The Telepathy Tapes - S3E3: Past Lives: Inside UVA's 60-Year Investigation| The Reincarnation Records

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

Can a child really remember a life that came before their own? And what happens when those memories contain details that can be independently verified?For more than 60 years, researchers at the University of Virginia have investigated thousands of children who claim to remember previous lives, developing methods to test their extraordinary accounts. In this episode, we explore the science behind those investigations, the surprising patterns emerging from decades of research, and a remarkable case from Sri Lanka involving a young girl who recalls a distant village, another family, and even a hidden container of money.If a child's memories match the life of someone who actually existed, what does that tell us? Is it coincidence, something science has yet to explain, or evidence of reincarnation?_______Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com._______Dive into the work of those interviewed in this episode:Dr. Ian Stevenson Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. First published 1966 as Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26. Second revised and enlarged edition 1974, University Press of Virginia. Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. I: Ten Cases in India. 1975, University Press of Virginia.Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. II: Ten Cases in Sri Lanka. University Press of Virginia. Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey. 1980, University Press of Virginia. Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. IV: Twelve Cases in Thailand and Burma. 1983, University Press of Virginia. Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. 1987, University Press of Virginia. Revised edition, McFarland. Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. 1997, Praeger. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. 1997, Praeger.European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. 2003, McFarland.Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of a Case. 1974, University Press of Virginia.Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. 1984, University Press of Virginia. Telepathic Impressions: A Review and Report of Thirty-Five New Cases. 1970, University Press of Virginia. Dr. James Matlock Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory. 2019, Rowman & Littlefield. I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children's Experiences of Reincarnation. 2016, White Crow Books. Dr. Jim TuckerLife Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives. 2005, St. Martin's Press.Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives. 2013, St. Martin's Press.Before: Children's Memories of Previous Lives. St. Martin's Essentials. _______Thank you to our sponsors!Alloy - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! Dose - Ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head to dosedaily.co/TAPES or enter TAPES to get 35% off your first subscription. Ka'Chava - Go to kachava.com and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order.Luminara - If you’re curious about energy healing and ready to experience it for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session for listeners of The Telepathy Tapes. Just go to luminara.care and use code TAPES20.Monarch - Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code TAPES at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50.Shopify - Start your business today with the industry’s best business partner, Shopify. Sign up for your free trial at Shopify.com/tapes.TruDiagnostics - Go to TruDiagnostic.com and use code tapes for 20% off your entire order. Quince - Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to Quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.Zenni - That scratched up pair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenni. Got to Zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order + free shipping on all orders over $65!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey everyone, this is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media. Welcome to episode three. This is the episode that for me determines how seriously we can take everything that comes next. Like many of you, I'm sure, I came into this season's skeptical. The part of my brain that loves science and logic still flinches at a lot of what we're talking about. And I think part of the problem is that I've always put questions about the afterlife in the category of faith. You could believe or not believe there's something after death. But how could you possibly research it, test? And then I found a place that has spent almost 60 years trying to do exactly that. A place attempting to put science to something that I'd always assumed could only be taken on blind faith. And what I found there completely deconstructed my reality.

We've been like circling the block. It's not in the campus? Last winter, my producer Cooper and I got on a plane and flew to Charlottesville. We rented a car and drove a few miles off the University of Virginia campus to a building that most people will never find on purpose. the Division of Perseptial Studies. Wait, did you just have a P.O. Fox? Yeah, I don't see it over there. You think it's this little building?

It's got to be... All right, you think we're in the park here, legally? Yes. Okay. Is that him? Hey, Phil. I'll meet you finally. Nice to meet you. The current co-lead of the Past Life Memory Research Program at Dops, Dr. Philip Cozolino has met us outside, and it is cold and windy.

So is this at university? We're off campus by a few miles. We have a P.O. that we often will give because this work sometimes attracts some attention, and we try to limit the number of people who know this exact address. Inside this quaint two-story building are filing cabinets, scores of them, and they're metal and gray and boring, the kind you'd walk past in any office in America and never think about again.

But what's packed inside these is the largest collection of evidence anyone has ever gathered on a question I think we've all asked ourselves at some point, what happens after we die and does any part of us come back? These are all of the near-death experience files. Those filing cabinets in there are most of the past life memory files. So on paper, the Division of Perceptual Studies belongs to the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In real life, it sits off by itself miles from campus, and it has since the day it opened. And to understand why it exists at all, you have to go back to 1957 when a 38-year-old intellectual enters the university history.

