Still More Pre-1975 Near-Death Experiences or Out-of-Body Experiences

 Near-death experiences first started to become well-known around 1975, with the popularity of Raymond Moody's book on the concept (entitled Life After Life). But we have very good reason to believe that such experiences have been a fact of human experience long before Moody's book.  In my posts below I document near-death experiences dating from long before 1975: 

Near-Death High-Speed Life Reviews From Before 1950

An Early Veridical Near-Death Experience

Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences Long Before 1975

The Evidence for Out-of-Body Experiences

Two More Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century

Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century

Old Newspaper Articles Describing Near-Death Experiences

Let us look at some more cases of near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences dating from long before 1975. The first account is from page 62 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

The account above (and one below) remind us that before the term "out-of-body experience" became common, it was often more common for writers to use the term "out-of-the-body experience." Anyone searching for old accounts of this type should remember that. 

The next account is from page 67 of the January 31, 1935 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

The next account is from page 40 of the January 22, 1932 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

An account of a near-death experience occurring during World War II appeared on page 179 of the November - December 1945 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which you can read here.  We read a doctor recalling his recollection of a woman saying that after her bus was hit by a flying bomb, she found herself up in the clouds. She thought she was going to see God, but was told "No, it is not yet time." She mentioned an experience of extraordinary vividness, with an altered sense of time. I won't quote the account, because instead of it being a first-hand account, it is a doctor's recollection of what the patient told her; and such second-hand accounts have lesser value as evidence. 

On page 59 of the same edition we read another account of an out-of-body experience, in which someone states this:

"The ceiling seemed to disappear as also the roof, and I clearly saw a star, or what appeared to be a star. Then, I can only describe this my own way, I was given psychic vision, for my Spirit left my body which I saw by my wife's in bed. I seemed to resemble the shape of a flame with a long silver thread attached to my earth body. I enjoyed, what I can only liken to, the Peace of God which passeth all understanding, I have never enjoyed such mental exhilaration before or since."

On page 123 of the 1954 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (Volume 48), which you can read here, we read of a poll done of 42 students who were asked: "Have you ever actually seen your physical body from a viewpoint completely outside that body, like standing beside the bed and looking at yourself lying in the bed, or like floating in the air near your body?” 33% answered "Yes." 

On the next page we read this:

"Of the students who reported having seen their physical bodies from outside positions, more than one-fourth said that during such experiences they seemed to be occupying another body, which seemed to be real, tangible, and capable of voluntary movement. More than two out of five reported that, during their out-of-the-body experiences they seemed to be able to pass through seemingly solid objects —like closed doors, or blank walls." 

On that same page (page 124) we are given two accounts of out-of-body experiences:

"2. Miss Nan Tignor, on March 8, 1953, reported the following experience: 'I had just awakened and dressed, and was on my way to my first class—about 10:15 a.m. 1 was standing on a hill looking at myself walking toward me. I could see myself walking toward the top of the hill very clearly and distinctly. 1 could see the path (rocks) on which I was walking and the vague surroundings. From my physical body, I was at a position about thirty feet away. I could see no one but myself.' Miss Tignor reports having had several such experiences, in each of which she could see herself in a situation either walking or sitting about twenty to thirty feet from her physical body, and in familiar surroundings. 

3. The following experience was reported by Mr. W. on February 28, 1953: 'I was hospitalized for pulmonary tuberculosis in August, 1948, when I experienced seeing my physical body from a viewpoint completely outside that body. I did not seem to be occupying another body—I seemed to be a rather formless entity.' "

The account by Nan Tignor has better value as evidence, as it is from a named witness. 

Below are statements made on page 23 of the periodical here. The author is Sylvan Muldoon, one of the main experts of his time on the topic of out-of-body experiences:

" 'On one occasion at a dentist’s office.' says Arthur J. Wills, Ph.D., C.E., of 224 Herrick Road, Riverside, Illinois, 'the dentist was drilling in my tooth. Suddenly I found myself outside of myself looking over the dentist’s shoulder into my own mouth!' 

