A Case Suggestive of Reincarnation Laura Knight-Jadczyk |
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March 2000: As I recounted in my book, Amazing Grace, when my son, (who is now 17), was born, he exhibited some peculiarly "adult" terrors and reactions to a number of things. I will not describe every detail, but, being involved in the work I have been for most of my adult life, I knew that this child had something strange going on from the way he clung to me so desperately as an infant. Later, when my son was old enough to start talking, he would tell me about his secret friend, "Janie," and his black dog "Sam," and his four brothers. This was really odd because he is the only boy with four sisters. One day when he was still in diapers, a big military transport plane flew overhead rather low and he began to jump up and down in excitement and point at it and informed me that he could fly such a plane! That this is what he "used to do in the war!" Being familiar with the work of Ian Stevenson and his Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, I just asked questions rather than telling him that such things were silly and untrue. Anyone who has read his book will wonder why Stevenson was so very careful to say his work is only "suggestive of reincarnation." But he is right to do so. There can be other explanations for such phenomena, though most of them involve going around the elbow to get to the thumb mental contortions to do so. In such cases, maybe Ockham's Razor is appropriately applied? I once read a completely absurd explanation for "casses suggestive of reincarnation" that goes like this:
I don't think I need to explain why such a "theory" is so absurd. As mentioned, I knew there was an issue with my child from the moment of his birth that had nothing to do with his present environment. Another reviewer of Dr. Stevenson's book wrote:
Exactly so. Stevenson's evidence is compelling - especially when children remember past lives and talk about their past life relatives by name, recognize their old homes or neighborhoods, and so on. Note that Stevenson also studied birthmarks as possibly relating to events of the past life. Even though I never accepted reincarnation as a proven fact, my work with past-life therapy suggested that many physcial problems could relate to past life experiences. I even had the idea that the conditions prevailing at the moment of death were like a sort of "snapshot-template," that had a powerful effect on the beginnings of the subsequent life. Of course, I am leaving out issues of simultaneous incarnations, time as an artificial construct, and so on. In any event, very early in life, my son developed asthma in a BIG way - hospitalizations almost every week, drugs, oxygen, nebulizers, etc. He also began to have very bad nightmares. Soon, this physically perfect child exhibited some problems running - he was dragging his left leg. The doctor said "Osgood-Schlatter's disease." I would see my son sitting on the ground in the shade while other kids were playing, and I would ask him why he wasn't playing and he answered that his "back hurts." Naturally, I took him to numerous specialists, all of whom said that, except for the so-called "Osgood thing " and the asthma, he was perfectly normal. The nightmares increased and I was at my wit's end. When he turned nine, I decided that it was time to do a session. I had done all I could in the "accepted" ways; I needed the cavalry to come in. I decided to do a "past life therapy" session. As I have already noted in my many remarks on the subject in other articles, even as a hypnotherapist I can't say that I ever actually "believed" in reincarnation. I used to tell people that I "believe in nothing, I just assign probabilities." I used past life therapy in my work because it WORKED, and not because I believed in it. From my point of view, if a person had to make up an elaborate past life scenario in their subconscious mind to escape from a labyrinth of emotional torment, fine with me! My son was desperate for relief from the nightly torments, and was ready to try anything. When I was working with hypnosis, I was pretty much a stickler for "non-leading" questions. If a past life came up, I would work with it (and it often did), but I didn't "set it up" as the mode beforehand. I would generally use an opening such as "go to the point in space/time when problem began and describe to me what you are seeing around you." Then that would be the platform from which to discover the experience. In the case of my son, without any prompting whatsoever, he launched into a terrifying description of being in an airplane - and it was unclear if he was the pilot or not, but it seemed so - and his attention being suddenly drawn to the fact that a missle was about to strike the craft. On impact, he began to scream that his leg had been torn off and he was breathing flames. It was so traumatic that I immediately took him away from direct experience and had him view it on a "screen" at a distance. (This works for getting details where there is a lot of emotion involved). The trauma was quite intense and I decided that it would be better to work on this one a little at a time, so we just dealt with part of the experience and I gave some "feel good" suggestions, and "healing" suggestions and that was that. This had been about three years before the Cassiopaean transmissions began and he DID have considerable relief from the asthma and nightmares as a result of the hypnotherapy, so we decided to just leave the issue alone for the time being unless and until more