Ian Stevenson

Stevenson founded the unit at the University of Virginia that investigates young children who make statements about a life they say they lived before, and he spent forty years building a catalogue of more than two thousand such cases. The method he described is documentary rather than experimental. A child, usually between two and five, speaks about another family, another place, a name, a manner of death. The investigator records those statements, ideally before the two families have met, then goes to the named place and checks whether a person answering the description existed and died in the way described. Where the child carries a birthmark or a malformation, he sought medical or postmortem records of the corresponding wound.

Two features of the collection are not in dispute and are worth stating. The cases cluster heavily in places where rebirth is an ordinary belief, in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Lebanon, Turkey and among certain groups in North America, which either reflects where such reports are taken seriously enough to be made or reflects what the belief itself produces. And the number of statements recorded in writing before any contact between the families is small, a point Stevenson himself made repeatedly, because by the time an investigator hears of a case the families have usually already found each other.

The critical case against the collection is specific rather than general, and the atlas records it in full because the material cannot be assessed without it. First, contamination: in most cases the two families had met before the investigator arrived, so a child statements were recorded after there was an opportunity for the child to have heard the details, and reconstructing what was said beforehand depends on the memory of people who now have a stake in the answer. Second, the interpreter. In much of the fieldwork the person translating was also the person who had located the case and knew what the answer was supposed to be, which is exactly the arrangement that controlled testing exists to prevent. Third, selection: a child produces many statements and only some correspond to a real person, and deciding which count as hits is a judgement made after the match has been proposed.

The answers offered on the other side are that the birthmark cases carry independent physical evidence, that some cases were written down first, and that the sheer volume is not explained by any one mechanism. Neither side has persuaded the other, and the honest description of the situation is that it has never been resolved rather than that it has been settled in either direction.