Ian Stevenson could be called the grandfather of reincarnation research. That's Dr. Jim Matlock, an anthropologist who knew Stevenson and has spent decades studying his work. He was a mid-career medical man who was hired by the University of Virginia as chairman of its department of psychiatry when he was not even 40. And this is Dr. Marietta Pelovinova. She co-leads the Past Life Memory Research Program with Philip. Dr. Ian Stevenson was a very intellectual guy, and he had his regular regular. mainstream psychiatry career, nothing paranormal. He was very serious, extremely meticulous. He worked very, very hard, barely taking any vacation. There were some years here where he basically

took Christmas off, and that was pretty much it. And a year after he was hired to chair the Department of Psychiatry, an academic journal had a contest that would change not just the course of Stevenson's life, but the course of afterlife research forever. Here's Dr. Jim Matlock again. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research had a contest for the best paper on the subject of survival of death. And Ian Stevenson decided to enter the contest and focus his paper on reincarnation. He started then focusing his reading on finding cases. And he found enough to whittle this down to 44 cases of children who spoke about having been somebody their parents did not know that had made a minimum of six statements that were verified. And so he wrote this paper and won the prize.

That brought him and the whole study of reincarnation to the attention of everybody. Including Chester Carlson, the millionaire inventor behind the Xerox machine. Here's Dr. Philip Cozellino again. Chester Carlson had a wife who had heard about some purported cases of reincarnation. And Carlson had a lot of money and he donated a million dollars to Ian Stevenson and the 1960s. It would be about $9 million in today's dollars. $9 million in today's money. Stevenson was given something almost nobody gets when they take on a controversial question,

the funding, the freedom, and the time to actually go find out. And Carlson basically said, please go do this research. You're interested in it and I can fund it for you. So the university takes this huge sum of money from the Xerox guy, Chester Carlson, and then quite literally pushes the research out the door. Ian had to make a deal with the University of Virginia that he would leave the department. He wouldn't be the chair of the psychiatry department. could do this work. The university made him call his new division, the division of parapsychology.

That was the university's plan, was to basically say, you're going to go out on this limb, you're going to be there by yourself, because that's you, not us. But eventually, the division of parapsychology became the division of perceptual studies, which is the name on the door today. And everyone here just calls it Dops. And though Dr. Ian Stevenson died in 2007, he's still everywhere in the building. His portraits on the wall, his handwriting's in the files, and his personal library lines the shelves. A lot of the books on this side are his private library that was donated to Dobbs after his passing.

And even just browsing the books, you can see how many different interests he had. You really can feel him all over this building. I mean, it just feels like all the books and the journals and the papers. We talk about this all the time. Even his picture over there, that was the portrait that they did when announcing this new division.

And though Philip and Marietta, co-lead the division now, Phillips' desk feels like it's being swallowed by this library. My office area is surrounded by his productivity, and it is a constant daily reminder of how little I've actually done. The first thing I wanted to understand is how he actually did the work. How did this bookish psychiatrist earn the title of being the father of reincarnation research? Here's Dr. Jim Matlock again. Unlike what had been done before using regression or something like that, he actually

went and talked to children and their family. children who spontaneously remembered previous lives. When he says regression, he's meaning when adults remember a previous life through hypnosis or psychotherapy. And with regression, it's really hard to rule out the possibility that the memories were influenced by a lifetime of exposure to information. The children's spontaneous memories turn out to be much, much more reliable, much more accurate, factually than the stuff that comes up through the regression.

What he discovered was so compelling in terms of the availability, and fascinating features of these cases that he decided to dedicate the rest of his career. Just looking at purported claims of reincarnation were cases of the reincarnation type, as we call him. Cases of the reincarnation type, C-O-R-T. The court C-O-R-T acronym comes from Ian directly. He coined that term, and it's also very indicative of how he approached the phenomenon. He didn't say this is reincarnation, but it's something that looks like reincarnation. And that same caution shaped how Stevenson investigated court cases. He wasn't interested in how

extraordinary a child's story sounded. He was looking for specifics, details that could actually be checked against a real person who has died. And here's Dr. Pelivanova again. The phenomenon shows up like this. A young child starts saying things like, you were not my real mommy, you're not my real family. I used to have another family that I want to go back to. Or they might say things like when I was big, I used to do X and Y. Sometimes they would talk about having children or the jobs that they purportedly had and also how they died. And as you can imagine, if a parent doesn't dismiss that, if they take it seriously, especially if the child is a little bit distressed, they might wonder what's going on. So they come to us.

