The Accounts: Veridical Perception Outside the Lab

The case files in this section were chosen because they are the best documented: prospective hospital studies, laboratory tests, cases investigated by researchers with records in hand. That makes them the fairest test of the question. It also makes them a very small sample. Most reports of seeing something true while out of the body never came near a study. They happened at home, on the road, in a crib, at sea, and they were told afterwards to a nurse, a spouse, a doctor or a book.

One person's story proves very little. But there are a great many of these stories, they come from people with no reason to coordinate, and some of them were confirmed by someone else. This page collects twenty of the strongest. Each one gets its source, what was perceived, who confirmed it, when it was written down, and its weak point. The weak points matter: this is testimony, not experiment, and it should be read that way. It is also too much testimony to wave away.

How many are there?

Two people have tried to count.

Janice Miner Holden (2009). In The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009), Holden gathered 107 published cases of apparent veridical perception during near-death experiences, the oldest from 1882. By her count, 37 per cent were completely accurate and confirmed by someone other than the experiencer, such as a doctor, a relative or a record. Another 55 per cent were completely accurate by the experiencer's own report. About 6 per cent contained some error, and roughly one case was entirely wrong. The often-quoted "92 per cent accurate" is those first two figures added together. The fair criticism, made by Andrew Paquette in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (2012), is that very few of the 107 were interviewed within days of the event.

Jeffrey Long (2010). Long, who founded NDERF, went through 617 consecutive accounts submitted between October 2004 and October 2008. In Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2010), chapter 4, he reports that 287 described real-world events that could in principle be checked, and that 280 of those contained nothing unrealistic. Sixty-five people said they had checked their observations afterwards, and none reported an error. Read those numbers carefully: "realistic" means nothing in the account was implausible, not that anyone verified it, and the 65 checks are the experiencers' own say-so. What the figures do show is the scale. Out of a few hundred ordinary submissions, nearly half include a claim about the physical world.

Rivas, Dirven and Smit (2016). The Self Does Not Die (IANDS, 2016; second edition 2023) is the most demanding collection. A case is only admitted if someone other than the experiencer confirmed the paranormal element, in writing or on record. More than a hundred cases passed. Several are below.

Robert Monroe's visits

Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body (1971), chapter 3, "On the Evidence", logs four visits he checked by phone or in person within days. He visited a sick friend and found him outdoors instead, in a light overcoat and hat. He saw a man loading an odd machine into a car, which turned out to be a Van de Graaff generator. And he pinched a colleague on holiday, who later showed him "two brown and blue marks at exactly the spot." The details, and their weaknesses, are on his page. Their strength is that they were deliberate: Monroe set out to see something, wrote down what he saw, then checked. Their weakness is that he is the only witness to the first half.

Caregivers who were seen

In 1993 Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence published three short cases in the Journal of Near-Death Studies ("Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences", 11(4), 223 to 229), each reported by a nurse or social worker who was involved.

• The shoe on the roof. Kathy Milne, a nurse at Hartford Hospital, described a resuscitated patient who said she had floated up through the floors and out above the roof, where she saw the Hartford skyline and "a red object. It turned out to be a shoe." A skeptical resident had a janitor take him onto the roof. In Milne's words, "he had a red shoe and became a believer, too." Weak point: it rests on Milne's letter of 1992, years after the event, with no statement from the patient or the resident.
• The plaid shoelaces. Joyce Harmon, an intensive-care nurse, came back from holiday in the summer of 1982 wearing new plaid laces and helped resuscitate a patient that day. The next day the patient told her, "Oh, you're the one with the plaid shoelaces!" Weak point: recorded ten years later, from her memory.
• The yellow top. Sue Saunders held an oxygen mask over a man's face while he had no heartbeat. Days later he told her, "You looked so much better in your yellow top." She had been wearing a yellow smock. Weak point: recalled long afterwards, with no notes made at the time.

The same paper is honest about the genre. It reveals that one of the most famous cases in circulation, Larry Dossey's "blind Sarah" (Recovering the Soul, 1989), was a composite that Dossey constructed. That case should never be cited, and we don't.

The needles on the defibrillator

Cardiologist Michael Sabom began as a skeptic. In Recollections of Death (Harper and Row, 1982) he interviewed 32 cardiac patients who said they had watched their own resuscitation, and compared them with 25 cardiac patients without NDEs who were asked to imagine theirs. Most of the comparison group made major errors. One of his subjects, a retired Air Force pilot, described the defibrillator meter as "square and had two needles on there, one fixed and one which moved," and the moving needle climbing in stages as the machine charged (pages 99 to 101). That is a detail you would only know by watching the machine charge. Weak point: a pilot reads gauges for a living, the interview came five years after the arrest, and Susan Blackmore argued that patients drifting in and out of consciousness pick up cues the comparison group never had.

