Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training—and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he’d been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who’d been introduced to Stevenson’s interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson’s paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.
Stevenson’s main claim to fame was his meticulous studies of children’s memories of previous lives. Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.
Professor Ian Stevenson (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1542356/Professor-Ian-Stevens...),Scientific Reincarnation Evidence by Dr Ian Stevenson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOMBHnwEfxY),5TH Dimension Reincarnation Documentary YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xak1qUhcyTg&t=253s),Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation by Dr Ian Stevenson(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbWMEWubrk0&t=295s),Stevenson Reincarnation Research 1/3(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRTBoRFTczI),(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge0-WCom0Ls),Scientific cases for Reincarnation by Dr Jim Tucker(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88s6HHkbh84),Evidence of Reincarnation in Childhood by Dr. Jim Tucker (Full Presentation)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La8vG4mA0is), https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/ian-stevensone28099s... (Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?)