Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [91]
A third man, a forty-four-year-old retired Air Force pilot, was transfixed not only by his own resuscitation—he saw them pounding on his chest, breaking a rib, placing a green oxygen mask on him—but also by the machinery. In May 1978, he suffered a massive heart attack. He described the dials on the defibrillator, how the doctor called out the “watt seconds” as a “fixed” needle determined the voltage the doctor wanted, and a “moving” needle told them when the machine was properly charged. The man claimed never to have heard these terms before, nor ever to have seen the procedure on television.
“Couldn’t he have heard the instructions and made a model in his mind?” I asked Sabom.
Not in this case, Sabom said, because auditory clues would not have been enough. “Somebody is not standing there saying, ‘Okay, now watch this one needle as it goes up . . . stops . . . okay now . . .’ That’s not being discussed, it’s just happening. So you either see it, or you don’t know about it, because it’s not verbal information that’s being discussed at the time.”
When conducting his research, Sabom did wonder if the patients might have made educated guesses—based either on their own experience with cardiac resuscitation or on television programs (although it would be a decade before realistic medical dramas took to the airwaves). To check that hypothesis, Sabom conducted a mini-study. He had in hand the interviews with the thirty-two patients who claimed they “watched” their resuscitation from outside their bodies. He then asked twenty-five “control” patients—individuals who had been resuscitated but remained oblivious throughout the procedure—to imagine being revived and tell him what that would look like.
“And twenty-three of the twenty-five [control subjects] made major mistakes in what they were telling me,” he reported.
They muffed details about how the paddles were used, the sequence of steps during the resuscitation, where needles were inserted, how nurses drew blood gases from the wrists. Then he compared those accounts with the descriptions by the people who had claimed to have watched their resuscitation.
“There was just no comparison at all,” he recalled. All in all, the group that claimed to have had out-of-body experiences was spot on. “Again, this is just some evidence to suggest what these people were telling me was coming from a different source of information than from something they knew about already.”2
Targets out of Range
A skeptical scientist would likely say that no matter how it is acces sorized with medical reports and tables, Sabom’s research is only a pile of retrospective anecdotes. Therein lies the dilemma: How does a researcher prove that consciousness can gallop free, even when the brain is crippled or dead?
It took nearly fifteen years for researchers to arrive at a plan. It needed to be dirt cheap; after all, who would fund this research? And it should have a shot, at least, of building an airtight case that someone had left his body and perceived an object or event that he simply could not have seen otherwise.
I think of this plan as the “squirrel monkey test.” When I was about eight years old, my family owned a squirrel monkey, imaginatively named Monk. One morning, Monk disappeared, and an entire day’s search ended with the primate still missing. In the evening, my mother hatched an idea: Place a grape on the floor of every room, close the doors, and wait for a grape to disappear.Within minutes, the grape in the basement was gone. My brother then replaced the grape and hid behind a chair with the cage. The denouement occurred when Monk emerged to fetch that “target” grape, and the rest is, well, a blur of a leaping boy and a cage snapping shut and a startled monkey clinging to a grape that cost him his freedom.
In similar fashion, near-death-experience researchers