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Most veridical cases are written up by someone who was not in the room. This one was written up by the nurse the patient says he watched. Penny Sartori spent five years studying near-death experiences in the intensive therapy unit at Morriston Hospital in Swansea, and this was the case she and her supervisors chose to publish in detail.
A 60-year-old man, deeply unconscious with his eyes closed, later gave an accurate account of what three members of staff did around his bed, including which doctor examined him. The authors described it as a case "in which there was strong evidence for both healing and a veridical OBE".
The paper is Penny Sartori, Paul Badham and Peter Fenwick, "A Prospectively Studied Near-Death Experience with Corroborated Out-of-Body Perceptions and Unexplained Healing", Journal of Near-Death Studies 25(2) (2006), 69 to 84. The wider study is in Sartori's monograph The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). To test out-of-body claims, she placed hidden symbols on top of each patient's cardiac monitor, mounted on brightly coloured paper and concealed behind ridges so that they could be seen only from above.
The patient was recovering from emergency surgery for bowel cancer, followed by sepsis and multi-organ failure. Still on a ventilator, he was helped into a chair. Within about five minutes his oxygen saturation fell, his blood pressure dropped to 85/50, and he was put back to bed "deeply unconscious", eyes closed, not responding to voice or "deep painful stimuli". He did not have a cardiac arrest. While he was unresponsive:
He regained full consciousness about three hours later and, still unable to speak, spelled out on a letter board: "I died and I watched it all from above." In later interviews with Sartori he described the scene:
I could also see Penny, who was a nurse. She was drawing something out of my mouth, which looked to me like a long, pink lollipop, like a long, pink thing on a stick.
Patient 10, interviewed by Penny Sartori, Journal of Near-Death Studies 25(2), 2006
He also described the "blonde lady therapist" who "hid behind the curtains, but kept poking her head around", and correctly identified the consultant, whom he had not seen that morning, as the doctor who shone the light. The events were confirmed by the nurse and physiotherapist and documented in his notes by the consultant. He also said that afterwards he could open his right hand, contracted since birth by cerebral palsy, which the authors report as unexplained.
When Sartori asked about the symbol on the monitor beside his bed, he said: "No, I'll be honest with you, Pen, I didn't look."
It is prospective, it was recorded by a witness who was present, the events were noted in the medical record, and the details are unusual: the long catheter rather than the standard sucker, the physiotherapist peering round the screens rather than standing at the bed, the right doctor out of several.
Much of it is conceded in the paper itself. He had been in the unit for eight days and knew its layout and routine. The authors write that nurses always explain what they are doing, even to unconscious patients, so he "could therefore have heard the nurse explain her actions" and "could also have felt her cleaning his mouth". They allow that he may have heard the consultant's voice, and that he may have heard the physiotherapist asking about him. He got the consultant's words wrong ("There's life in the eye").
He was also never close to clinical death. His heart kept beating and his oxygen level was stabilised; the episode was one of low blood pressure and unresponsiveness, not cardiac arrest. Perception through hearing and touch during reduced consciousness is a known phenomenon, and nothing he reported required a view from above. The one item that did, the symbol on the monitor, he did not see. In a later exchange in the same journal, ending with a rejoinder in 2013, Michael Rush argued that methodological weaknesses and possible interpretive bias undermine the paper's conclusions; Sartori replied that she had addressed most of his points in earlier publications.
A carefully recorded case that shows how much an apparently unconscious patient can register. Its distinctive details are suggestive, but every one was within reach of the senses he still had, and the built-in visual test came back empty. Rating: Moderate.
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