S3E4: Do Birthmarks Carry Evidence of a Past Life?

A child remembers being murdered with a blow to the head and bears an unusual mark in the same place. Another recalls being shot, with birthmarks that appear to match a bullet's entry and exit wounds. But what makes these cases extraordinary is that researchers identified the real people whose lives the children claimed to remember and, in some cases, uncovered autopsy reports and medical records documenting fatal injuries that appeared to match the children's birthmarks and birth defects. Dr. Ian Stevenson, founder of the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, was so fascinated by these cases that he devoted decades to investigating them. These physical correspondences make children's past-life memories far more difficult to explain away as coincidence, imagination, or suggestion. Could the human body carry physical evidence that consciousness survives death? _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ _______ Dive into the work of those interviewed in this episode: Dr. Ian Stevenson Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. First published 1966 as Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26. Second revised and enlarged edition 1974, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B0c13Vlit Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. I: Ten Cases in India. 1975, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B0fEcQz51 Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. II: Ten Cases in Sri Lanka. University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B09vw8anF Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey. 1980, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B0d9kqIpW Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. IV: Twelve Cases in Thailand and Burma. 1983, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B04Xa7jlr Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. 1987, University Press of Virginia. Revised edition, McFarland. https://link.amazon/B0heP61Cy Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. 1997, Praeger. https://link.amazon/B0ikZzaOP Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. 1997, Praeger. https://link.amazon/B0eFiOBJT European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. 2003, McFarland. https://link.amazon/B0drOLjiJ Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of a Case. 1974, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B053q2ubj Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. 1984, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B075u4N61 Telepathic Impressions: A Review and Report of Thirty-Five New Cases. 1970, University Press of Virginia. https://link.amazon/B0hzj1Ijb Dr. James Matlock Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory. 2019, Rowman & Littlefield. https://link.amazon/B0fwVTegH I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children's Experiences of Reincarnation. 2016, White Crow Books. https://link.amazon/B0iQgsbiU Dr. Jim Tucker Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives. 2005, St. Martin's Press. https://link.amazon/B08XQsoN6 Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives. 2013, St. Martin's Press. https://link.amazon/B0651rvFP Before: Children's Memories of Previous Lives. St. Martin's Essentials. https://link.amazon/B0arAPXer _______ Thank you to our sponsors! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:00Ky Dickens?

  Hey, everyone. This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.

• 1:13Ky Dickens?

  Welcome to episode four. If you have not listened to our first three episodes, I highly encourage you to do so as everything in this season builds on what came before it. Last week, we visited the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, commonly referred to as DOPS, to see what 60 years of reincarnation research actually looks like. And historically, the goal of research there has been pretty straightforward. Document what a young child says they remember about a past life and then see whether those details can be matched to a real person who's died. And that match is made possible because the families that reach out to the department don't just have kids stating vague memories. They're often giving their alleged past name, the town where they say they lived, names of family members, their previous profession, and in a majority of the cases, in the university's

• 1:57Ky Dickens?

  archive, they also describe how they died. And that's where this episode begins. Because in over a third of those cases, the children aren't just describing a death. They're born with a birthmark or birth defect that appears in the same place on their body where the person that they remember being was injured or killed. But before we go any further, I think there's an important distinction to make. Because when Stevenson and other reincarnation researchers talk about birthmarks, they're not the type that you're probably visualizing. Here's anthropologist Dr. Jim Matlock, who spent years studying Stevenson's work and investigating his own cases as well.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  First of all, we appreciate not all birthmarks are linked to reincarnation. Reincarnation-linked birthmarks tend to be not the usual kinds, not the kinds that come about to bumps in the birthing process or genetics. They're odd-looking things in odd places, and they tend to be in the same place as the wound, and very often, it's a mortal wound.

• 2:53Ky Dickens?

