Original subtitles

The world you know is not what it seems.

Buried deep inside one of America's leading universities

lies one of the largest collections

of paranormal research in the world.

- This thing is-- - Something--

This is the spirit. This is your--

I saw a little object hovering.

From telepathy, possession, the abduction experience.

They said, "we're coming."

Collected over decades,

much of it has never been seen by the public.

This is truly a halfway house

between your world and ours.

I'm scouring the globe looking for new people

with extraordinary stories.

I realized my dream is about to happen.

Their accounts will be preserved

alongside some of the most remarkable cases in history.

She's more than telepathic.

I felt like I was being watched.

I saw really horrific things.

There's no way for me to put into words

what I went through.

The paranormal is all about the afterlife,

and it shows up in the most dramatic way--

around the death of the body.

For thousands of years, people have reported

near-death experiences, and their accounts

have remarkable similarities.

Something opens up and the person sees the afterlife.

Yet what happens to people afterward can vary wildly.

We're interested in what happens to consciousness

during a near-death experience,

and how it changes us.

So I've invited two people who have survived

extraordinary near-death experiences

to come and tell their stories.

We will record and preserve them for future research.

I've invited Dr. Eben Alexander,

a leading neurosurgeon, to come and help me

investigate this phenomenon.

I've been an active neurosurgeon for 25 years,

and I was at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery

for about 15 years.

In 2008, I developed E. coli meningitis.

I spent seven days in deep coma

and had a profound near-death experience.

I was very scientific my entire life,

and yet my coma showed me very clearly that consciousness

is not created by the brain.

What happened to me in 1988 was insane.

I was struck by lightning and was killed.

My near-death experience proved to me that consciousness

survives death.

I was dead, and I was conscious.

In 1988, I was 28 years old.

I was living with my first husband, and I had two sons.

It was a very happy time in my life,

but I did have some grief in that my grandfather had died.

I was very close to my grandfather.

It was the one year anniversary of my grandfather's death,

and it was one of the rare occasions in which

I was going to go to the synagogue.

My family was not very religious.

I got the boys dressed up in little plaid suits.

We were late.

And as soon as I turned into the parking lot

of the synagogue, it started raining.

It was torrential.

I parked and I grabbed my umbrella.

And it was very windy, so I grabbed the umbrella

very high on the shaft.

And so we set off toward the building.

I realized that my ring was touching

the metal shaft of the umbrella.

Suddenly something happened.

My two-year-old was screaming

and my four-year-old was running back toward us.

And he grabbed his brother

and started pulling him toward the building.

I was thinking, why are they ignoring me?

I'm standing right there.

And I just followed them.

I looked down to my shoes.

And my feet weren't touching the ground.

And as soon as I thought that, I was over my body,

looking down at it.

And that's when I realized I was dead.

I was willing myself to get up.

"Get up. Get up!"

At that point, a light appeared above me

and it wanted me to follow it.

This light led me to a place that I call "the garden."

It was just unbelievable beauty,

like nothing that exists here.

The colors were stunning.

And this light was alive.

There was a consciousness to it.

The light moved behind the mountain range.

And there was a voice.

And it was my grandfather's voice.

And I realized it was not my grandfather, it was God.

It was so disorienting.

Up to that point in my life, had been such a skeptic.

And yet here it was happening to me.

So when Elizabeth is seeing those colors,

it's because she's not even using her brain.

The brain goes dark, and this is something

that most near-death experiencers talk about,

and that is that we're experiencing this

without our eyes, our ears, our neural mechanisms.

The brain is simply getting out of the way

to allow access to that field of all potentiality.

So one of the things that I find

most attractive about Elizabeth's story

is this notion that the afterlife

is going to appear to someone however they want it to appear,

That it's God speaking in her dead grandfather's voice.

Ultimately, near-death experience is always tailored

for the individual who has it,

has no other reason for existence.

And that's why they can have so many

individual characteristics.

He told me it was my decision

whether I'd stay there

or I could choose to go back,

but there were things that he felt that I needed to know.

He told me that I would end up divorced.

He told me that also if I came back,

I would have a third child and it would be a girl.

I absolutely wanted to stay because that was my heaven.

But I decided to come back.

God hugged me, and it felt like every bone

was snapping in my body.

