After Death

Mr. Black: It was July 18th, 1969.

It was early in the morning, about 5:30 a.m.

It was a beautiful day to fly.

No wind to speak of.

So how could it be better?

We start up the engines.

We were full of fuel.

Everything was fine.

And we started taxiing.

And then sure enough,

the aircraft started to climb.

Chuck brought the landing gear up.

We were accelerating and climbing

above the runway,

and I think we were about

100 feet above the ground when I started noticing

that something was wrong.

You have one engine at higher rpm,

another low rpm.

Now that can happen with an engine failure.

And I mean, I grabbed the chairs

and held on and looked out

and I saw a bunch of green grass

and it looked like a city park

And I thought, well, worst case scenario,

we've always been trained to just land in a park.

But the next thing I noticed was

towering trees were filling our windshield

Chuck grabbed the flight controls,

and he yanks them all the way left.

As far as they'll go.

And then he pulls them all the way back,

against his chest.

I suddenly found myself

above the crash site,

but unaware

of what I was looking at or why.

I was not in any pain.

I was not in any fear or discomfort.

I was just above this crash site.

I could see an airplane and I could see a pilot.

First of all, my eyes went right to one pilot.

This was Gene.

And then I went over and I saw another pilot

right next to him five feet away.

And I recognized this as Chuck.

And while I'm processing what I'm looking at,

I see a third pilot also about five feet away.

And this is me.

Mr. Burke: Imagine if what we're living here on this

earth is really being lived on a flat, black

and white painting on a wall,

and death is separation.

So when we die, our

spirit separates from our physical body.

You die and you're ripped off

that flat, black and white

two-dimensional painting

your brought out into a three-dimensional room

of color all around you.

You're experiencing things

you've never experienced before,

even though you can see your world

is contained within this world,

then imagine you're put back into

that flat, black and white painting,

and you have to describe

three dimensions of color

in two-dimensional black and white terms.

How would you do it?

Dr. Sabom: Medically,

Scientifically,

the point of death

cannot be defined.

What we do know is there is a process of dying

during which I feel the

near-death experience occurs.

75% of the people in that first study

have had a documented cardiac arrest.

Part of the experience is they

said they floated up out of their body

and they can see what was going on

during the resuscitation.

I felt that myself, as a cardiologist

could pick that apart.

Mr. Burke: This is clinical death as we know it,

sometimes for a few minutes,

sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes hours.

And yet modern medicine or the miraculous,

I don't know,

resuscitated them

and they were able to come back

and talk about it.

You may think you've died.

Dr. Sabom: All definitions, medically,

scientifically, and legally

state that once you go across that red line,

i.e. you die,

you don't come back.

And I like to say doctors resuscitate,

not resurrect their patients.

Mr. Burke: I was actually an agnostic.

I didn't know if I believed there was a God.

I thought, I don't know if I believe

there's a heaven or not,

but my dad was dying of cancer

and someone gave him the very first research

on what's now called near-death experiences.

And I saw it on his nightstand,

picked it up and read it in one night.

And that just got me curious.

So I kind of opened my my eyes, my mind,

and I started to explore from there.

I found it fascinating,

kind of, the train of how this

whole near-death experience phenomenon

started to get traction in America.

Dr. George Ritchie was the first one

to really talk publicly about this.

He was actually at Camp Barkeley

getting ready to go fight in World War II.

Joan Rivers: What happened during those 9 minutes?

What did you see? What happened?

Dr. Ritchie: I met the Christ

because I was told to stand up, you are

in the presence of the Son of God.

He came into my room

and he conducted me through four different

realms of life after death.

Life really is forever. We don't die.

Death is nothing more than just a gateway

through which we go.

Mr. Burke: Dr. Moody actually heard him lecture

at the University of Virginia,

where he was a visiting professor

and heard him talk about

this near-death experience.

Dr. Moody: In 1969,

I became a professor of philosophy

at East Carolina University

and in teaching courses on Plato.

I began to hear these

experiences from my students

and also from other faculty members.

Dr. Sabom: I was brought into this

field kicking and screaming.

I was at the University of Florida in Gainesville

with Sarah Kreissinger

who was a psychiatric, social worker

at the hospital I was working at.

And she had picked up

Raymond Moody's book Life After Life,

about two months

after it was initially published.

She read it. She gave it to me.

She asked me what I thought.

This is Dr. Raymond Moody,

noted psychiatrist, lecturer, and researcher.

He is perhaps best known as the author

of the groundbreaking examination

of the near-death experience.

The bestselling book, Life After Life.

It has sold upwards of 15 million copies,

and has been printed in 14 different languages.

Dr. Moody: They tell us, first of all,

that they seem, from their point of view,

to leave their physical bodies

to float up above the scene of the resuscitation

and to watch the events going on down below.

They tell us that they go

through a narrow passageway or a tunnel

into an incredibly brilliant

and warm and loving light

Dr. Sabom: Hogwash.

I never heard these experiences before.

I went into the hospital

asking some of the older physicians,

"Hey, you ever heard a patient say this?"

"No."

So I was very skeptical

that these things were even occurring.

And if they were occurring,

they were either hallucinations

or delusions or whatever.

In cardiology, we're about scientific studies.

So I asked a few people

who had been resuscitated,

and the third patient

I talked to had an experience

similar to what Moody talked

about in his book, Life After Life.

So, Sarah and I said,

Well, maybe we ought to look into this further.

We devised a scientific protocol

to interview these people.

We tape recorded the interviews.

We took down their background data,

the demographics, etc.. And...

this went on for five years.

First of all, I'd get permission