Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Many years ago, around the same time that movies like Flatliners were springing from the from the zeitgeist, I found myself in a job that had me hanging out socially with a lot of emergency room docs and nurses. The discussion turned often to near-death experiences.

One of the most common reported NDEs is “floating up out of my body, looking down, seeing the doctors and nurses working on my body, etc.”, usually called an out-of-body experience. Opinions as to weather reports of OBEs were fabrications, hallucinations, or actual perception, varied (Surprisingly, medical folk in my experience consist of about the same mix of superstitious and non-superstitious people as the general population). Every ER in this hospital had the same piece of equipment, a movable cart with various stuff on it, and a broad, flat top about 180 cm from the floor, with a small metal lip around it. I that I write a 3-digit number on a 3x5” card in thick black felt tip pen, and place the card face up on each cart top. After a resuscitation, any doc in on our scheme would casually interview the patient, and not if they noticed the card and the number on it. If the patient could read the number, or even notice that a card with something written on it in black was there, we’d have a “hit”, indicating that OBEs are objectively real perceptions. Everybody (at the time) agreed, and I did it.

It was a busy next few weeks, and our unofficial project actually gathered several “rising, floating, looking” OBE reports. Fortunately, nobody engaged in any successful cheating, such as reading the card and fabricating a “hit”. All reports were negative.

Despite everybody’s agreement to keep our experiment a secret, after a few weeks, word made its way to the hospital’s ethicist, putting a sudden and legally scary end to it. Fortunately, the worst anyone got was a stern private talking-to and a collection of ominous threats, one of them specifically admonishing me never to speak or publish anything about the whole affair, even after anonomyzing the specifics, which is exactly what I’m doing here.

Thus ended my first and only try for the Randi Foundation’s $1,000,000.