Ian Stevenson (Studies of children who remember past Lives)
The best available objective evidence for reincarnation has been the work of Ian Stevenson (October 31, 1918 – February 8, 2007), a professor of psychiatry at the University Of Virginia School Of Medicine. He was famous for researching cases of reincarnation all over the world, and he wrote many books on the subject.
Over his very long career, Stevenson studied over 2500 cases of alleged reincarnation, many of them in depth. Stevenson’s studies all started with children as young as age two who spoke of having lived a past life. He and his team interviewed the children and their parents about the child’s statements and then attempted to verify these statements using medical records and archival evidence along with visits to the reported past life locations where he met with people who knew the past life personality. He was quite successful and his evidence seems fairly convincing. He even found that the stigmata of old wounds acquired in a previous lifetime (verified in autopsy reports) can be passed on to newborn infants in the form of birthmarks or birth defects.
Many of Stevenson’s cases were not only evidential, but, unless you are a skeptic and assume they were all due to fraud, the circumstances surrounding them made them difficult to debunk or to explain in anything but paranormal terms. His two classics are: Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Children Who Remember Previous Lives. The Psi Encyclopedia website has a list of 61 of his cases in abbreviated form for those who want an overview. Most of the information I will quote here is from the children’s book cited above which devotes a majority of its chapters to the correlation of statistics based on his findings.
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