We do not solicit. They write us. And they report remarkably consistent characteristics that we're seeing in thousands of these children. What are those characteristics that you see over and over again? They talk about their profession, people in their lives. Often they talk about how they died, phobias that seem to be related to the purported past life. And so when we hear of these accounts, we can't do much if the child is not saying anything specific. But if they're giving names, like names of who they claim to have.

have been other people in their purported past life, where they lived. That allows us to start trying to verify this. And by verify, we mean, is there a unique deceased person who matches what the child is saying? People would say, well, kids say the craziest things. It's all just fantasy, which, okay, that's reasonable. Kids have an active imagination. But it is pretty remarkable if they say things without access to specialized knowledge, that then end up matching the life and often death of a real person who existed.

Here's Dr. Philip Cozellino again. The kids aren't confused about this. The kids will tell you, no, when I was that person, I lived here. Even their parents will say, we'll just be walking through the park and they'll say, I want to go on the slide. Oh, you know when I was in a car accident and died? Oh, look, a squirrel, just out of the blue. And then 10 seconds later, they were on to something else.

Something I was quickly learning at Dobbs was this was not a quick process. Children often started talking about these memories as early as 18 months, and the memories could continue for years, often being triggered by a new experience or a trip or even just learning more words. He would meet with the family multiple times, grandparents, aunts, uncles. He would talk to teachers, neighbors. Eliminating any conventional explanation of this, like could the child have watched a movie or read a book or whatever else?

He would attempt to identify, if at all possible, the deceased person, someone that actually lived that matches what the kid said. That's the goal. The really important thing to note is that Stevenson was investigating two lives at once. On one side, he documented everything the child and the family were reporting about the past life memories. And on the other, Stevenson and his colleagues were trying to find the deceased person the child was describing. And then he would compare the two of them. It's almost like a forensic-style investigation where you're trying to dig into records of deceased people who match what the child is saying.

from medical records, death certificates. He would even get local linguists come in and say, okay, if they use this word versus that word, what would that tell you? Here's anthropologist Dr. Jim Matlock again. A lot of these kids will show the way to the former house. They'll show the way back there. And when the memories of a small child match with a real person's life who has died, the case is called solved.

Solved is a term that we use when we are confident that we have found that deceased person. that we believe matches the statement of the child. 70% of the cases in our database have been solved. Which sounds enormous, but Philip is quick to point out that 70% is not a success rate of all the cases out there. It's a conflated number because you take cases where you're more likely to identify them. And the goal always, as it is today, was to refute whatever claims were possible to refute and to verify whatever it could be verified.

And not every case in the UVA archive is equally strong. In some of Dr. Stevenson's earlier investigations, he didn't hear about a child until well after the memories had begun. So parts of those cases depended on families recalling what the child had originally said. Stevenson understood that was a limitation. And it's why the cases researchers consider the strongest are the ones where the child's statements were documented before anyone went looking for the deceased person that they might have been describing. The most important kind of case for us is ones where the parents or researcher somebody recorded the things. that the child was saying and doing before verifications or even attempt. And when you have a record like that, then you don't need to worry about memories having changed,

things being forgotten or whatever. And if the parents don't know who the previous person was, how can they shape what the kids are saying you've got that record? And one of the reasons Stevenson's research is incredibly valuable today is that many of his cases were incredibly isolated. Stevenson traveled all over the world to investigate children in remote communities, starting in the 1960s. And when he got there, he was often traveling by foot or by donkey or by cart and in places with little access to landline phones or outside information. And from an evidentiary

standpoint, that isolation matters because there were simply fewer conventional ways for a child or family to learn detailed information about a stranger who died miles away, sometimes countries away. Today, researchers have a problem Stevenson didn't encounter until late in his life, the internet. It's now much easier to find a deceased person that the child might be. describing. And that makes it way harder to rule out the possibility that the child or the family could have found information about this deceased person on their own, which makes researchers look for something else, what they call private knowledge. Private knowledge, a kid expressing something that no one else could know or should know. And the private knowledge thing is really meaningful

because, wow, if you can verify that there is some hidden money in that tree trunk, like the kid said, that no one knew about, how would anyone have known that? How could that kid have known it? So that's any kind of private knowledge is really meaningful. And that can take different forms. Private family information, spontaneous recognition of people or places, controlled photo tests designed to see whether a child can identify someone significant in the deceased person's life. And we'll get to all of that shortly.

