It was sleeting and foggy the day that RaNelle Wallace made her roundtrip journey to a place that she has since tried hard to describe, a place she is certain was heaven.
It was one of those unexpected October storms that dump snow on mountainsides still dressed up in red and gold. RaNelle and Terry Wallace knew they couldn't fly their little plane all the way back to California in weather like that, but they thought maybe they could make the hop from Delta to Fillmore, where they could rent a car.They crashed into the mountains near Fillmore going 180 miles per hour.
Although they survived the impact with hardly a scratch, when Wallace opened the cockpit door gas fumes ignited and rushed at her face. She and her husband spent the next five hours walking through the fog, toward help.
When a trucker finally found them as they stumbled toward the freeway, Wallace was charred and bleeding. The fire had burned away her blouse and a piece of the plane's carpet was stuck to her chest; her hair was singed off, and her face had turned black.
It was in the ambulance, speeding toward the hospital in Salt Lake City, that Wallace had her near-death experience. It was a classic NDE: The tunnel, the light, the joy, the feeling of being overwhelmed by unconditional love.
By now most of us have become familiar with these signposts. According to a Gallup Poll taken in 1982, one in 19 Americans - about 13 million people - have had a near-death experience.
Before the term was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody in his 1975 book "Life After Life," people who had NDEs often kept the experience to themselves. Since then, however, the idea has become more respectable. According to Dr. Bruce Greyson, a Connecticut psychiatrist and NDE expert, there are now 100 researchers worldwide investigating the phenomenon.
The scientists are trying to make sense of sensations that may be proof of an afterlife - or may just be the last-ditch efforts of a distressed brain to cope with the process of dying. The first thing RaNelle Wallace remembers is floating above her body as nurses tried to get her heart going again. Then, suddenly, she was zooming.
"I felt like I was being sucked through a straw. I felt like my spirit was being turned inside out. I felt like this tiny little molecule in the universe." She stops and looks over at her listener. "It's real hard to find the words to describe this experience."
She saw a pinpoint of light that grew closer and larger and soon pierced her, exploding inside of her in a feeling of love and peace. And then she saw a woman moving towards her, a white-haired woman with a young face.
"RaNelle, it's Grandma," the woman said, although her lips never moved.
Thought to thought, says Wallace, the two of them communicated. "I felt my head would explode from too much information," Wallace remembers. "And as soon as I had that thought we stopped."
"We don't have time for this, RaNelle," her grandmother told her. "Let go of the doubt and fear." And as soon as she did, says Wallace, "information started coming at a great speed, like into a computer."
"I learned a long lesson on love," Wallace says. "I learned that the world operates off this power of love, and that our inability to love limits us in this life."
The lesson continued as Wallace was sent into a room where a woman was draped over an altar, waiting for people to bow down to her. "She was so engulfed in her own vanity that she couldn't see anything else." She was limited, even in eternity says Wallace, by her own selfishness.People talk about "the miracle of birth" and RaNelle Wallace, who has three children and one on the way, is as moved as anyone. But Wallace also talks about "the miracle of death."
After being there, she says, there is a lot about this world, the one where she lives in a beautiful house in Park City, that seems colorless and superficial in comparison.
"Everything here seems so green and brown to me. Sometimes blue. But mostly green and brown. The world seems so . . . ennhh." After she recovered and went home from the hospital she would go to paint stores to look at color samples, hoping to find something that might resemble the vivid, indescribable colors she remembered from her NDE. Nothing ever matched up.
But while the world seems lackluster, it also fills her with joy in ways she never felt before.
She is more patient now, she says, and in fact she doesn't even flinch when her 2-year-old pulls the curtains off the wall during this interview. And she is afraid of nothing, especially death. But was Wallace really dead - not just legally dead, but dead enough to come back with an answer to life's biggest mystery? Did she really get a peek at an afterlife? It's a question that 100 researchers, or even 100,000 researchers, will probably never be able to answer.
In the meantime, scientists have discovered some things that reveal how complicated the whole matter is. Some researchers have found they can simulate the tunnel and bright light aspects of an NDE by stimulating the visual cortex. Other researchers have found that stimulating part of the brain's right temporal lobe will produce the tunnel, the out-of-body-experience, the feeling of unconditional love, although maybe not as intensely as a bonafide NDE.
Do near-death experiences, then, really take place in the confines of the brain? Is it a firing of electrons rather than a vision of eternal life?
Or is it possible, as Dr. Melvin Morse, author of "Closer to the Light," suggests, that there is a part of the brain that is actually the seat of the soul? That the brain is hooked into another dimension? That the mind and heaven are somehow intertwined?
And there is a third wrinkle. Psychologist Justine Owens at the University of Virginia has interviewed nearly 400 people who have had NDEs and has found that about half of them only thought they were near death. Does this imply that NDEs are just wishful thinking?
Owens doesn't think so. "We strongly believe that the explanations shouldn't be pitted one against the other," she says.
Shannon Greer, research assistant for Melvin Morse, agrees. "We're trying to bring religion and science together, at least so they will talk."
Aside from the religious implications of NDEs, there is plenty about the experience that still baffles researchers. Why, for example, do some people who have NDEs seem to alter the electromagnetic field around them, causing computers and other electrical equipment to malfunction?