Mr. M. L. Hymans had just such an experience, too, but on account of its similarity, I do not repeat it. Later, however, he had a second experience out-of-the-body, at a time when he was staying at a London hotel. Mr. Hymans had been suffering with a heart ailment. He awoke one morning from sleep and shortly afterward fainted. 

'To my great surprise I found myself high up in the room, from where, to my terror, I saw my body on the bed, eyes closed. I tried to re-enter my body, but without success, and concluded that I was dead. I could not leave the room, and felt chained to it, immobilized in the corner where I first found myself. An hour or two later I heard knockings on the door ... I could not respond. A little later the hotel porter climbed through the fire escape to the balcony. I saw him enter the room and look anxiously at mv body on the bed and then at the door. Soon the manager and others entered and a physician came. I saw him shake his head when he examined my heart. He introduced a spoon between my lips. I lost consciousness and awoke in bed. The experience lasted for two hours.' "

Below is part of an 1893 account of a near-death experience, one you can read here. We have the narrative element of something like a mix-up to explain the close brush with death, an element that I seem to recall occurs rather often in Asian or Mideast accounts of near-death experiences. 

There was recently published in The Washingtonian a long article on near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, which you can read here. The article mentions pre-1975 experiences of this type:

"And the phenomenon has a long history. During the first century, Pliny the Elder wrote about a man who’d experienced something that sounds a lot like an NDE. Carl Jung reported having one during a 1944 heart attack, later describing how he’d left his body and observed the world from above. And years after a 1961 NDE during a bout with pneumonia, Elizabeth Taylor told Oprah Winfrey all about it, including a conversation with her deceased husband."

Elizabeth Taylor's account of her experience can be found in the interesting clip below:

 The policy of most scientists on so many of these types of mysterious phenomena is shown in the visual below, which illustrates what would have happened to a typical out-of-body experience being reported before 1975. 

Materialists Act Like Soldiers in a War on Meaning

 Behold today's materialists, many of which act like they were soldiers in a War on Meaning. What we can call the War on Meaning is a long-standing agenda of materialists to describe human life in a way that makes it sound as meaningless as possible.  Materialists started out by pushing the idea that the human race is a mere accident of nature, contrary to all of the facts of biology which suggest in the strongest way that we are here on purpose. Materialists never had more than the scantiest crumbs of reasoning to try to back up such a claim that the human species is an accident of nature, but they used "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" tactics to try to make their specious specks look like something substantial.  

Materialists have long engaged in free-will denialism, which has been part of this War on Meaning. Trying to portray human life as having  no moral meaning, materialists attempted to persuade us that all of our actions are unavoidable on the grounds that every decision is just chemistry or electricity going on in the brain, and that we are controlled by the "falling dominoes" of molecular interactions. The best way to debunk this nonsense is to study the brain and its many severe physical shortfalls very carefully, which leads the sufficiently diligent scholar and philosopher of mind to the conclusion that brains cannot explain human decisions, human beliefs or human memory. Once we adequately study the brain and human mental phenomena in all its diversity and human best mental performances that are impossible to explain by neural means, the malignant foolishness of free-will denialism melts away like the Wicked Witch of the West melting away near the end of The Wizard of Oz.

Later on materialists tried to drag us down the craziest of rabbit holes, pushing the nutty idea of an infinity of parallel universes in which all possible events occur, and in which human life has no meaning. There was never the slightest iota of evidence for believing in such a claim. The claim was based on the silliest reasoning. It was argued that there is in quantum physics a puzzle of "wave function collapse," and that one way to get around the puzzle is to imagine that every possible outcome is actualized.  This was the stupidest reasoning. 

The very concept of a "wave function collapse" is a social construct of physicists, not an actual physical reality. A wave function is part of a mathematical calculation method that physicists find useful in making certain predictions. According to most interpretations of quantum mechanics, there is no actual event in nature corresponding to a "wave function collapse." As the source here says, "Of the several 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics, more than half deny the collapse of the wave function." Another source puts it this way:

"In one view, a wave function is a piece of math, an equation. It’s not a physical thing. So, it can’t collapse in any physical sense. The collapse is metaphorical. This is one interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s the interpretation taught in most university classes, the Copenhagen Interpretation."

