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It is an awesome story. Awesome because there is little explanation for this other than a: it’s true, b: it’s a set up. But the evidence would seem to show it’s legit. A young boy, under anesthesia during an operation sees his baby sister, who had miscarried before she was born. Amazing. Apparently during the same surgery Colton went to Heaven where he recounts how he met his grandfather who he had never known, who he later recognized in photos. The interesting thing is that he didn’t recognize photos of his grandfather as an old man with glasses, which is...

At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience. People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching themselves being resuscitated from above, but verifying such accounts is difficult. The images would be visible only to people who had done that. "We've added these images as objective markers," says Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and lead investigator of the study, which hopes to...

THE JESSE LEE PETERSON RADIO SHOW TUNE INTO JESSE'S SHOW HERE 6 am to 9 am PST, 9 am to 12 pm EST BOND Action, Inc. has been created to educate, motivate and rally Americans to greater involvement in the moral, cultural and political issues that threaten our great country ”Rebuilding the Family by Rebuilding the Man”... Tickets for BOND's 20th Anniversary Fundraising Celebration are now available! Come join BOND Founder and President Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson and Special Guest Speaker Pat Boone for an evening of patriotic fun Saturday, October 16th, 2010 in Los Angeles CLICK HERE for...

[The following is an experience obtained over several months by the Near-Death Research Foundation from a woman who had never shared this before, except with her son, and remains anonymous. The foundation is directed by a radiation oncologist, Dr. Jeffrey Long. The major and minor details of this story remained consistent over the months it was shared.  It was very difficult for her to share this.  Approximately one of every four such experiences are this detailed.  Among the experiences that have this level of detail, the events are quite typical. For your discernment]: When I was a young, single woman living...

I wanted to share this story with you about a man who died, went to heaven and then came back. I find this, and stories like it, inspiring and encouraging to my faith. Who doesn't want to know more about what heaven is like? Or to know what to expect when we die? I hope this testimony does the same for you as it has for me. And because this is the Exposed Blog and Exposing the ELCA website, I'd like to point out when the gentleman in this story encountered Jesus, Jesus quoted scripture to him. Also notice how...

Two books arrived in recent weeks that are written from the scientific standpoint and have to do with near-death experiences. We'll be drawing articles from them, starting with one by a researcher named Roy Abraham Varghese. As Varghese points out, in There Is Life After Death, near-death experiences cannot be explained by anesthesia, chemicals in the brain, lack of oxygen, sedatives, hallucination, or other factors skeptics have sought to use in explaining the death episodes. Even those blind from birth have been able to describe their environment once they "leave" their body! When -- in trying to duplicate near-death experiences...

..."For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light..." One of the most common characteristics of the so-called near-death experience is encountering a being of light. This being is said to emanate love and warmth. It has been claimed by numerous (not all) individuals who have had alleged near-death experiences that the being of light they encountered was none other than Jesus Christ. As appealing as the idea may initially sound, this identification seems to be flawed in view of the fact that the so-called being of light typically says and does things contrary to the Christ of the...

Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long argues that if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade's worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife. Medicine, Long says, cannot account for the consistencies in the accounts reported by people all over the world. He talked to TIME about the nature of...

In new book, he says that near-death accounts transcend cultures and agesThe near-death experience story is so common that it has become a bit of a cliché: A medical patient, hanging in a murky limbo between life and death, is drawn through a tunnel of bright light, meets their maker, and is told they must return to the land of living. But that scenario played out letter-perfectly for Mary Jo Rapini. And her story is getting firm backing by a doctor who has studied some 1,300 near-death experiences. Medical doctor Jeffrey Long chronicles Rapini’s story, along with his own research,...

Death is terrifying, right? Correct? Oh, sometimes, yes, for some -- perhaps. But in the majority of near-death experiences, death is described not as a frightening traverse onto foreign turf, but as a feeling of return. How strange this seems! "I'm home. I'm finally home," they often say they felt. "This is my real home!" many claim they felt upon death (and entrance into the eternal). That's a constant in near-death experiences: the feeling that this -- Heaven -- is where they originated (in the Mind of God) and that earth was indeed as Catholicism says: a place of exile....

