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decided to place a visual “target” in rooms (such as operating rooms) where people were likely to suffer cardiac arrests. Usually these were hung or placed below the ceiling but above the operating table—somewhere in the line of vision of an out-of-body-experiencer “hovering” near the ceiling. In one study, the target was a large laminated piece of cardboard with a pattern or a word on it that was changed every few days. In another, the researcher hung computer screens that displayed images of words or colors or pastoral scenes, rotating as in a photo gallery. The nurses and doctors who crawled up on a ladder to affix these targets hoped that a traumatized patient in the operating room would report floating above his body as the doctors worked on him, see the target, and then volunteer the information later.Would that not serve as irrefutable proof that the out-of-body experience had occurred? Wouldn’t that prove the monkey was in the basement?

“It was a lot of work,” Penny Sartori told me. Sartori, an intensive-care nurse, religiously rotated targets in the intensive-care unit at Morris-ton Hospital in Swansea (Wales) for five years.

“I had to decide how to do it,” the diminutive thirty-five-year-old said in a lilting cadence. “I had to decide on which signals I was going to use. I had to go to the trouble of getting them laminated. And then when I put them on top of the monitors, every month I’d have to clean them for infection-control purposes, and rotate each to a different bed area. It was a lot of work. And no one actually saw the symbols. So I was very disappointed, yeah.”

Out of five studies conducted in Europe and the United States, not one of the patients spotted the target.

Why, I asked Sartori, did she suppose, no patients spotted them?

“Well, a lot of the patients didn’t float high enough to see the symbol,” she said earnestly.“Some of them floated in directions opposite of where [the targets] were situated. And the patients who were high enough said they were so concerned with what was going on around their immediate body that they weren’t looking anywhere else. I’m sure I’d be the same,” she added, then smiled. “But one man did say to me, if I had known there would be a symbol there, I’d have gone up to it and looked at it and I would have come back and told you what it was.”

A comforting sentiment, that, but no monkey. Not yet, at least.

The White Crow

I realized before I wrote the first word of this book that I would never be able to “prove” that God exists, or that the soul survives death, or even that the universe is an intelligent, caring place. One arrives at those conclusions through personal experience, through an encounter with a dimension of reality that just does not fit Newtonian physics. But as I delved further into the research, I picked up the scent of a provable story: a case that demonstrates that one’s mind can be untethered from the body, and consciousness can fly free of the brain.

Harvard psychologist William James once said,“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough to prove one single crow to be white.”3

I found my white crow.

On the day I visited Pam Reynolds, the sky sparkled porcelain blue, the last breath of gentle weather before winter took its hold. It was October 30, 2006. I turned onto the gravel road to find a large brown and tan touring bus parked in the driveway. This was Pam’s home. Pam is a musician, owner of Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta, which has recorded the music of Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Matchbox 20, among dozens of other musicians. Her son greeted me at my car cheerfully and opened the pneumatic door to the bus. I climbed the stairs and peered through the dim, smoky room, spotting a kitchenette with the remains of breakfast, a small table, couches lining one side of the bus, with a large-screen TV at the front.

“Hello, hello!” Pam called, a beacon of life in the dark interior. I made my way to the back of the bus. Michael Sabom had discovered Pam’s case and