The near-death experience

Many people have experienced an OOBE for the first time through being involved in a serious accident. In 1964 David “Taylor and a friend were spending the last few weeks of their tour of East Africa in northern Tanzania, when they had a serious collision with a lorry. David nearly died as a result of his injuries.

We had been driving through the game park and had just turned on to the main road to Moshi. It was dusk and I was sitting half-asleep in the passenger seat.

`I was suddenly woken by my friend, who was delighted to see the first vehicle we had come across in six hours, driving down towards us. Either my friend or the other driver must have been half-asleep, too, for within seconds the two vehicles drove smack into each other.

`As the two vehicles collided, I suddenly found that I was watching the scene from several yards up in the air, as if I were suspended above the road. I saw our own Land-Rover colliding with a large lorry. I watched as I was thrown from the Land-Rover and my friend then climbed out unhurt and came back to examine my body. I also saw the lorry drive off. I remember thinking that I looked a terrible mess lying there on the road and could well be dead.

`The next thing I knew was coming to in Moshi Hospital. I had been uncon­scious for two days with serious injuries. I told my friend what I had seen and he confirmed that it was indeed a lorry that had run into us and that it had driven on. I had only been saved because another car had come down the road soon after­wards and taken me to the hospital.

`The whole experience, even after all these years, has left me completely un­afraid of death.’

 

On the evening of Friday, 26 May 1979 the world was shocked to learn that an American Airlines DC-I0 airliner had crashed — a mass of flames and twisted wreckage — on take-off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The lives of 273 people were lost in the worst disaster in the history of flying in the United States.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, 23-year-old office manager David Booth sat slumped in horrified disbelief in front of his television. For s0 consecutive nights before the disaster he had had the same terrible nightmare. First, he heard the sound of engines failing, then looked on helplessly as a huge American Airlines aeroplane swerved sharply, rolled over and crashed to the ground in a mass of red and orange flames. Not only did he see the crash and hear the explosion, he also felt the heat of the flames. Each time he awoke in terror and was obsessed all day by the memory of the hideous dream. He was sure it was a premonition: `There was never any doubt to me that something was going to happen,’ he said. `It wasn’t like a dream. It was like I was standing there watching the whole thing — like watching television.’

After several nights he could no longer keep his terrible premonition to himself and, on Tuesday, 22 May 1979, he telephoned the Federal Aviation

 

 

A nightmare comes true

On the evening of Friday, 26 May 1979 the world was shocked to learn that an American Airlines DC-I0 airliner had crashed — a mass of flames and twisted wreckage — on take-off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The lives of 273 people were lost in the worst disaster in the history of flying in the United States.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, 23-year-old office manager David Booth sat slumped in horrified disbelief in front of his television. For s0 consecutive nights before the disaster he had had the same terrible nightmare. First, he heard the sound of engines failing, then looked on helplessly as a huge American Airlines aeroplane swerved sharply, rolled over and crashed to the ground in a mass of red and orange flames. Not only did he see the crash and hear the explosion, he also felt the heat of the flames. Each time he awoke in terror and was obsessed all day by the memory of the hideous dream. He was sure it was a premonition: `There was never any doubt to me that something was going to happen,’ he said. `It wasn’t like a dream. It was like I was standing there watching the whole thing — like watching television.’

After several nights he could no longer keep his terrible premonition to himself and, on Tuesday, 22 May 1979, he telephoned the Federal Aviation

Authority at the Greater Cincinnati Airport. Then he called American Air­lines and a psychiatrist at the University of Cincinnati. They listened sympa­thetically, but that didn’t make David Booth feel any better. Three days later, almost out of his mind with worry, he heard the news of the DC-10 crash.

The Federal Aviation Authority had taken David Booth’s call seriously enough to attempt — in vain — to match up the details of his nightmare with some known airport or aeroplane somewhere in the country. When they heard the news of the crash, the details tallied all too well. ‘It was uncanny,’ said Jack Barker, public affairs officer for the southern region of the FAA. ‘There were dif­ferences, but there were many simila­rities. The greatest similarity was his calling [naming] the airline and the airplane . . . and that [the plane] came in inverted.’ Booth had mentioned a ‘three-engine aircraft’ resembling a DC- 10 and the crash site he described was similar to the airport at Chicago.

David Booth stopped having nightmares once the disaster had hap­pened, but he continued to feel dis­turbed by the whole affair. ‘How can you make sense of something like that?’ he asked. ‘There’s no explanation for it. No meaning. No conclusion. It just doesn’t make sense.’