It was incredibly painful.

And then I gasped

and opened my eyes.

And I was lying in the synagogue

parking lot in the rain.

I had come back, but I had changed

and I was about to find out how.

When I woke up, I was in a lot of pain.

Oh, there you go.

It's a message for me.

So while I had been in heaven for two weeks,

two or three minutes had passed here at the synagogue

in Earth time.

I think the temporal distortion,

the two weeks in the garden

and the being out only two minutes here

is itself a signal that time isn't what we think it is.

I view this passage of time as a massive illusion.

The deeper reality, which is something we witness

during near-death experiences,

is something often referred to as the spatialization of time.

What that means is space is explorable

and time now becomes explorable.

So near-death experiences give us clues

about a far grander understanding of reality,

especially as it concerns the flow of time.

It took me several months to recover from the burns.

My third child was born in 1990,

and she is a girl.

I absolutely thought about my near-death experience

the day she was born and the fact that it came true.

But I felt a sense of unease with my marriage

because I left as one person

and I came back as someone else.

And then something started happening.

I started having dreams.

I had a nightmare about a plane crash.

And the number 800 was a recurring number.

And I knew that it had crashed in the ocean.

I called my mom and told her,

and then she called me the following morning,

telling me, "Hurry up, turn on the news."

The search for bodies and debris from TWA Flight 800

goes on through the night.

TWA Flight 800 had crashed.

It was awful.

I knew this was going to happen, and then it happened.

It was a premonition.

My husband was very upset by it.

He packed a suitcase and moved out.

We were married for 17 years.

So it was--it was hard.

Like, what's gonna happen to me?

What's gonna happen to my kids?

Time passed, and Matt and I met.

And we went out a few times.

I really liked him.

What attracted me to Elizabeth

was her plainspokenness.

She is very grounded.

It was only when we knew each other better

that she began to talk about the experience that she had.

We fell in love. We got married.

He found precognition fascinating.

So he wasn't gonna run away

when I told him about my nightmares.

We were in Jerusalem, and I had one

of my plane crash nightmares.

And Matt heard me crying, and I said,

"It's like this plane landed on a river

in New York and nobody died."

I said, "Well, you missed this one because

airplanes don't float on water. They sink."

We're at breakfast the next morning,

and Matt, he's pointing at the TV and I turned and looked

and it was the landing on the Hudson.

Flight 1549 remains in the water

as all 155 people onboard got off safely.

I was aghast.

We're 6,000 miles away,

and my wife sees this before it occurred.

That convinced me her ability to see is legitimate.

I started emailing myself my nightmares

so that they would be date and time-stamped.

So this email was about the landing on the Hudson.

Sent on Thursday, January 15, 2009.

Mid-size commercial passenger jet, 80 to 150 people,

crashes in NYC, maybe in river.

This email was February 2, 2015.

Passenger plane with propellers.

Foreign airline--maybe Asian.

Right wing of plane is pointed straight up.

And two days later, I saw a news report.

Close to 30 people remain unaccounted for

from the TransAsia flight that crashed into the river.

The aircraft was seen clipping a bridge.

It was exactly as I had seen it in my nightmare.

Exactly.

I could see which wing was pointed up

and which wing was pointed down.

It's amazing the detail that she describes.

They're extremely detailed living of events

that in many ways are sharper and more memorable

than lived events in the material world.

And of course, they're unwanted.

- Right. - It's not--

it's not like these are ever happy.

She doesn't wanna see the plane going down, but she does.

What Elizabeth is describing is a form of precognition

that has tremendous power.

Near-death experiences often leave people

with a much thinner veil.

They're much more intuitive.

We really don't know how this works,

but it seems NDEs can open up consciousness

and result in extrasensory powers.

As a scientist for my entire life,

if we want to understand reality,

we need to pursue these jagged edges of human experience

and come up with models that actually work

to explain the empirical data.

We're interested in documenting

what other unusual phenomena can occur

after a near-death experience.

The most bizarre thing that happened

after my near-death experience involved a necklace.

I was going to meet a friend for lunch,

and she was running late, so I was just killing time.

And one store that I went into had a wall with accessories

hanging on it.

And there was a necklace there that I just found beautiful,

but it did not have a price tag on it.

And the woman at the register, she said,

"This didn't come from our store."