symptoms emerged and became unmanageable. As a part of the "testing" phase of the Cassiopaean contact, I decided to ask about any past life information for my son, but I wanted to go about it in a rather "cagey" way. I was the only one present who knew what he had told me under hypnosis and had never discussed his childhood remarks with anyone in the room, so I thought it would be a good test of the source. If the only information that could be obtained was what was in my mind or my son's mind, that at least would demonstrate a form of telepathy. At the same time, there was the idea that, perhaps my son's description of his "past life" had been merely a "drama" in which he could express some other problem that I did not know about. So, I wanted to be very careful in the way I obtained the information. I was also fully cognizant of the fact that children are very imaginative, and the problem he was having with his leg might simply be that he had injured it at some point or it had some sort of congenital deformity. There were a number of solutions, and I wanted to hear what the Cassiopaeans offered. Thus, the VERY ambiguous form of the questions and my "indirect" approach:
And that led off to a series of questions about "scars of the soul" being a source of physical, mental and emotional problems from life to life. And there the matter lay until a member of the group, Terry Rodemerk, read it (sometime in December of 94) and asked me if I had ever checked it out. I said "no," and he asked if he might do so, so I said "sure." I didn't think he would find anything because my experience had been that finding any confirmation from such things was pretty remote. While many cases DO produce information that checks out, a lot of them don't, and I wasn't particularly invested in "proving" anything, especially where my own son was concerned. I just wanted to have tools and ideas to help him. I wasn't sure how Terry planned on going about checking out the details about George Ray or Raymond. It was a week or two later that Terry produced a little piece of paper that had some notes on it. He thought it might be a "match." But, all the info he could get was a person named "George R. K***," had died in that particular year, was in the AF with the rank of Captain. I think it was from the list of names on the Viet Nam War Memorial, which only lists name, birth and death dates, branch of service, rank etc... but, somehow, he also had the hometown, but whether that is on the memorial or not, I don't know. Maybe it's on a separate list. Surprisingly, it was Punta Gorda which is only about 150 miles south of our home.Well, I didn't do anything with it except lay it on the desk and we went on with our session of that evening. I really DIDN'T think it was TOO good of a match because the name on the list was "George R. K***." We had been given the name George Ray or Raymond. Not too long afterward, I met Tom French as he describes in his article and during one of our interveiws I mentioned this to him. He asked me if I was going to check it out and, with that encouragement, I figured "what the heck!" I might as well SEE if the guy's MIDDLE name was Ray or Raymond and HOW he died - maybe it WAS a SAM. And, if so, that would be a more definite "hit." Since the hometown was given, my idea was to call the newspaper in Punta Gorda to see if there was an obit on file that listed the FULL name and maybe, that went into more detail about the manner of death. It wasn't going to be a big deal - just a little check with a phone call. I called information, found the number of the local paper and dialled. I was told that such "old" records were kept in storage and it would cost to have a search done. Well, I wasn't sufficiently invested in this idea that it might be a "hit" to spend money on it, so that put me off. BUT, the person on the phone just volunteered that the local library might have such things in their available archives. She gave me the number. That was easy enough. Why stop with one easy phone call if you can get it with two? I called the library, explained what I was trying to find: an obituary for George R. K*** that would give me some details about how he died and what his middle name was. The woman said she would look and, after a few minutes, came back and said that yes, they had him in their genealogy section (funny, considering my later plunge into the genealogy project!), but that the records they had did NOT give his middle name, nor the mode of death. It only told where he was buried. Then, just as the lady at the newspaper office had done, she volunteerd that "such and such" funeral home was listed as having handled the arrangements and she knew that they were still in business, so maybe THEY would have a copy of the obituary! And, she very kindly obtained the number for me. Well, I was only on my third call in less than a half hour or so, and it seemed like I ought to pursue it until I hit a brick wall, so I decided to call the funeral home. By this time, I began to feel that I really needed to know George R. K***'s middle name and how he died! The girl who answered the phone at the funeral home listened to my explanation that I was looking for a copy of the obituary of George R. K***, and said that, yes, they might have one in their files. She put me on hold, and a minute later a man came on the phone and said (more or less): "I understand you are looking for information about Captain George K***? Can I ask WHY?" I was NOT prepared to be questioned about this, figuring that it was so old, that nobody would really care WHY I wanted to know. I