So the idea that we should believe in some infinity of parallel universes because we are puzzled by a wave function collapse was always the silliest nonsense, rather like believing in an infinite anti-universe because we are puzzled by the concept of negative infinity. But many materialists love the idea of an infinity of parallel universes, because it gives them a pretext for a description of reality in which all meaning is destroyed. Of course, some multiverse in which all possible outcomes occur is a multiverse devoid of any meaning. A person's life can have no meaning if he lives in some multiverse in which everything he might possibly do occurs. 

Then there is the simulated universe theory originated by Nick Bostrom. It is the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations have computers that are simulating our reality, and that you are just some bits in an extraterrestrial computer. The reasoning Bostrom gave for the idea was fallacious. It was based on the idea that there is a nonzero chance that extraterrestrial computers can produce a stream of experiences like human experiences. This crucial premise of the theory was false. Computers can no more create a stream of human experiences than your television set can cause a tiger to leap out of its screen and bite you. Arguments that we are mere bits in some extraterrestrial computer program are part of the War on Meaning. If you were merely part of some simulation of human life running on a computer on another planet, then your life presumably would have no meaning, and you could not even be sure that the people you see really exist. 

Recently we had on a popular podcast an example of the featherweight reasoning of simulated universe theorists. It comes in the 56:12 mark of the interview here with AI expert Roman Yampolskiy. The podcast host talks about how there is some impressive Google program producing video output from text prompts. The host says this is the beginning of being able to create a simulation that simulates "everything we see here," apparently referring to his studio and his current podcast. Yampolskiy then unwisely says, "That's why I think that we are in one, that's exactly the reason," and by "we are in one" he means a simulated universe in which our experience is produced by computers. 

This is some very bad reasoning. The impressive Google program the podcast host is referring to is something that merely produces pixels on a computer screen. Neither that program nor any other program has ever produced the slightest iota of human experience. It's the same thing for video consoles such as PlayStation and X-Box. They produce mere pixel outputs on a screen, and never produce the slightest speck of human experience. A human may interact with a computer or a video console, and have his experience affected by such devices. But no such devices have ever produced a single second or a single millisecond of human experience. 

Therefore all arguments based on improving computer proficiency are completely worthless in supporting the idea that computers on other planets can produce our experience. What is going on in such arguments is equivocation sophistry. Ambiguity in the word "simulation" is being leveraged. First the simulated universe believer uses the word "simulation" to refer to something that is only output on a computer screen. Then (without announcing that he is changing how he is using the word "simulation") the believer starts talking about universe simulations, using "simulation" in an entirely different sense, to mean something that has never been observed to any degree whatsoever: the production of human-like experience from computer activity. 

This is the same kind of equivocation sophistry that goes on if someone says, "Taylor Swift is a star; a star is a giant self-luminous ball of hot gas; so Taylor Swift is a giant self-luminous ball of hot gas." In that fallacious reasoning, the speaker switches the definition of "star," using one definition at the beginning, and an entirely different definition at the end. Similar tricks are used by the simulated universe believer. First he refers to a "simulation" that is a mere output of pixels on a screen. Then, without announcing he is switching the definition of "simulation," he says something about a "simulated universe" in which the idea is a flow of human experience like the experience humans have. Progress in producing outputs on computer screens gives not the slightest warrant for thinking that outputs of human experience could be produced by a computer. No computer has ever produced one speck of human experience. 

Materialists are constantly engaging in equivocation sophistry like this.  Their biggest example involves equivocation on the word "evolution." First the materialist will tell you "evolution is fact," referring to a fact of mere gene pool change over time. Then the materialist will say that this proves the doctrine of common descent, which is a definition of "evolution" entirely different (and a billion times more presumptuous) than the mere fact of gene pool change over time. 