I said, "I really want it. Just tell me how much."

So I bought it and I wore it three times.

The first time I wore it, I went to work and I walked in

and my assistant was there.

I had never told her about my NDE or my premonition,

and she commented on how beautiful the necklace was.

And about an hour later, she came back to my office

and she was crying and she said she needed to leave

because she had just had a phone call

that her sister had died.

And this was a young woman.

I mean, it was surprising.

The second time I wore it was two weeks later,

and I had a client, and his cell phone rang.

And it was someone telling him

that a family member of his had died.

It was awful.

And the third time, I was in a grocery store

and the cashier that was checking me out

got a phone call.

And the cashier was told that someone had died.

And I thought, "Well, that's really weird.

I need to get out of here."

It struck me that there's something about this necklace,

because every time I've worn it, somebody died.

I was gonna bury it, but I didn't have a shovel,

so I just put it in the back corner

of my backyard.

And a couple weeks later, I got up in the morning

and I went and opened my front door.

And the necklace was sitting on my doorstep.

I was frightened.

How did it show up here?

Time passed, and one of my sons was going off to college.

And we were cleaning his car.

And I put my head down to look under the seat.

And damn if that necklace wasn't under the front seat.

And I started screaming.

I couldn't handle it.

I took some advice from a friend

who said I should try to honor the necklace,

instead of trying to get rid of it.

I placed it in this glass bell jar,

and it's been in my house ever since, on display.

Elizabeth's antagonism with this necklace

was something that I dismissed

until there was somebody over to the house

who wanted to see it.

Elizabeth sat it on the dining room table,

lifted the bell jar off the necklace,

and all the bulbs in the chandelier went out.

Well, that's when I paid attention to the necklace.

I couldn't explain it.

I do believe that the necklace is haunted,

or at least carries some kind of power

that I don't understand.

Somehow the necklace is manifesting these powers

alongside these precognitive abilities

that Elizabeth develops after the lightning strike.

My instinct is that it's actually

Elizabeth who carries this extrasensory power

rather than the necklace itself.

Perhaps the lightning strike opened Elizabeth up

to a frequency that not many of us

have access to.

I would like to submit to the archives the necklace.

There's something about the colors in it

that reminded me of the garden,

but I have a hard time seeing the beauty in it

when it brings such heartache to people.

Elizabeth's story has similarities

to a case that was recently donated to our archive.

Joe McMoneagle is one of the U.S. government's

most successful remote viewers,

and we now hold his collection of private materials.

It's been documented that Joe located

a hidden Russian submarine for the U.S. military

using his psychic power.

But it's not commonly known that Joe's ability

was triggered by a near-death experience

when he was poisoned in an Austrian restaurant in 1970.

We ordered drinks, and all I did

was take a couple sips

and started feeling really bad.

So I headed for the front door,

and there was, like, a pop.

There was a warm rain,

but I didn't feel like I was getting wet.

I noticed the rain was going through my hands,

and I saw this body laying on the concrete.

And I saw it was me.

And then I saw this guy pull me up into his lap.

Then he started yelling at me, "Breathe, sucker!"

And he smacked me in the chest.

And every time he hit me in the chest,

I'd be back in my body,

looking up at him in this incredibly intense pain.

So he threw me in the backseat of his Volkswagen.

And I'm standing outside my body watching all this.

And then they took off.

So I'm flying along beside the car.

And he went to a hospital.

I was enveloped in a white light, and this voice said,

"It's okay, but you can't stay."

And I suddenly woke up in hospital.

I had tubes and wires hooked all up to my body.

Both Joe and Elizabeth's stories

indicate that an NDE can open up our consciousness

in ways that we have never imagined.

I've also invited Cherylee to share her story,

because we'd like to know what other powers

might be triggered by near-death experiences.

Anomalous things happen around me,

like poltergeist activity and psychokinesis,

essentially moving things with your mind.

There's so many NDErs out there,

and many are very quiet about what they've experienced.

I grew up in Winnipeg, Canadian prairies.

I had a really happy home life.

I had my mom and my dad and my two older brothers.

I graduated in '81, and my first undergraduate degree

was in Fine Arts.

And I loved it.

And I helped pay for my way through university

by playing drums in a military band.

I've had three near-death experiences.