had told the newspaper person that I was doing research on Viet Nam, but somehow, the nature of my questions here, so close to the "jackpot," were not adequately covered by that explanation. There was a pregnant silence while I calculated how MUCH I could say, considering that I might be talking to a person who was not very open to such things, and I decided to leave out the fact that the information had been obtained via channeling, and just stick to the "information about past lives obtained under hypnosis" story. So, that's what I told him. I said my son had been talking since he was little about having brothers and a dog named Sam and having flown a plane in the war since, and that recently, because of some physical problems, he had undergone hypnosis in an effort to seek relief and had given further information about his name, that he was shot down by a SAM missle, and that all I really wanted to do was confirm his middle name and if, in fact, this was how he died! The guy was completely amazed. He kept saying over and over: "this is amazing! This is amazing!" Then he said that, yes, he not only had a copy of the obituary and could confirm that George K***'s middle name was Ray, but that he had also been a personal friend, and was still in touch with the family. He said he would fax me the obituary. THEN he asked me if I would mind if he contacted the family and told them about this? This was getting out of hand! I did NOT think that was a good idea. I had enough info to satisfy my curiosity that it had a good probability of being a "hit," but I certainly didn't want to interfere in anyone else's life with such a thing. My innocent little venture into finding out two simple facts was in danger of going way South! I could imagine the feelings of a person who got a call and was told that there was some strange kid who might be their dead relative reincarnated! But, the funeral home guy persisted saying that Captain K*** had two sisters who still lived nearby, and they were very "open minded," and he just COULDN'T keep such a thing from them, so, reluctantly, I agreed. One was named Ann, and the other was Ruth. Shortly after I hung up the phone, he faxed me the obituary which, listed the cause of death as "crash on take-off." I was disappointed because it did not confirm the SAM thing, even if we had a partial "confirmation" about the name. He added a note that he had called Ruth, Captain K***'s sister, and would be shortly having lunch with her. I was still cleaning off my desk and feeling nervous that this man was planning on telling some strange woman in Punta Gorda that my son MIGHT be her dead brother reincarnated. I had such serious misgivings about it that I was actually becoming sick to my stomach. And, I had NO idea that he was going to do it so quickly! An hour later, George Ray's sister called me and it was, indeed, the strangest conversation I have ever had. I could tell that she was almost pathetically anxious for this to be true, and my heart broke for her. I tried to play the whole thing down as just a freaky anomaly that had only a small chance of being true, but as she asked me question after question about my son, and I answered them, she became more excited and kept saying that she wanted to meet my son. For my son's sake, I didn't think that was such a good idea even though I felt very sorry for this lady who had been grieving for her brother for so many years. I told her that I would think about it, but that it was impossible for us to make the trip anytime soon. A week or so later, I received a letter from Ruth Day with directions to her house and a repeated request to let her know as soon as we were able to visit. And, that was where it lay for eight months. As I said, I wasn't anxious to make any moves on this. I didn't think it was a good idea for pretty obvious reasons. I didn't want to take the risk that my son might identify so much with his past life that he could not focus on this one, and I certainly didn't want him to be further traumatized by waking up memories that might be better left alone. But, we DID have another session and asked some further questions:
And, it was VERY strange that his sister questioned the remains when we finally made the visit. But, I am getting ahead of myself. What we had here was merely a confirmation of the name, the rank, and that was it.Yes, we had the details that my son had given from the time he was a baby, and some details from the Cassiopaeans that didn't match up with what was recorded, but all in all, it clicked on a several significant points and MIGHT be worth further investigation. The Cassiopaeans seemed to think that the visit would be helpful, so I tucked it away in my mind as a future excurson, but only when I was emotionally ready to take the risk. It was as much a traumatic prospect for ME as it was for my only son. Not too long after this, Tom French mentioned that if I ever decided to make this trip, to please let him know because he would certainly like to be there. So, I bumped the idea forward a bit, though I was still not anxious to go. Actually, I was dragging my feet. But, after awhile, I couldn't make any more excuses for not going, and I called Ruth to say we would be able to drive down and meet. She was very anxious and gave careful instructions. Arrangements were confirmed, and we made the trip. When we were all sitting together in the sister's living room, with assorted other relatives gathered around, the sister, Ruth, asked Jason some questions. He told her about his "secret friend, Janie" and his memory of having brothers, and