Jim Tucker, M.D, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, has been continuing the work of Ian Stevenson. He described his work in two books, Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2005), and Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (2013). In the latter he provides the remarkable account of James Leininger.
James, a little boy in in Lafayette, Louisiana, began saying things about a past life as soon as he was able to talk His parents, Bruce and Andrea, first became aware of their little boy’s story when he was twenty-two months old and his father took him to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum. He was fascinated by the planes in the World War II exhibit. Bruce got him a few toy planes and a video on the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight exhibition team. James watched it for hours at a time. A few months later he began having nightmares. Andrea would find him thrashing around and screaming “Airplane crash on fire! Little Man can’t get out!” These happened night after night. Andrea’s sister said the nightmares were like watching someone in terror fighting for his life.
James said he had been a pilot named James who had flown off a boat and was shot down at Iwo Jima. He also said he had a friend named Jack Larsen. When his father asked the name of the boat, James said, “Natoma.” Bruce searched online and discovered the USS Natoma Bay was an escort carrier stationed in the Pacific during World War II. Tucker states that while some of the specifics of this case are dependent on the accuracy of Bruce and Andrea’s memories, in this case Bruce printed out the information on his search and kept it. Each page of the printout has the date the pages were printed, 08/ 27/ 2000, showing that Bruce was searching for Natoma when James was twenty-eight months old.
When James was just over two and a half Bruce was looking through a book, The Battle for Iwo Jima 1945, that he ordered as a gift for his father. James was sitting on his lap. They came to a place in the book showing a map of Iwo Jima on one page and on the other page a photograph showing an aerial view of the base of the island. James pointed at the picture and said, “My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.”
Whenever James played with his toy airplanes he crashed them into the family’s coffee table. He would say “Airplane crash on fire.” When Andrea and James went to the airport to see Bruce off for a business trip, James would say “Daddy, airplane crash on fire.” He said the same thing to his aunt before her flight, and Bruce sternly reprimanded him.
Andrea’s sister told Tucker that at one point, when Bruce was frustrated with all the talk about a plane crash, he placed a world map from an atlas showing much of the globe on the table and asked his son, “Okay, where is Little Man’s plane?” James pointed to a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean called the Ogasawara Archipelago. The name Iwo Jima was written in tiny letters.
In 2002 Bruce attended a Natoma Bay reunion where he learned that only one pilot from Natoma Bay had been killed during the Iwo Jima operation, a twenty-one-year-old from Pennsylvania named James Huston. Jack Larsen was still alive, and when Bruce visited him, he recalled well the day that Huston was killed.
James from time to time offered details about Huston’s family that proved to be accurate. When asked by his mother if Little Man had any brothers or sisters, he replied that he had two older sisters, Annie and Ruth. This was correct. One time James saw his mother with a glass of wine and said that his father had been an alcoholic and that was put in the hospital for six weeks. Andrea was actually able to call the elderly Annie, and she confirmed this was true of their father.
James revealed detailed information about World War II planes. A number of times he talked about flying a Corsair, which was a fighter plane developed during World War II. When he was asked about these planes, James said that they always got flat tires. This was confirmed by a military historian who said that the Corsairs landed hard which often caused flat tires. When he was around two his mother mentioned that a toy airplane she had bought him had a bomb on the bottom. James said no, it was a drop tank. During a tour of the Natoma Bay museum James and his mother saw a five inch cannon. When asked where it was located James said on the fantail on the back of the ship. This was correct.
Besides crashing his toy airplanes into the table top, James engaged in other ritual-like play activities that coincided with those of an airplane pilot who had been shot down. He took an old car seat and various objects to create a play cockpit in Bruce’s home office closet. He would pretend to be a pilot, then come tumbling out like he was the pilot parachuting out after his plane had been hit. When he got into his car seat he raised his hands over his head, then lowered them to above his ears, and placed his right hand in front of his face and down to his chin. What this was about became clear to his parents when he was three and a half and taken to an airshow. He sat in the cockpit of a Piper Cub, put on the headgear, and placed the earphones on his ears and the microphone at his chin, all using the same motions that were involved in his car seat ritual.
When he was four and a half James and his cousin were playing in the community pool. He pretended to shoot at airplanes, and said he was shooting “the Japs.” Andrea told him not to say that. Besides, the war had ended, and we defeated the Japanese. James appeared stunned, and then jumped up and down and yelled in celebration.
He sometimes said and did things that seemed related to an afterlife experience. When he was three his parents gave him a G.I. Joe for Christmas and did this again two more times. He named the first Billy, the second Leon, and the third Walter, and he slept with them and took them everywhere. When his parents asked about these names, James said they were the ones who met him when he went to heaven. On checking, there were ten men in Huston’s squadron who were killed before him. The names of three of them were Billie, Leon, and Walter. In fact, the hair color of the three, brown, blond, and red, matched the hair of the G.I. Joes.
Andrea asked him about. Heaven and God and coming back after death. James told her heaven is real, it’s “right here,” and it’s the most beautiful place in the world. He said that God is not a man or a woman but whoever you need him to be. You can come back, but you get to choose whether you will.
One time when Bruce hugged James and told him how happy he was to he was his son, James told him he had chosen Bruce because he was sure he would be a good father. He said he found him and his mother in Hawaii on the beach eating dinner in front of a big pink hotel. In fact they had stayed at a pink hotel in Hawaii their first week of trying to get pregnant.
Although Tucker didn’t actually get to talk with James until he was almost twelve, he very carefully documented the above account. When they did finally meet James no longer had the memories and appeared to be a typical boy with no particular problems related to his past life experience. (Tucker, 2013)