Two happened when I was a child.

In the first, I met a family member

who had died before I was born.

I fell down the stairs and hit my head really badly.

I remember this lady picking me up and it was really nice.

It was like this wonderful kind of safe hug.

But I didn't really know who she was.

And then I remember suddenly my dad was there holding me.

When I was around 12 or so,

I started looking through some old family pictures,

and that's where I was able to find out

that was my grandmother.

But she died just before I was born.

I always thought it was strange.

In the second near-death experience,

I left my body during surgery for appendicitis.

I saw the surgery and was pretty horrified.

It was like I was going in and out of myself,

like being sucked in and out of a straw.

I'd be in horrible, horrible pain.

And then it was like, poof, sucked out.

And I was like, oh, thank God, okay, this doesn't hurt now.

And then I'd get sucked back in

and be in horrible, horrible pain again.

And then I just woke up in my body

when I woke up in the hospital.

My third NDE happened when I was 29.

Like all of my NDEs, it was a life-changing experience.

In 1985, I met an infantry soldier named Bob,

and we got married.

We got to travel and play in bands together.

It was a lot of fun.

I didn't get my license until I was 25,

and Bob did not want me to learn to drive

because his mother died in a car accident.

It was a lovely day.

I went up to go hiking and I brought my sketchbook.

It was beautiful and I did sketching.

And then I started driving home.

There was black ice, and I lost control of my car

just as a large truck was coming.

And then the next thing I remember,

I was in this place with my grandma.

She had died when I was 24.

We were in this, what looked like an apartment building

in the middle of the wilderness.

The room seemed really long,

like a boundary between places.

I felt really loved.

I wanted to know things about the family.

And my grandmother said to me,

she wished she'd been kinder to my mom.

There was some tension between the two families.

I remember when I saw my body, I was barely recognizable.

My face, in particular, was just

hacked to pieces by glass--

the fractured skull, the brain injury.

When I looked at what I'd be going back into,

I didn't wanna go back.

My grandma, she was like, "No, you're going back."

And she literally pushed me back into my body.

I can remember waking up, and it was so painful.

And when I came back, I did ask Mom

about my grandma and she said, "Yeah, we didn't get along."

The very fact that she was not the one

who made the choice about whether or not to return,

her grandmother, in some sense, knew that Cherylee

had more to live in this life.

So she helped her make the decision

to come back because that was the better thing

for her soul journey.

Went through a lot of surgeries.

I was just different when I came back.

After the NDE, I was so sensitive.

Everything going on around me was--

just felt like just too much information.

I have a lot of difficulty with crowds.

I can just feel what other people are feeling around me.

And Bob was devastated.

You know, he didn't see me as his wife anymore.

It was about 2 1/2 years after the car accident,

Bob suffered some PTSD.

And then one night, Bob completely snapped.

He thought that we both had to die

because he had failed to protect me

from being in a car accident.

He had his hands on my neck.

But then everything came alive in the house.

It was really scary.

Just so bizarre.

My husband Bob was terrified, and he just let me go and ran.

And so I just crawled under the kitchen table

and stayed there.

I just basically waited until everything

kind of just went quiet again.

She has this psychokinetic effect on the whole house.

It's that relationship between her own spiritual state

and the physical environment.

And she isn't even aware of what's happening.

I would say that's a very difficult aspect

of Cherylee's story, as you can imagine how difficult

it would be to have these abilities

and then other people, you know,

wondering how in the world can you do that.

Is this some form of, you know, magic or what?

That was the end of our marriage.

It's not a fun thing to go through a divorce.

It's a tremendous challenge to adapt to that

and realize that you have been fundamentally changed.

And these experiences lead to divorce.

Divorce is something that is not uncommon.

I think the figure is around 85%

of people who've had near-death experiences

end up having a divorce.

So this can be such a profound kind of course correction...

Change.

That often it's a big challenge

to the prior relationship.

Yeah.

It was around '97, and I ended up in the reserve unit.

And that's where I met Peter.

We both played in the military band on the base.

I was at band practice.

And then a woman showed up who was a drummer,

and I thought, "Well, that's an attractive lady."

And she invited me out to coffee.

As soon as we started living together,

I noticed the effect she had on light bulbs.

When we'd go anywhere, bulbs would fail.