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the...

Several years back we met a woman from Syosset, New York, who had a near-death experience. We try to be cautious with all such reports. We're well aware that there can be deception in any realm, and also that near-death experiences, because they involve a reality far outside our own, can seem strange to some people.  But hers sounded legitimate -- one of the most powerful we've heard -- and the Church has been recording such experiences since the fourth century (when Pope Gregory the Great detailed them). Scientists recently issued a study saying that millions have had these experiences,...

Many are those who have questioned near-death experiences for a number of reasons, among which the concern that so little on the topic has been broached by theologians. The visions of "eternity," and the lessons from such episodes, do not always fit the neat pictures created by the philosophical branch of the Church, some say. Thus it comes as a jolt to learn that the man considered the master of modern theology, St. Thomas Aquinas -- almost universally cited as the major intellectual inspiration for the Church -- himself experienced what has been described as a "glimpse of eternity"...

It was December of 1994 that Linnie Smith of New Hudson, Michigan, "died" and returned. And when she did, she had an incredible description of Jesus. What she saw, as you will note in a moment, should be a warning to atheists: Many dozens -- hundreds, indeed thousands -- are those who return from death's door with a similar description. In all the fuss over Christmas, in all the commotion over its denial -- in the inconceivable hoopla over taking the Name of Jesus out of His very birthday -- we can rest assured of one thing: there are great...

One night while diving for lobster on the island of Mauritius, an Australian named Ian McCormick was stung on his forearm by what local Creole fishermen call "invisibles": extraordinarily poisonous but hard to see "five-box" jellyfish, in the nomenclature of the trade. Medics were called -- urgently. It was an emergency if ever there is an emergency. "Found in the waters off northern Australia, the box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri is not the only marine invertebrate to use venom, but it is the possessor of arguably the most lethal venom in the world," notes one expert. "In the past half...

Rocky collected money for the Mafia. A typical bagman, he was immersed in the material world of fast cars, quick cash and getting ahead by butting heads. One day, he was shot in the chest and left for dead on the street. He survived, though, and lived to tell of an experience that changed his life. "He described a blissful, typical near-death experience—seeing the light, communicating with a deity and seeing deceased relatives," says Bruce Greyson, a U.Va.-trained psychiatrist who interviewed Rocky after the shooting. "He came back with typical near-death aftereffects. He felt that cooperation and love were the...

Sleep holds the key to understanding these mystical events, reports Roger HighfieldPeople who have out-of-body experiences near death, such as flying along a tunnel towards a heavenly light, are more likely to suffer a strange effect called sleep paralysis, according to a survey that adds to mounting evidence for a biological explanation for this mystical experience. During sleep paralysis, people experience a kind of breakdown between states of consciousness which takes place on the fringe of slumber, either when falling asleep or awakening. Because the brain turns off the body's ability to move during dreaming, muscles can lose their tone,...

'He gave me life twice' Eric MansfieldPOSTED: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 10:46:22 PMUPDATED: Thursday, November 09, 2006 11:52:50 AMAndy Holcomb shares his near-death experience in hopes of helping others with the problems they face in life. AKRON -- His body broken and battered, Andy Holcomb's spirit has never been more alive. The Akron man was nearly killed in early 2005 when an industrial accident claimed the entire lower half of his body. Doctors believe Holcomb should have died that day, but he survived as a medical miracle. For the first time, Holcomb is talking publicly about the journey he said...

Avraham Yosef was 25 years old when he died for the first time. "I was an electrician, and I was working in an industrial building when I unplugged the drill I was using, slipped, and got electrocuted,"... "I screamed and then lost consciousness," he says. "My brother who was working with me heard me scream and called an ambulance. But by the time they got me to the emergency room, I was dead." At Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek hospital, doctors administered paddles to his chest and attempted to defibrillate his heart, but to no avail. Minutes later, they declared Yosef dead,...

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self. Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that...