For me, at this point on our rapid tour of the day, I had a handle on what could make one case stronger than another. But what I wanted to understand was what the evidence actually looked like up close. That's coming up after this break. When I was paying off my student loans, the hardest part was wondering how long they'd be part of my life. I made payments every month year after year, and often it felt like I was getting no closer to being done.

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And on the way, we walk past a few display cases. The display cases are from the E-N-E-E-A-Rah of investigations around the world. There are some gruesome photos of children with missing limbs, missing digits, birth marks and defects, and a lot of weaponry, machetes, swords, knives, spears on the wall. And these are documented cases that he's published on on the connection between these past life memory claims of children and the biological connection to that past life that seemed to match.

So how many birth marks does this child have? How many defects? Do the birth marks or defects correspond to the fatal wound of the past person? We're going to come back to these display cabinets later, because on display next to them are books totaling thousands of pages that Stevenson wrote on birth marks and birth defects and how they tie into past life memories. And it's clear to me, this is not some strange footnote in his research. It's an entire body of work. And we will return to it because it deserves more time. It deserves an entire episode. So here's what we have.

So now we're walking into the conference room where Marietta and Philip have pulled out various cases from their trove of filing cabinets. And Philip puts one on the table. This is all one case. So some of the files will be incredibly thin. But what type of papers are in there? I mean, it is like 200 papers. Yeah, I mean, it will be everything from medical reports to interview transcripts to, it just depends. How interesting the case was and how many investigators were involved. Yeah.

This is a case of a young girl named Disna. This is from 1971. The huge file folder is filled with handwritten notes and pictures, maps, interviews. And then he pulls out something that looks like a chart or table. Usually these files start with these coding forms. So imagine a giant spreadsheet with columns for everything, names, dates, behaviors, phobias, birthmarks, comments, totaling over 200 variables that researchers look into for every case. Almost always you're going to find this.

The tabled statements and recognitions behaviors of the child under investigation. So the person in this case we're looking at Disna, she started talking early, about two and a half, three. The first thing she started talking about was, I'm not from here, that she lived. in this village widowa. Had a son Mahataya. Son had a woman, quote, in quotes. Place in river where she used to bathe. Drum owned by previous personality.

Every possible detail is tracked in this document. And then what's next to that is, is like, all right, who is the informant in reference for that? And where in this file would you find that? And then if there's a verification, who did the verification? And where would you find that? And then the final column is comments. Okay.

And then did she say the name of the person? thought she was. Babona or Babonona is the name that she eventually started coming up with. Okay, so what else? Here's a good one. So this child was saying, I lived alone as this past person. And there are some verifications for that. And then the note says the past person did not live alone before she died, but did live alone for five years, up to six months before she died. Okay, so that statement wasn't wrong, but it wasn't like a match either. Does Stevenson note that anywhere? Yes. So here's, here are some handwritten notes. And it turns out Stevenson did. He noted the ambiguity as well as the flat out misses when they occurred. When you look at his handwritten

notes, I often wonder if anyone ever asked him maybe, maybe try your other hand. It's just so bad. Okay, so what's that? It's like a drawing of a kitchen? So this is interesting because this is a case where Disna had claimed that as this past person, she had buried treasure in the hearth, in a cigarette tin. And this wasn't unique to Disna. Stevenson encountered this enough times that he gave the phenomenon its own name. He coined this phrase, hidden treasure. There are a select number of cases in our database where the child claimed that they had hidden treasure valuables in their past life, but no one knew about it. And some of those cases, people discovered stuff and they didn't know it was there, which is really fascinating. And I think it's important to put the word treasure in

context, because treasure is relative. When I went through a number of the files of these claims, It was trinkets, something shiny, money worth potentially today's dollars of 70 cents. And though that will sound like nothing to most of our listeners, 70 cents in 1960s, Ceylon, could represent a day's wages for a laborer. Here's anthropologist Dr. Jamalock again. You know, back in the 60s, in rural areas in Asia, they weren't banks or anything. And so valuables were hidden, right, in various places. And if people die without telling anyone where those valuables are, then this is a problem we call unfinished business. So back to Disney, because she's one of the kids with a case in these metal filing cabinets,

who talked about burying money in a past life with such detail that investigators could draw a picture of it. Okay, so here's this kitchen and here's the hearth that was drawn based on Disney's description. And basically you'd expect to find the tin somewhere in here. And this little girl, Disna, had never stepped foot in this house or even the village where she claimed the house stood. And in Disney's case, her recollections of buried money were correct. Stevenson verified that the past personalities surviving family had found that cigarette tin under a grinding stone in the kitchen. It was basically next to or under the hearth. And money was not in the tin, but it was there buried as well.