the dog, Sam. Ruth produced a greeting card from a box of mementos and handed it to him. It was written to "Dear Janie..." and it turned out that the deceased's secret, pet name for this sister, Ruth, had been "Janie." They claimed that NO one, but family, could have known this. Next, she produced a photograph of the deceased with his 4 brothers, him holding the big, black, dog "Sam" or Sambo. But, the REAL surprise came a little later when the funeral director friend arrived to see my son. In front of all of us there he said: (And I am paraphrasing a little, but it is really burned in my memory, so will be pretty accurate.) "I have been carrying a secret for 25 years and I am going to tell it to you all now. I guess it doesn't matter anymore. When Ray's body arrived here with the military escort, I drove out to the airport to pick him up. I noticed that the casket was sealed, and I asked the escort if I could open it to prepare him for viewing. The guy told me I had better not because he was in BAD shape having been in the jungle for awhile before he was found. I mentioned that the report was that he crashed on take-off so why should it have taken so long to find him? The escort told me: 'what I am going to tell you is between you and me, and if you ever repeat it, I will call you a liar. He was flying recon over Thailand and got shot down by a SAM. It took us two weeks to find him. You DON'T want to open that coffin!'" Needless to say, ALL of us were silent for some minutes at this revelation. Then, the sister, Ruth, began to cry because she said: "All those years they blamed it on pilot error, that Ray crashed on take off and he DIDN'T! It wasn't his fault." As I understand it, the U.S. Government was not supposed to be violating Thai airspace. Captain K*** was, in fact, flying his last mission before his tour of duty was up, so there has been the suggestion made that a BIG coverup about his death was effected by the government. The result of this series of incidents was that the additional data points, personally experienced, re-ordered my ideas about reincarnation. I now assigned a much higher probability to it being more than a theory. But, that was clearly NOT what the undertaker thought. At the time of the visit, Tom French asked him what HE thought about the whole bizarre situation. He was obviously uncomfortable with the question, and he began to talk about his fundamental Christian beliefs which precluded any belief in reincarnation. It was his opinion that Captain K*** must have had a demon in him that was released when he died in the crash, and that this very same demon traveled across the globe to infect my child in infancy! While I understood why he had to come up with such a solution in order to protect his belief system, I wondered if he was aware of how insulting to the memory of his friend, Captain K*** such a statement was. Not only that, I was pretty upset for him to say such a thing about my son. What the reader will find in the article by Tom French, published on February 13th, is a FAR different statement made by the family of Captain K*** in which they negate ANY validity to the story whatsoever! Just before printing day, Tom called to find out if there were any final things the family would like to have included in the article, and to read them their part of the account and check for detail accuracy. Tom was only able to talk to the other sister, Ann, and she vehemently denied that anything was proven or verified, even in view of the fact that Tom French and Cherie Diez had BEEN THERE and WITNESSED EVERYTHING! She said the name was not exactly right, that she and her sister had applied to the government under the Freedom of Information Act to find out about Captain K***'s death, and the documents showed that he did NOT get shot down by a SAM, (completely ignoring the fact that this makes a liar out of their family friend, the undertaker). When Tom asked her how she could explain the numbers of details that my son provided that "only the family could know," she viciously declared that I must have gone down to Punta Gorda and snooped around about them, and then put my son up to producing this information fraudulently! They did NOT want their names in the paper in connection to this story. They refused to grant permission for the Times to print the pictures of Captain K*** that they had so willingly supplied previously when they were so convinced that it WAS true. This was so complete a turnaround in attitude, that Tom and Cherie both were stunned, not to mention my own reaction of amazement. In short, it almost seemed as if someone had "gotten to them" and had warned them not to participate. Further, to add insult to injury, this sister, Ann, went so far as to say that I had instigated and pushed for this meeting, that I had been the one insisting on going down there, and on and on. You get the picture. All of this was said after the article was finished and was being prepared to be sent to the plant for printing. So, needless to say, it was some pretty quick revising that had to be done to comply with these folks at this late date. But, a few funny things did happen in regards to this story.At the time of the meeting, Ann and Ruth had given Tom French a good selection of photographs of Captain K*** for the article. I have done the same on a number of occasions, and they have always been returned to me by Federal Express within a day or two of being copied. Some time after, Tom told me that somehow, the photos of George Ray K*** had disappeared. He couldn't explain it, he had NEVER lost any photos that