Do an amazon search on "NDE" and you’ll turn up reams of paper memorializing Other Side encounters with Muffins and Bowsers galore, quite a few angels, and occasionally even the Big Guy Him/Herself.

Over the decades the NDE-ers have formed one of the more successful New Age profit centers. Books, workshops, $500-per-hour counseling, it all adds up. Not to mention wee-hours visits with Art Bell. Whitley Strieber, et al, and enough Internet sites to revive Yahoo.

Folderol notwithstanding, disconcerting hard evidence has gradually accumulated that behind the metaphysical show biz NDE hype, something very strange is going on here. People on operating tables, in emergency rooms, in ambulances would go flat. No heart-beat, no brain activity. Code Puce or whatever would sound. Resuscitation efforts would ensue, and sometimes be successful.

Among the revivees, in addition to those who would go on, and on, and on about Light Tunnels, Loved Ones, and the like, there were those who would describe in perfect detail persons, settings, and events that occurred around their body while they were absolutely 100% clinically dead.

Science, and the best instrumentation science has to offer, said that these people were d-e-a-d. Which, among other things, meant that they had no way to acquire, much less remember, any sensory input. Yet here they were, after resuscitation, describing accurately sights and sounds that had happened while they were d-e-a-d.

Researchers could (and did) dismiss a lot of the NDE stories as delusion arising from chemical changes of the brain under stress. They even managed to reproduce certain of the experiences by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Anyway, it was all so dreamlike, so drug-like, that was difficult for anyone except habitués of the nether aisles of Barnes and Noble to take it seriously.

Unexplained and unreproduced was that persistent reporting of events in THIS world that happened while the persons were, as far as science could determine, dead.

In the late 1980s, a Dutch doctor, Pim van Lommel, undertook to collect and analyze NDE incidents in a way no one had done before. He and several physician-colleagues spent 12 years on the project. They recently reported their disconcerting results in The Lancet.

For skeptics and others of a doubting-Thomas bent: The Lancet is to British medicine what JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) is to American medicine. You don’t get any harder science than this.

What the Dutch doctors found>>