Okay. And then what's the this? So these are things that basically they would then take to the past person's family and say, well, these are things that we've been told. Did your relative who died? Did they have a son? Did they own a drum? And in this case, they did find a Mitch. Bona, it turns out that is either the official name or what they called the past person.

And the village, Disney talked about Widowa, was a real place as well. It was about three miles away, and Disna had never been there. And I want to get to the moment where Disney is taken to her old village. But first, Marietta, who's walked back into the room, describes the different types of recognition tests that we might find in these files. I want to differentiate here between recognitions that just happened in the environments, like where the kid led to that village and said, hey, this was my mom or this was my murder. That is what we would call an uncontrolled recognition. So it just happens naturally in the environment as the child is interacting in it. And then later on, especially in the American cases,

we started using what we call controlled recognitions. So this is specifically, once that previous person is identified, then the investigator can create a stimuli set where one picture is a picture of something real from the previous person's life, say the school that they went to and then use a few other pictures as foils, so something that looks like the actual target for recognition, but is not that. And then they would present it to the child and see if one of the pictures is familiar or not. So I just want to make this differentiation between controlled and uncontrolled. Yeah. So noted in Dizness File, there was an uncontrolled recognition that happened when she was very little, and her family took her to Weddawa, the village where she claims she lived

and died in her past life. They didn't know the family at all. And there's many pages here where they walked through the town and they say very clearly, Disney walked past a number of homes that any one of them could have been the right home and went to the home that was the correct home of the past personality and didn't walk up to the front door but walked around the side and everyone was looking and there was an unseen from the road door and she walked right in that door. Jeez, that's so wild. And the people who lived there who were part of the past person's family said, yeah, that's the door that that past person would have walked in. She would never have walked in the front door. So that was one case, one child and we just went through like a tenth of it.

But what's mind-boggling is Stevenson and the researchers who followed him did this thousands of times. And all those interviews, medical records, maps, recognitions, hits, misses, behaviors, even tiny details like that cigarette tin, eventually had to be organized in a way that researchers could compare one case to another. And there's literally a rulebook for how to do it. And Dr. Marietta Palovenova pulls it out. We have this coding manual. It's literally this thick. There are 208 variables in our database. He developed all of these criteria and applied them to the documentation of thousands of these cases. And this is where all those filing cabinets that we saw on the way in becomes something much bigger. Because the team at DOPS is digitizing the archive, turning decades of case files into searchable data.

It's an electronic database that currently has 2,254 cases. These are the cases that are considered solid enough. representative enough of this phenomenon to be entered in the database. So just to put this in perspective, you know, Stevenson hadn't spent his career just collecting a handful of extraordinary stories. He and those who followed after him investigated thousands of children across countries and cultures, religions, and decades. And when you collect that many cases and they're all coded with the same 200 plus variables, you can start asking much more interesting questions. Like, does the data show any patterns? And it turns out it does. So for start,

is the type of lives these kids remember having. It's overwhelmingly lives of normal people. It's not like the tropes someone remembers being Cleopatra or Napoleon. But while the lives they remember are often ordinary, the ways they end are not. 61% of our children can tell you how they think they died in this past life. And of those, 75% described a violent traumatic death in their past life. A traumatic death. and we don't know why that is,

but we also hypothesized that maybe some aspect of this trauma from this purported past life can transfer to this current life and make the child act traumatized, even if they haven't had traumatic exposure. That's so interesting, because, you know, some of the cases we're already looking at, you know, these boys have phobias connected to their traumatic death. Actually, that makes me wonder something.

Do boys report past lives more often? There's more boys than girls. talking about past life memories. I think the percentage is something like 60 to 40 or 65 to 35. It is fairly imbalance. Wow. In the database, most children, when they talk about a past life, they talk about a life of the same sex, which is already pretty fascinating.

In a small percentage of cases, I think it's about 10%. The children talk about a life of the opposite sex. So if most children are remembering a past life of the same sex, you know, why would boys be showing up more in the data than girls. There's possibly a cultural element that boys are being listened to more and that their claims are being taken more seriously than girls' claims. That may be a factor. But the other interesting element that a lot of these cases are traumatic deaths, men in general

are more likely to die of unnatural or violent accidents. It's interesting. And in that database... And then she brought up a pattern, something they've measured, that is a something I would have ever thought to even ask about. How much time passed between the last person's death and the new child's birth? And obviously they can only figure that out with quote and quote solved cases where they know the dates of both, but at Dopp's, they have a name for this. The intermission period, the time between a child's claims of dying and when they were born.