Cases confirmed by family or staff

• Jan Price (December 1993, at home). During a near-death experience at home she described, word for word, what the paramedics did. Her husband, who was there, confirmed it on camera for a documentary. From The Self Does Not Die.
• Kristle Merzlock. A young girl who nearly drowned in a pool described her emergency-room treatment, and also what her family at home were doing and wearing while she was in hospital. The family confirmed it to the paediatrician Melvin Morse (Closer to the Light, 1990). Weak point: confirmed to the investigator, with no independent records.
• George Rodonaia (1976, Soviet Union). After his near-death experience he said he had seen a newborn in the hospital with an undiagnosed broken hip, which an X-ray confirmed. His wife confirmed this account. Weak point: the sourcing is late and comes through popular books.
• The anaesthesiologist's patient (NDERF, 2007). A patient under general anaesthesia for lung surgery said that from the ceiling he saw a cardiac team come in, and concluded he must have had heart surgery. The account was submitted to NDERF by the anaesthesiologist who was present, who confirms the cardiac team was called. It is the best-sourced NDERF item we found, though it is one doctor's report with no records attached.
• The ship wallpaper (NDERF, 1966). Dianne B had pneumonia at two or three months old. Around age four she described to her mother the room she had been nursed in: the crib moved into a dining room, ship-pattern wallpaper, olive curtains, a glass vaporiser with rick-rack trim. The family had moved by then. Her mother kept asking who had told her. Weak point: written about 56 years later, and the mother's confirmation reaches us only through Dianne.
• The blood exchange (NDERF, 1968). Tom N described a blood exchange, one arm drained while the other was infused. An orderly asked him, "How the hell did you know we did that, you were gone?" Weak point: one unnamed witness, quoted from memory.
• The horse on the road (NDERF, 1995). Betty R was thrown from a horse onto a road. She says she watched the horse go back to the barn and her employer drive out looking for her, and that those present confirmed it. Weak point: nobody is named.

Before hospitals: the Wilmot case (1863)

In October 1863 Mr. S. R. Wilmot was crossing from Liverpool to New York through a nine-day storm. At home in Watertown, Connecticut, his wife lay awake worrying, and felt that she crossed the sea, found a low black steamer, went into his stateroom, saw a man in the upper berth, kissed her husband and left. On board, Wilmot dreamed exactly that visit. His bunkmate, who was awake, teased him the next morning about the woman who had come in. When Wilmot got home, his wife asked whether he had received "a visit", and described the stateroom correctly. The case was investigated for the Society for Psychical Research and published in its Proceedings in 1891 (volume 7). Weak point: it was written down 26 years later, the bunkmate was dead by then, and all three accounts ultimately come through Mr. Wilmot.

Peak in Darien: meeting someone not known to have died

A different kind of veridical claim. In a 2010 paper ("Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died", Anthropology and Humanism 35(2), 159 to 171), the psychiatrist Bruce Greyson collected cases in which an experiencer met a person they did not know was dead. In the University of Virginia's collection, about one NDE in five includes meeting a deceased person. Most are people already known to be dead. A few are not:

• Eddie Cuomo. A nine-year-old who met his sister Teresa in his NDE, and was told to go back. She had died in a car crash just after midnight, and her college was still trying to reach the family. Weak point: told in a popular book (Steiger and Steiger, 1995), with no primary documents.
• Van Lommel's patient. A Dutch man saw a stranger during his NDE. About ten years later his mother told him that his biological father had been killed in the Second World War, and showed him a photograph. It was the man he had seen. Weak point: the match is his own recognition, years later (Pim van Lommel, as cited by Greyson, 2010).
• Durdana Khan (1968). She met her grandfather and a grandmother she had never seen, then picked the grandmother out of one of only two photographs that existed. From The Self Does Not Die.

Experiments outside the hospital

• Ingo Swann at the ASPR (1972). Targets were placed on a shelf near the ceiling while Swann lay wired to an EEG and sketched what he "saw." In eight sessions a blind judge matched all eight sketches to the right targets. Karlis Osis put the odds at about 40,000 to 1. Weak point: reported in a newsletter, not a peer-reviewed paper; the lights were on; and Swann himself raised the possibility of reflections.
• Blue Harary's kitten (1973 to 1974). At the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, a kitten moved and meowed much less during Keith Harary's out-of-body "visits" than in control periods. The effect faded and could not be repeated, and the paper says so (Morris and others, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72, 1978).
• Monroe in the lab. When Charles Tart tested Monroe under controlled conditions in the mid-1960s, he did not read the five-digit target. See his page, and Miss Z for Tart's more famous result.

What to make of it

Put the two halves of this section side by side and a pattern appears. The controlled tests are clean, and so far they are almost empty: no hospital study has produced a hit on a hidden visual target. The accounts are messy, and there are hundreds of them, many with oddly specific details confirmed by someone who was there. Skeptics read the gap as the signature of memory, coincidence and storytelling, which flourish without controls and vanish with them. Researchers like Holden read it the other way: veridical perception is spontaneous and rare, and a shelf in a hospital ward is a poor net for catching it.

Neither side has settled it. What the record does not support is the claim that there is nothing to explain. If you want to judge for yourself, read the primary sources below, apply the five tests, and remember that a story's weak point is no reason to stop reading. It tells you how much weight the story can carry.

Know a case with a real paper trail? Send it through the contribute page, with the source.

Sources

• Janice Miner Holden, "Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences", in Holden, Greyson and James (eds.), The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009), 185 to 211.
• Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2010), chapter 4.
• Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven and Rudolf Smit, The Self Does Not Die (IANDS, 2016); summarised in the Psi Encyclopedia.
• Robert Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body (Doubleday, 1971), chapter 3.
• Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence, "Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences", Journal of Near-Death Studies 11(4) (1993), 223 to 229, full text.
• Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death (Harper and Row, 1982).
• Andrew Paquette, Journal of Scientific Exploration 26(4) (2012), 791 to 824, full text.
• Eleanor Sidgwick, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 7 (1891 to 1892), 41 to 46; Psi Encyclopedia summary.
• Bruce Greyson, "Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences", Anthropology and Humanism 35(2) (2010), 159 to 171.
• Robert Morris and others, "Studies of Communication During Out-of-Body Experiences", Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72 (1978), 1 to 21.
• Susan Blackmore, "Out-of-body experiences are not evidence for survival".