Yampolskiy is reasoning very poorly when he states this at the 57:02 mark, using the phrase "we are in one" to mean that humans are merely part of an extraterrestrial computer simulation of our existence:

Yampolskiy: "That's why I think we are in one, that's exactly the reason. AI is getting to the level of creating human agents, human level agents. And virtual reality is getting to the level of being  indistinguishable from ours."

There is progress in computer programming and data processing that allows some computer programs to perform highly, debatably at "human level."  But that provides not the slightest warrant for establishing the possibility or likelihood that human experience is produced by extraterrestrial computers. Getting a computer to produce a second, minute or day of human experience is an entirely different task from getting computers to produce some visual output on a screen that looks like human experience. Similarly, progress in virtual reality provides not the slightest warrant for thinking that a computer could produce a single minute of human experience (not to be confused with screen output simulating human experience). And the fact that AI systems can provide high-performing results (such as well-answering a typed question) provides not the slightest warrant for thinking that computers will ever be able to produce any speck of actual human experience. 

A person as old as me has seen over his lifetime the greatest progress in screen representations of tigers. The first tigers I saw on TV were blurry black-and-white affairs, no bigger on the TV screen than a dinner plate. Now my wide-screen TV can produce a stunningly sharp image of a tiger, almost as big as a real tiger. But it would be the worst type of reasoning for me to reason like this:

"Gee, the tigers on TV sure are getting better as the years pass. The first tigers I saw were black-and-white, small and blurry. Now my TV tigers are so big and realistic-looking, looking just like real tigers. So it seems that soon a tiger will leap out of my TV screen, and that might be dangerous. I better get a gun to protect myself."

The fact that there has been progress in TV screens producing images of tigers provides not the slightest warrant for thinking that a TV could ever produce a living tiger that could leap out of a TV screen. And progress in simulating human experiences on television screens and computer screens provides not the slightest warrant for thinking that computers could ever produce a single second of actual human experience. There is only one thing capable of producing actual human experience: a real live human being. 

A Recent Paper Indicates a 14% Difference Between the Genomes of Humans and Chimps

The intellectual empire of Darwinism was not built on honest speech.  Darwinism got launched by the word trick of using the phrase "natural selection" for a claimed survival-of-the-fittest effect that was not actually any such thing as selection. "Selection" is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent, but the so-called natural selection depicted by Darwin was no such thing, being a mere blind accidental process rather than any willful act of selection.  Darwin was also guilty of larger deceits, such as the glaring deceit (in a passage of The Descent of Man) of claiming that " there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties."  This appalling lie continues to be repeated by the disciples of Darwin, and a few days before writing this post I saw the same witless claim repeated by one of the evangelists of Darwinism, who cited Darwin as his "proof" for this obviously false claim. 

A very silly thing to say

Following in the footsteps of their adored master, the apostles of Darwinism have for a very long time been guilty of dozens of deceits and misrepresentations large and small. In my post here I have a numbered list of 80+ such deceits, word tricks, misleading statements and tall tales.  One of the worst of these deceits has been the massive repetition by Darwinists of a claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same. Typically the claim is made without any citation of its source. The word "genome" refers to what is in DNA. The genome includes the set of all genes in the DNA of an organism. 

Below are some of the leading scientific sources where this false claim has been made:

• “We share more than 98 percent of our DNA and almost all of our genes with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.” (Nature)
• “Most studies indicate that when genomic regions are compared between chimpanzees and humans, they share about 98.5 percent sequence identity.” (Scientific American)
• “Humans and chimps share a surprising 98.8 percent of their DNA.” (American Museum of Natural History)
• “Humans share about 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.” (Science)

There are many scientific papers contradicting such a claim. A 2005 paper had the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees."  A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was in error. The 2021 study "An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes" published in the journal Science states, "We find that only 1.5 to 7% of the modern human genome is uniquely human," and later states, "We find that approximately 7% of the human autosomal genome is human-unique and free of both admixture and ILS."  A 2002 paper is entitled "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels." 