When the child talks about a life that ended traumatically, the intermission period is shorter. We just got a paper published in the psychology of consciousness. looking at how unexpectedness of dying in the purported deceased person predicts a significantly faster intermission period. So Dr. Sadigy, she saw something in the data. Dr. Saida Sadigy is one of the postdoc researchers at Dops, and she'll be included in a future episode when we do a deep dive into the intermission period. But here's a quick bite of her explaining her findings.

For the most unexpected, like immediate death, the intermission time is 12 months. The most expected, which means the person was ill and they expected it to happen, the median intermission time is 21 months. The median intermission time is 21 months when a death is expected, and it's 12 months when it isn't. Trauma seems to speed something up. There seems to be some sort of urgency in these past lives to manifest quicker when it's trauma versus not. I want to pause here, because when I was standing in that room, this part of our

conversation really affected me and not scientifically, but spiritually. Because first off, if there really is an intermission period, where are we going? Is it the same place people go when they explain a near-death experience? Is it heaven? Is it somewhere else? And it comes up in almost every culture. And the other thing about this intermission period is it kind of made reincarnation feel more just to me. Because if you're five years old and your life ends and you're robbed from all the experiences that would give you a full and round life, there's something comforting to me about the possibility you get another turn. And it makes sense you'd go back quicker. Like if you're playing a video game and someone kills off your character or five minutes into the game, you're like,

hell yeah, I'm hitting restart. But if you spend hours going through all the levels and going through the entire game and conquering it, you know, you might not want to play right away. I for one would want to chill for a bit. I wouldn't want to do the whole thing again. So all this intermission period stuff made reincarnation feel a little less like some endless cycle that you're trapped in and something that we might actually have agency and even free will over. So, whew, but for right now, let's go back to the data because buried among the 200 plus variables are some wild things that happen less often, but are much harder to know how to explain or what to do with. And one of them is Xenaglossi. So Zinaglossi is speaking a language that you have no natural explanation for

understanding or being able to speak. You've never been explained. to this language. You never had training in it, and yet somehow you're speaking it. And this is not speaking in tongues. Zinaglossi means an actual identified language. And in their database, there are 40 cases of young kids speaking a language they've never been taught. And the kids in these cases could just be using random words or full-on sentences. There was an interesting case where there was a boy who claimed to be Japanese in his past life. And any time the boy fell, like at the park or at home, would say a word. that they didn't understand. And it turns out they found out that he was saying the Japanese word for

ouch. And the other thing this one boy did that was really interesting. So the parents, they were American and they would say sukiaki, the Japanese food sukiaki. But apparently that's not how you say it in Japanese. You say skaiiki. And the kid corrected their pronunciation as to how you say that, which is remarkable to me, because who in the world would know that? Okay, so these words were happening that weren't anywhere in the world at all. But was he also saying that he used to live in Japan? Yeah, his past live memories were from Japan. And sometimes kids can even carry on a conversation in a language they've never been taught.

These Burmese twin girls were, according to their parents, speaking to each other, responsibly, in Japanese. So even though this is another Japanese case, it's a completely different one, right? Like the first little boy we just talked about, he was born into American family. Yeah. But it's not like Japanese shows them. more often than any other language when it comes to Zinaglasey. No. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. So these Burmese twins, they both were expressing shared memories of having lived as Japanese brothers who died on the same battlefield at the same moment in World War II. Ian was able to verify later that there was actually British bombing going on at that point in that part of the world where they had claimed they died. Ian went as far to find like the war evidence. And the lives they recalled were from where?

Japan. someone verify that they were actually speaking Japanese. Yeah, exactly. They had people come in and say, yeah, the words they were using is Japanese. Now, again, these are young children. And they've never been taught Japanese. No. There are reports, and you see them in the file.

And once they were speaking Burmese, the parents would say, we would always be asked, where are they originally from? Because they're speaking with, like, an accent, like they're not from here originally. So that's the phenomenon. Those are some of the examples of the cases that we had of the 40. And here's another detail that makes those 40 cases a little harder to shrug off. off, the language wasn't random. Every one of the 40 cases, whatever the language was connected to where they were from

and they're alleged to pass life. And this is where the cases get harder to think of as children simply knowing unusual information because sometimes what seems to carry over isn't a fact at all. It's something deeply personal like a phobia or a skill, a way of behaving, even a vice. Preferences for food, for music, hobbies like guitar, even negative preferences. We've had children who, when they were very young, wanted cigarettes, asked their parents for cigarettes. All of this because apparently they're saying these were things that mattered to them in this past life that they live. There's this famous story of a boy where he really liked hats, but like fedora style hats.

