CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—Dr. Jim Tucker works at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) as a reincarnation researcher.
He has a database of about 2,000 cases of children who seem to remember past lives. Some of these children’s memories have been verified to match in detail the lives of people who have died, suggesting the memories are genuine.
Tucker spoke with Epoch Times about his work, starting with the terminology. In his academic work, he usually prefers terms such as “survival” instead of “reincarnation.”
“There are a lot of connotations with ’reincarnation,'” Tucker said. The religious connotations do not necessarily have bearing on the cases he studies. “Stated most conservatively,” he said, “[the cases] provide evidence that some young children have knowledge of events that happened in the past and their experience of that knowledge is that they are memories that they went through themselves.”
“The simplest explanation is that they’re recalling a life they actually lived,” Tucker said.
Concerns About Fraud or Children’s Vivid Imaginations?
Recently, there has been some attention given to the case of Alex Malarkey, coauthor of the book “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.” Malarkey was about 6 years old in 2004 when he was in a car accident. He said at the time that he'd been to heaven and returned. Later, however, he said he made the story up and was pushed to expand on it by enthusiastic adults.
Tucker said he is not particularly worried about this happening in the cases he studies.
“With our cases, we don’t take anything on faith if we don’t have to … The question is, do the things that they say match with the life of somebody in the past? ... In the strongest cases, it would have been impossible for the children or even their parents to have committed fraud, because the information was so hard to come by.”