Recently we had the publication of another paper showing how false is the claim that human DNA is 98% the same as chimpanzee DNA. The paper is one entitled "Complete sequencing of ape genomes," which you can read here. The authors act just as if they were trying to make it almost as hard as possible for readers to get a clear statement of how they debunked the claim that human DNA is 98% similar to chimpanzee DNA. The main body of the text says little more than this on this topic:

"Overall, sequence comparisons among the complete ape genomes revealed greater divergence than previously estimated (Supplementary Notes III–IV). Indeed, 12.5–27.3% of an ape genome failed to align or was inconsistent with a simple one-to-one alignment, thereby introducing gaps."

To get a graph that shows a comparison between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome, you must go to the trouble of opening up the paper's Supplementary Information, as a PDF file. You can do that by using the link here. The average reader will still by stymied, as nowhere in that file do we have a simple quote clearly stating a degree of difference between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA.

Finding the relevant figure requires the following pieces of luck that 99% would not be likely to experience:

• First, you have to know that the Latin name for the chimpanzee species is Pan troglodytes. 
• Then you have to notice that in Supplementary Table VIII.37 the authors are using "mPanTro3" as a tag for the chimpanzee genome. 
• Then you have to somehow find out that the authors are using "hg002" as a tag meaning the human genome. 
• Then you have to somehow find your way to Supplementary Figure III.12, where the seventh row and the eighth row has a comparison between "PanTro3" (the chimpanzee genome) and ""hg002" (the human genome). 

Finally, if all this luck occurs to you, you can get to the relevant visual depiction, which is found in the red rounded rectangle below, where we see a depiction (according to one measure) of the difference between the human genome ("hg002") and the chimpanzee genome ("PanTro3"):

Notice the numbers above. They are about 13%. What the authors have found is that by one important measure (a "gap divergence" measure), there is about a 13% difference between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome. 

Casey Luskin in his post here helped to clarify what is meant by this "gap divergence" measure and another measure called SNV (single-nucleotide variant). He gives us a hypothetical stretch of DNA showing examples of such "gap divergences" and SNV differences:

In the diagram one line represents part of human DNA, and the other line represents part of chimpanzee DNA. The blue parts are parts where you cannot compare the human DNA part to the corresponding part of chimpanzee DNA, or vice versa. 

To compute the total difference between the human genome and the genome of the chimp, we must add these two different types of differences (corresponding to the blue parts and the yellow parts in the diagram above). The paper says that the SNV differences (single-nucleotide variant differences) between humans and chimpanzees are about 1.5%.  To compute the total difference between the genomes we need to add up the 13% "gap difference" measure stated in the paper and the 1.5% SNV measure. That leaves you with a total difference of about 14.5% between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome. 

So the Darwinist authorities who so often told us that there was merely about a 1.5% difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees were very much in error, off by a factor of about 1000%. Previous studies published years ago had already shown the falsehood of the the claim of a 1.5% difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, suggesting that that the actual difference was several times larger. But Darwinism evangelists kept citing that phony figure of a 1.5% difference, a figure that was never well-established. 

It is rather obvious why we were so long deceived in this matter. Darwinists have always tried to make the ocean-sized gap between humans and chimpanzees and other apes look like a small gap, as a way of trying to make more credible claims of a natural evolution from an ape-like predecessor to humans. 

A recent article from the very mainstream site LiveScience.com helps clarify that the difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees is much greater than 1 or 2 percent. The article tells us this:

"The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species' genomes, experts told Live Science....the 99% figure is misleading because it focuses on stretches of DNA where the human and chimp genomes can be directly aligned and ignores sections of the genomes that are difficult to compare, Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the Comparative Genomics group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC/UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

Sections of human DNA without a clear counterpart in chimp DNA make up approximately 15% to 20% of the genome, Marques-Bonet said. For example, some bits of DNA are present in one species but missing in the other; these are known as 'insertions and deletions'...