Why do some people have frightening NDEs? What about pre-death visions that closely resemble the near-death experience? How do you explain how a blind woman is able to describe the pattern of someone's shirt while she is near-death? And why are the lives of people who have NDEs so profoundly altered? Not long after her accident, RaNelle Wallace told a close friend about her near-death experience.
"You just had a drug-induced dream," said the friend.
For years after that, Wallace kept her memories pretty much to herself. She travels around the country as a professional speaker now, and occasionally she will make a small allusion to the experience. But this article marks the first time she has talked about it in depth to people she doesn't know.
She is a little afraid that she won't sound credible. But, like most people who have had near-death experiences, she says it was the most real thing that has ever happened to her.
It is this life, she says, that seems more like a dream.
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Cowboy searches world over for life as good as death
J.D. Hair hasn't been satisfied with his life since he died. But he goes on with it. He works and travels, and on Sundays he goes to one church or another, looking for something that will move him as much as being dead did.
A couple of months ago he showed up at the Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, in cowboy boots and a gold chain around his neck. A group of parents and children were out on the front lawn blowing bubbles.
"Do y'all have a Bible study class here," he asked.
Later he sat through a service, a talk really, about women. He sat with his arms folded across his chest and sighed several times. Already that morning he had been to a service at the Methodist church.
Today, though, it is a Monday, and he is having lunch at Denny's. He places his cowboy hat on the next table and does some small talk about his job as trouble shooter for computer network systems. Then he mentions that he used to work for the CIA.
"I don't like the term `spy.' I like the term `eavesdropper,' " he explains. For 10 years, he says, he eavesdropped in places like Iran and Lybia, or to be more exact, he would make it possible for other people at the CIA to eavesdrop. It wasn't that exciting. But there were dangers.
"I've been around that death thang all my life," he drawls. Ah, here it is. This is why you've come: To talk about being dead.
It happened in 1975. He had gone rattlesnake hunting on his motorcycle near his home in Dallas. His wife and her mother had flown to New York City to shop. So Hair took his son Trampus with him.
Although Trampus was only 3, his extra weight made the motorcycle unstable as they climbed a hill toward their destination. The bike tipped over, the little boy fell off unhurt, and the man tumbled down the hill. At the bottom, the motorcycle landed on his head.
By the time he was revived at the hospital, Hair figures he had been without a pulse for 10 minutes. "During this time I met God, or I came into his presence, I guess you could say."
The odd thing, says Hair, is that he had never even believed in God. He hadn't even gone to church when he was a little boy, so there wasn't even any residual memory of fire and brimstone or Jesus-loves-me.
Later, he says, "I didn't need God. I was married to the perfect woman."
But lying dead, or nearly dead, in the hospital bed in Dallas that day in 1975, he felt something that made him feel better than he has ever felt. He says he didn't see a light or a tunnel or any other of the typical near-death visions. "It all came through telepathy, more or less."
When he eventually went home from the hospital he began reading the Bible and talking a lot about the Bible and going to one church or another. He didn't feel like drinking or gambling any more, or even dancing. Within six months, he says, his wife divorced him.
"I didn't give her a chance to adjust to it," he says, meaning his fervor about God.
He figures God must have sent him back to life for a purpose, and for a long time he figured the purpose was Trampus.
For the next 14 years after the divorce, Hair had custody of the boy off and on. When Trampus was 16, Hair bought him a motorcycle.
One evening in March three years ago he and Trampus had dinner at Tony Roma's in Dallas. They talked about life and death. The next evening Trampus was killed while driving the motorcycle.
"There's no doubt in my mind he's gone to a better place," says Hair, finishing up his BLT and fries. "I've been there, remember? I can just see him up there, smiling. He's probably thinking, `Ha, ha, Dad, I beat you again. Where you've been trying to get, I'm already there.' "
When he can, Hair eats lunch now at Tony Roma's in whatever city he's in.
Hair moved to Utah three months ago to try out the Mormon Church. He has already looked into six other religions: Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, Moslem and Buddhist.
"I get the feeling that most people are worshiping their church, not God."
You get the feeling that he's really just biding his time. He used to be a lot happier, he says. But he has a hard time now accepting the way the world is. "Either give me back what I used to have or take me with you," he has told God more than once.
Not that he's suicidal. He doesn't have a death wish, but he has a wish about his death, and it goes like this: He'll be driving across the country and will stop to save a woman from being raped by a bunch of bikers. This actually happened to him once, he says. But this time, when he pulls out his gun, the bikers will kill him. He'll be back again, in that life after life.
He can't wait. - Elaine Jarvik
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Support group hopes to help people with life
They end up being less competitive. Less nasty in a lot of ways, actually. More altruistic. More spiritual. And because of this, says Salt Lake psychologist Lynn Johnson, people who have near-death experiences often feel out of place when they return to the lives they have always lived.
Suddenly, back in the tangible world, they feel disappointed, often depressed. "They often feel a great sense of loss, almost a grief," he says. The divorce rate is high among people who have NDEs, he adds.
Helping people fit back in after an NDE will be one goal of a support group that Johnson is forming. He hopes the group will become affiliated with the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS), which has about 1,500 members worldwide.
"Near-death experiences are more powerful than psychotherapy in changing people's lives," says Connecticut psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, who has interviewed over 3,000 people who have had NDEs.
For more information about a Utah NDE support group, contact Lynn Johnson at 261-1412.