jim B. Tucker is currently a professor in the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychiatry, and the director of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia in the United States.
DOPS brings together researchers studying near-death phenomena, ghosts, pre-death visions, and other topics related to human consciousness. At DOPS, Dr. Jim continues the work of his predecessor Ian Stevenson, researching children who have been documented to have memories of past lives. Dr. Jim is the author of several books that have been translated into over 20 languages worldwide: Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children who Remember Past Lives, Life Before Life, and Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, the latter being a compilation of the two previous books.
The incredible story of James Leininger has been documented in the book Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot, published in 2009. The authors of this book are James Leininger’s parents—Bruce Leininger and Andrea Leininger—along with professional writer Ken Gross.