belonged to anyone else EVER! But, they were gone, and no amount of searching produced them. I wondered later if the family became angry at him about this, or if it was an anomalous clue to some sort of "other activity" behind the scenes, stories of which are so familiar to researchers in these subjects. What do I think happened? Well, a conspiracy is a nice theory, but there is also the far more mundane possibility that the sisters just simply jumped into denial because of their religious beliefs. But that is a funny thing. If they had just said they didn't believe that their brother had been reincarnated, that they didn't believe in reincarnation, that would have been one thing. But, to clearly and blatantly LIE about the facts surrounding the meeting, to viciously attack me and make slanderous remarks about my motivations, (including my son in these remarks), referring to them as fraudulent intentions, (for what reason we would defraud them, I can't imagine!) - well, that passed common decency, and demonstrated most thoroughly to me that, if their objections to being connected to the story are based on their religious beliefs, then being a Christian is not only to believe a lie, but it makes liars out of people - and that is most definitely not "Christian" behavior. And the worst kinds of lies are the ones they tell themselves. I sympathized with Tom for having to work so hard to write these people out of the article at the last minute, and I was distressed to have to tell my son the change in attitude of his "former family," but he took it philosophically and merely pities them for their ignorance and smallness of mind. He's a great kid, and, after all, that was what it was all about... helping him to adjust to THIS life, so he could forget the other one! I was also relieved of the worry that these people might want to intrude on OUR lives. So, in the end, even if some of it left a bad taste in my mouth, it was for the best all the way around. The only sad thing, in my mind, was that these people deprived themselves of the comfort of knowing that the human soul is, indeed, eternal and when death comes, we are not faced with the choice of only "belief." There was an exchange with Tom French in 1998 that pretty much sums up my take on the whole thing, though this was before the "attack of the sisters":
There is something else about this story. Some time after the visit and the gathering of clues from the Cassiopaeans, we decided that it was time to undertake the process of "processing" the event so that my son would have release from this prior experience. The process consisted of taking him back to the scene under hypnosis and going through it a little at a time, with distance and perspective in an effort to "desensitize" him. Well, everything went fine except that he kept "skipping" over something. He would describe going along in the plane, telling me what he saw in terms of the landscape, sounds, thoughts and so on. Then, he would talk about the approach of the missle, and then he would skip to being out of the body, looking down at the scene full of grief and rage at his young life, full of hope and promise, being cut short so suddenly and unexpectedly. This "skip" bothered me. So, we went over it again, projecting it onto a screen so that he could be somewhat distanced, and have some control over the speed using a mental device of a sort of tv remote control. This time, going through it frame by frame, he made a funny remark, saying "what's that SMELL?" "What smell?" I asked. "Kind of like garbage, or sewage." "Where is it coming from?" "Boxes. Boxes in the cargo bay." He continued describing the scenery below, and then he volunteered: "The smell is gone." Right away, I knew something was going on, so I backed him up again. Frame by frame we went through it again. THIS time, he noticed something peculiar: it seemed that they had passed over the same landscape, which had certain notable features, TWICE! The first time, the smell was present, the second time it was gone. And there was ANOTHER skip there! The only way I could think of to get some sort of idea what was going on here, since the skip occurred over and over again, was to take him out of the scene to the "between life" state, where he could analyze and describe what he perceived to have happened. In this state, he remarked that the strange, smelly boxes in the cargo hold had something to do with "alien presences," and that he had been transporting them, the plane was "abducted" so that the cargo could be off-loaded into an alien craft, and was "put back" in the time line just in time to catch a missle DELIBERATELY. And it was this hidden interaction that was the cause of the great distress! Well, needless to say, I didn't know what to make of such an idea. It was bizarre beyond even MY imagining. But, there it was. So, I decided to ask the C's about it:
So, indeed, if any validity were to be given to this story by agreement of the family, then it would certainly open the door to further inquiry, and it seems that the kind of exposure that would result from confirmation is certainly NOT wanted by certain persons or groups, as yet unknown.Thus, we may use this information to conjecture as to why the family of Captain K*** may have retracted their original statements. The only question is: did they do this under coercion by HUMAN agents, or have they been "tampered with" from other densities or dimensions so that they truly believe what they are now saying? And, so it goes. Two steps forward, one step backward.
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