Microelectronics can serve as an interface

between the spiritual realm and this world.

After my near-death experience,

I would walk under street lights near our home

and they would go out.

I had to go through three watches

before I found a watch that worked.

In the six to nine months after my NDE,

I was just beginning to discover that these effects

were not uncommon.

I don't know how many light bulbs blew in the house

that winter.

Crazy numbers.

At this point, I knew that these poltergeist

things happen.

I just wanted a rational explanation or cure.

If I was crazy, I wanted a cure, you know?

The poltergeist activity was a problem.

I went in the library and tried to find

some kind of literature on this stuff,

but you don't really find it easily.

In 2010, I found Dr. William Roll.

He was at the University of West Georgia.

Bill studied poltergeist activity.

Bill's theory was that it was a living

poltergeist agent that was facilitating

anomalous phenomena.

Bill told me about psychokinesis,

which he refers to as PKE for short,

essentially moving things with your mind.

He told me that that's what was going on with me.

Scientific investigation of psychokinesis

has shown it to be a true phenomenon.

It's a representation of this thinner veil

in people who don't realize how much influence

they have over their emergent reality in the physical world.

And I think in Cherylee's case,

someone with three near-death experiences

with this kind of deep interaction

with the spiritual realm, it all fits together.

I went to Laurentian University.

I was hooked up to an EEG.

They did a lot of tests in this big Faraday cage--

basically kind of like a big copper-lined room.

And it stops the transmission of radio signals

and electromagnetic energies.

When I came back, though, I had all of these results

of all these different tests.

And what they found was that once you

close the door of the Faraday cage,

my brain starts to calm down because it's not being

inundated by information.

When I'm outside the Faraday cage in the regular world,

I'm just reacting to so much information around me.

That's what the NDEs have done to me.

I just get more information from my surroundings

than other people do.

I kept a journal of every anomalous experience I had,

and I figured out the anomalous activity

was associated with geomagnetic activity.

And I discovered that my mood affects PKE.

There could be a correlation emerging

between Cherylee's story and Elizabeth's.

Both women experienced light bulbs

exploding after their NDE.

Tests by the University of Iceland

have found a correlation between

extrasensory perception and geomagnetic activity.

So I wonder whether our experiencers are now

affected by electromagnetic frequencies

because of their NDEs.

When Cherylee finally got answers,

I think that made her a lot happier person.

Bill Roll told me to use a pinwheel as kind of

a target for psychokinesis--

a little folded piece of tinfoil balanced on a pin.

I was able to spin it.

That's when I started to increase my feeling of control.

This area of research is typically called

"human biofield."

So when Cherylee came to our laboratory,

we set up the conditions for the experiment.

She didn't.

We found that Cherylee was able to move this pinwheel,

and that ability was associated

with very specific EEG signatures.

So each time it moved, there was a unique signature

within Cherylee's brain.

While we don't have EEGs of Cherylee

before her near-death experience,

I would hypothesize that the unique brain state

that is associated with her experience was not present.

And so when someone has a substantial head injury,

what can occur is you can have alterations in brain function,

and then suddenly you have this brand new function

within an individual that doesn't

fit within the population.

Now that my life with Peter is really good,

we don't get a lot of PKE.

I mean, it's still around.

When I looked back at my near-death experiences,

I think my grandmother sent me back so that I could

tell my story and help other people who might be wondering,

you know, like, are they okay.

That's why, as much as I'm tempted

to look beyond the veil,

I really work to focus on this life

because it's really a gift.

I'd like to submit some articles to the archive.

And this is my pinwheel.

Using this helped me to develop a sense of control,

being in control with my powers.

What's so amazing is Elizabeth and Cherylee

both developing these separate abilities

of psychokinesis and precognition.

They're very different psychic phenomena,

but the commonality of the experience

of a near-death experience can lead to tremendous soul growth

in many different directions.

I think Cherylee Black is superhuman.

It's incredibly rare to have an entire house

respond to a person like this.

Elizabeth's story is one of a kind.

The necklace deserves abundantly

to be put into the archive.

The stories of Elizabeth and Cherylee

prove that NDEs open up our consciousness

and trigger extrasensory powers.

It's all about the connectedness

of these abilities and consciousness.

It's not about the physical brain.