Al Sullivan and the Surgeon Who Flapped

The trouble with most veridical claims is that the detail is generic: people in scrubs, machines beeping, someone shouting "clear". This case is cited because the detail is odd. A patient under general anaesthesia said his surgeon was flapping his arms like a bird. His cardiologist knew exactly what he meant.

The claim

Al Sullivan said that during quadruple bypass surgery he left his body, saw himself on the table with his chest open, and saw his surgeon looking perplexed and "flapping his arms as if trying to fly". The surgeon had a peculiar habit that matched. Proponents argue that Sullivan, deeply anaesthetised, had no normal way to know it.

What was documented, when, by whom

The case is number 14 in Emily Williams Cook, Bruce Greyson and Ian Stevenson, "Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports", Journal of Scientific Exploration 12(3) (1998), 377 to 406. The facts as they give them:

• Sullivan was a 56-year-old van driver. On 18 January 1988 his heart began beating irregularly at work and he was admitted to Hartford Hospital, Connecticut. During tests a coronary artery became blocked and he was rushed into what became quadruple bypass surgery.
• He wrote an account of his experience in 1990, and Greyson met him that year at a Connecticut meeting of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
• In the account he describes rising through dark smoke, looking over a wall and seeing himself below, "cut open so as to expose my chest cavity", and his surgeon, who "appeared to be somewhat perplexed. I thought he was flapping his arms as if trying to fly." He also describes meeting his dead brother-in-law and his mother, who died when he was seven.
• Sullivan said that as soon as the breathing tube was out he told his cardiologist, Dr Anthony LaSala. LaSala's first thought was drugs. When Sullivan described the flapping, LaSala asked who had told him; it was a habit of the surgeon, Dr Hiroyoshi Takata, to flatten his palms against his chest and direct his assistants by pointing with his elbows.
• In the autumn of 1997 Greyson spoke to both doctors. Takata confirmed the habit but "could not confirm specifically that he had 'flapped' his elbows during Mr. Sullivan's surgery in particular". LaSala confirmed that Sullivan had told him about it shortly after he regained consciousness, and said he had never seen another surgeon do this.

The authors anticipated one obvious objection. Sullivan's records show that he was given a local anaesthetic while a balloon pump was inserted, and only then a general anaesthetic. Might he have seen Takata's gesture while still awake and later misplaced it in time? Greyson asked him for more detail. Sullivan said he saw Takata standing alone over his open chest, held by clamps, while two other surgeons worked on his leg. That is the stage at which a leg vein is harvested for the grafts, so the observation, if accurate, came during general anaesthesia.

Why it's cited

It has three things rarely found together: an idiosyncratic detail nobody would guess, a physician who heard the report soon after the surgery, and that physician's immediate recognition of the detail. Cook, Greyson and Stevenson called it "a significant improvement of the evidence", and wrote that they knew of no normal sensory means by which he "could have learned about the peculiar behavior of the surgeon."

The skeptical case

The authors list the first weakness themselves: the event happened in the same room as Sullivan's body, so ordinary perception during a lapse in anaesthesia cannot be fully ruled out. Takata's elbow-pointing was a standing habit, by his account used whenever he had scrubbed in and was not yet operating, so it could well have been on display while Sullivan was still awake under local anaesthesia for the balloon pump.

Second, time. The investigation took place nine years after the operation, and the key exchange with LaSala is in Sullivan's own retelling. LaSala's confirmation, as reported, is that Sullivan told him "about the experience" soon afterwards and that Takata has the habit, not a contemporaneous note of exactly what Sullivan said.

Third, the detail is not quite what Takata described. Sullivan's version was that the surgeon did it before scrubbing in; Takata said he did it after scrubbing in. And the leg-vein detail that places the sighting under general anaesthesia came from Sullivan's memory when asked about it years later, which is exactly the kind of detail memory supplies.

Status

This is one of the better cases on record because the detail is specific and two doctors stand behind parts of it. It is also a single case, reconstructed long after the fact, in which the perceived event took place a few feet from the patient's own head. Rating: Moderate.

Sources

• Emily Williams Cook, Bruce Greyson and Ian Stevenson, "Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports", Journal of Scientific Exploration 12(3) (1998), 377 to 406.
• Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research), "Near-Death Experiences: Paranormal Aspects".