So, while earlier studies suggested a 98% to 99% similarity, comparisons that include harder-to-align regions push that difference closer to 5% to 10%, Marques-Bonet said. 'And if we account for the regions still too complex to align properly with current technology, the true overall difference is likely to exceed 10%,'  he said.

In fact, a 2025 study found that human and chimpanzee genomes are approximately 15% different when compared directly and completely." 

What happened is that our mainstream biology authorities for quite a few recent years engaged in the most outrageous deceit by making the false claim that human DNA is 98% the same or 99% the same as chimpanzee DNA. This is only one of innumerable lies and deceits and misleading claims that over the decades have been used to prop up the dubious claims of Darwinists. 

Acting like a giant echo chamber, the ideological soldiers of the materialist mainstream tend to uncritically repeat any useful-sounding sound bite that seems to them like a good talking point. So by a process of social contagion in a herd-like conformist community, an incorrect talking point can become a belief community speech custom, with the same false claim repeated on a thousand web pages and in a thousand professor lectures. 

In the year 2025 the materialist-oriented newspaper The Guardian published an article confessing how scanty is the claimed fossil evidence for the evolution of humans from apelike predecessors. It stated this:

"Our direct knowledge of the first few million years of human evolution derives from a collection of bone fragments that could no more than halfway fill a large shoebox....Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random."

The wikipedia.org article on "Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor" (CHLCA) confesses, "no fossil has yet been identified as a probable candidate for the CHLCA." Faced with the weakness of fossil evidence backing up the claim that humans and chimpanzees are descendants of a common ancestor, the assertion that human and chimpanzee genomes were 98% or 99% similar seemed to serve as a crucial substitute talking point.  Now that it is clear that such a talking point was untrue, our confidence in such an ancestry claim should be disrupted or shattered. 

Is the recent LiveScience.com article an indication that scientists will no longer give us deceptive miseducation on this topic, and will tell us the truth on this topic from now on? Not quite. The article gives us some evidence of the deceit continuing. The article ends with a quote by a scientist saying, "Humans and chimps are made up of essentially the same building blocks (proteins), but these are used in somewhat different ways to make a human versus a chimp." This sentence misleads us in four ways:

• Organisms such as chimpanzees and humans are not honestly described as being "made up of" proteins. Physically a human is made up of a skeletal system and organ systems, which are made up of organs and other components, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of enormously organized cells, which are made up of organelles, which are made up of protein complexes, which are made up of proteins. You vastly misstate the amount of organization in the human body when you say that humans are made up of proteins. 
• Proteins are way too complex to be honestly described as "building blocks." A building block is something all made of the same thing, usually clay. Protein molecules are very complex components built up of hundreds or thousands of very specially arranged amino acids, with each protein molecule having thousands of well-arranged atomic parts. The continued use of the dishonest phrase "building blocks" to refer to things with thousands of well-arranged parts is an inexcusable deception which can be easily avoided by using the term "building components." 
• It is not true that humans and chimpanzees are made up of the same proteins, because a 2005 paper had the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees."  
• Given all the physical differences and mental differences between bipedal humans who can speak very well and fast and non-speaking chimps who normally walk on four limbs rather than two, it is misleading to claim that proteins are merely used in "somewhat different ways" in humans. 

We can expect that lies about a mere 1% genomic difference between chimps and humans will long continue, just as many biologists have long continued to tell the even worse lie that there is in DNA or its genes a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body (a lie told because of reasons explained here). The ideological motivation for telling the first of these lies is basically the same as the ideological motivation for telling the second of these lies. 

Psychic Experiences in the News, Part 5

Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making about newspaper accounts of things such as ESP, precognition, prophetic dreams, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. 

If you have any difficulty viewing this video, try the link here. 

To see another video as long as this one, with the same type of newspaper clippings, see Part 1 of this video series using the link here, or see Part 2 of this video series using the link here, or see part 3 of this video series using the link here or see part 4 of this series using this link here.