And we have in our database the ability to differentiate, is this just a unique little kid who's got a funny style of clothing? Or is this style of clothing specifically directly verified to have been linked to the way of that past person dressed? So it's not just that the children are remembering facts about a person. Pieces of that personality are showing up inside of them. It's not just, you know, I know things about this person. It's, this was me. Not every strong case has a xenoblossy. Not every strong case has birth marks or phobias.

But I'm starting to think every strong case has to have that psychological core identity connection. And then it could manifest physically, biologically in numerous ways. It could be a language. It could be a birth mark. It could be something else, a phobia. The other stuff is important, but it comes secondary to that core continuation of something. And if you think all that's strange, there's another pattern in these files that, for me, moves into a much more unexplained space. That's coming up after this break.

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advantage of that extra online traffic. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com. Go to Shopify.com today to hear your first. Welcome back to the reincarnation records. There's another pattern in these files that for me moves into a much more unexplained space, because sometimes the first nod to reincarnation doesn't come from the child at all. It comes in a dream visiting. It comes in a dream visiting. from what seems like a soul or consciousness to often a parent who's expecting a baby or a parent who's grieving the loss of someone who's died. And it's not necessarily always parents. Here's Philip. Our variable in the database covers both announcing dreams and departing dreams.

So departing dreams are look for me in this other place because I'm going to come back for you in this other body, right? They mostly occur after the death before the claimed rebirth. announcing dreams are in a mother or even a father in their dreams being told, I'm coming to you. Come on. So announcing dreams commonly happen when parents who are expecting a baby are visited by the consciousness or soul of this incoming life to say, hey, I'm on my way. I chose you. And the departing dreams are when the consciousness of someone who's died come to their grieving loved ones and say, hey, I'm going to be reborn in Akron, Ohio. Find me there.

This is crazy. How often does the enunciation dreams happen? I don't know, Philip, do you have the database pulled up? We just have announcing departing numbers, and we can get you both frequencies and what percentage of our database had some or more. It's okay. You can send it to me later. Yeah, I will. We asked to see an actual case, and Marietta pulled a file from Turkey. Okay, so this is the case of Salaman Chapar.

It is a Turkish case. So briefly, Salaman was born in... 1966. While his mother was pregnant with him, she had this dream where a man came to her on horseback and he said, I was killed with a blow to the head with a shovel and I want to stay with you in particular and I don't want to go to anyone else. And when he was born, his family noticed that he had this birth mark in the back of his head, this little area that was depressed. It was just there from the moment that he was born. As soon as the child starts speaking,

one of the very first things he said was that he wanted to go to the stream and that his home was by the stream. When he started talking a bit more, he started talking about this past life where he was a miller in a neighboring village and he had gotten himself into some kind of fight with a customer and the customer had killed him. He kept talking about his other life,

So at some point, the mom decided to let him take her to the stream and just let him explore whatever he was talking about. So he led the way to a neighboring village called Ekber, and there he led her to a mill on the stream. And he also pointed to a house that he said, this used to be my house. Identifying the village, the house, the mill, the stream is all in the file. And most of those statements happened around the age of two. And his second visit was when he was two and a half, he met the mother of that presumed previous personality, the man who was killed. Wait, accidentally? Like, did he just run into her on the road? Yeah, and a lot of these, once you go to the village, like a lot of people seem to be hanging outside or in the field.

So as you're walking about the village, you can find people. Yeah. And after identifying the mill where the boy said he used to work, his former house, and the mother from his past life, they found the name of the man who made. matched and who was killed. Mehmet Becler is the name of the deceased individual, and he was killed a few years before Suleiman was born. One day he was just at the mill doing his normal work, and this other guy comes by with his wheat, and there's a line of customers waiting, and this guy insists to have his wheat milled first because his family was hungry.

And so it seemed like he was pushy, and then Mehmet. Bechler, the Miller, told him, no, you have to wait in line. All of these people were here before you. I can't just take you first. And then this fight happened. And this other guy hit him on the head with a shovel. Dr. Stevenson was able to consult the court proceedings and also the autopsy of Mehmet Bechler. So now, in terms of statements that the child made that were verified. And these were statements said by the boy prior to them finding Mechman, the man who was killed. I had a family, I had a wife, I had two sons and a daughter, which was exactly the number of children and their sexes that Mehmet had. He talked about having a father who took a second wife,

which at the time was illegal in Turkey. He talked about having a mill, and then he also said a lot of specific things about how Mehmet Bekler was killed. Jeez. Was he familiar with the court documents when he said that, or was that just kind of out of the blue? No. These court documents were only accessible and they're in the file to Ian Stevenson through his local informants. He said he was hit on the head. Now, Suleiman didn't specifically talk about the shovel. The shovel only came through in that announcing dream. Wow. So the only mention of the shovel from the family was from the dream his mother had before he was born. And Stevenson was able to verify the shovel was the murder weapon when he received the court case, something the family did not have access to.

Very interesting. Yeah, but I think we covered so much. I'm so glad we were able to get you sit down again. I'm grateful, too, because I just felt like there was a lot of stuff. By the end of the first day, we'd gone through so much material, I could barely hold all of it in my head. And I was exhausted. Gosh, this has been a lot. And I have to be honest, like, I actually don't feel well.

Like, I feel kind of sick. And, like, I don't know if I'm just overwhelmed. I just feel really, I don't know. If we accept that this is real, is it a glitch? Most people, if they live the past life, they don't seem to remember. Is it by design that you don't remember? This is where we get into the metaphysical stuff. Many people actually speculate that we're meant to forget.

You get a clean slate, but why do some people and some kids remember? Is it serving a purpose? And maybe it is. We do talk a little bit about what we would call the unfinished business hypothesis, but we don't have the empirical data yet. Let's pretend for a second. This is reincarnation. I don't think it's supposed to work this way, right?

Like, I don't think a three-year-old is supposed to be having nightmares about how they died in a fiery plane crash. But if it's what's happening, it could be that the emotion and the trauma of that past life is created a kind of a glitch in the process, in the system, and it's not allowed these children to start over in a fresh new way. If reincarnation is real, I don't think we're supposed to remember. Even with all of the work that has been done in more than six,

decades, we're still, in many ways, it just still seems like we're scratching the surface. I came to UVA specifically asking whether something as slippery as reincarnation could really be investigated scientifically. And by the end, I was not asking that anymore. Because even if you don't call it reincarnation, the children in these files appear to know things they should have no way of knowing. So now the question is much harder. What is actually happening? Because access to the memories of a dead person might not necessarily mean that you were that person. There's this notion of the Akashik record. The Akashik record is basically the idea that all the details and specifics of every life to ever live are stored in like an informational field. Sometimes what other people call

it super sigh, which is just that maybe these kids just have access to some remnant, some consciousness that was here and they're just psychically telling the memory of it, which by the way, it would be fucking remarkable if that's true. But it wouldn't have to be reincarnation. Which sounds like a conservative explanation until you realize it's still. breaks everything we currently understand about memory and the brain. This should not be possible if this deceased person's brain has died, their memories have died with them. So how is this kid apparently picking up on the memories of that deceased person? So that already is anomalous in the context of current neuroscientific understanding of memory

and the mind and consciousness. So even though I tried entertaining that possibility, that there's super sci or this ability to psychically download information. about someone else's life, there's something in these cases that becomes much harder to explain as simply accessing someone else's memories, in more than a third of the solved cases at Dobbs. The children have a birth mark or birth defect that matches an injury or fatal wound of the past life the child is remembering. The biological aspect of it, the missing limbs, the birth defects that correspond to validated post-mortem reports and autopsy reports of the alleged person that the child claims they were. I don't know that the Akashic record explains that.

I don't quite understand what does. And that brings me back to the glass display cabinets on the other side of the room, the ones with the photographs and the weapons. This boy was born without a right ear, but with memories of the life of a man who was shot in the head. Which leaves a question that memory alone can't answer. How could something that happened to one body appear on another? An autopsy report in black and white made before the child in question was born,

In many cases, we find a close correspondence between the post-morting report and the birth marks and birth defects. It becomes harder to make sense of how someone's fatal wound in another country years ago shows up in a child. The birthmark cases. That's next time on the reincarnation records. Thank you to the small team who made this season possible. Our amazing producer, Cooper Mal. Our audio mix and sound design was by Jeremy Cole. Music was by Microbino. My right hand was Selena Kennedy.

And I'm Kyn Dickens, your executive producer, writer, editor, and host. And if you haven't listened to our last season of the podcast, the consciousness cassettes, I highly recommend you do so, as it will give even more context to this season. And if you want to go in deeper, subscribe to our backstage pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content. Ask Me Anything, interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to connect with other members on our Discord. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free,

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