  And just to reiterate again, something important we learned last week. Researchers are not starting with a strange birthmark and then looking for someone who had a matching wound. The child's specific memories lead investigators to a deceased person first. Only after that identification is made do they compare any birthmarks or birth defects with documented, verified injuries on that deceased person.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  It can be any sort of thing. An earring hole can produce a birthmark. Tattoo can produce a birthmark, right? Surgical scar can produce a birthmark. And the thing is, these birthmarks look identical to those scars. Stevenson had a case with a surgical scar on a guy's back. You could actually see the holes, the stitch-marked holes in the surgical thing.

• 3:33Ky Dickens?

  Wow. Dr. Philip Cozzolino now co-leads the Past Life Memory Research Program at DOPS, and I quickly wanted to remind you of something he said last week.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  61% of our children can tell you how they think they died in this past life, and of those, 75% claim an unnatural, often violent, death. The raw numbers of those that have birthmarks is 44% of them, and birth defects is 11% of them.

• 3:57Ky Dickens?

  So the birthmark phenomenon is no small thing. It's a phenomenon unto itself. And of everything that Ian Stevenson encountered during his decades studying these children, this was the part of the research that eventually consumed him. Here's Dr. Cozzolino again.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  These are the two volumes of reincarnation biology, volume one, volume two. They're massive books that Ian wrote and published all about birthmarks and birth defects.

• 4:20Ky Dickens?

  And it's over 2,000 pages.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yes, they're both huge. This was, I think, the most compelling in his mind. Everything else probably could have multiple explanations, but it becomes harder to make sense of how someone's fatal wound in another country years ago somehow shows up in a child. And I think that, to him, was probably why you spend this much effort to write books of this size, is that there's something here that he couldn't wrap his head around, and neither can we.

• 4:46Ky Dickens?

  In last week's episode, I briefly walked past some wooden display cases, sitting right next to these massive books. At the time, I only glanced at what was inside, but at the end of our visit to DOPS, we went back for a much closer look.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  So the display cases are from the Ian era of investigations around the world. There are some gruesome photos of children, and even young, and this is an infant, with missing limbs, missing digits and fingers, wounds, birthmarks and defects, and weapons.

• 5:15Ky Dickens?

  There's something, obviously, a little unsettling about these display cases, but standing next to them, I found myself drawn into the first photograph and trying to connect the dots of the various pictures in the case and the weapons on the wall.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  So in that case right there, that's a boy from Thailand. And you can see the picture that Ian took there. There's a birthmark in the back left of his head.

• 5:36Ky Dickens?

  And though he says "birthmark," what I see in this picture looks like a scar on the back of this person's head, almost like a gash that has healed.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  He claimed to have died from a machete hit to the back of his head, and that was the birthmark that he was born with. And Ian identified someone who matched this boy's story, and sure enough, that person had been killed with a machete hit to the back of his head. And he found the autopsy's postmortem report, and sure enough, the scar matched what was on the autopsy report. That machete right above the photo is indicative of the kind that was used allegedly.

• 6:13Ky Dickens?

  After our trip to the University of Virginia, I set up a call with Philip and Dr. Marietta Pellvinova, the other person who co-leads the Past Life Research Program at DOPS. We spent a lot of time with her last week as well, and I wanted them to walk me through in depth some of the birthmark cases that Stevenson studied. And for the rest of this episode, we'll kind of be bouncing between that phone call and also some of the tape from when I was at DOPS in person. And first, I asked if they could pull out more details about the boy in the picture that I saw in the display case, the one with the scar on the back of his head.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Okay, so Ting was born in 1924 in Thailand with a scar on the back left of his head. Both of his parents had what we call announcing dreams. So the mother and the father reported dreams well before Ting was born of a deceased person coming to them in their dreams, saying, "Hey, I'm going to be coming to you in a new life."

• 7:07Ky Dickens?

  We went through announcing dreams in detail last week, so I don't want to spend too much time on them, but just as a quick recap, in many of these cases, people, usually parents, report either having an announcing dream or a departing dream. As wild as this sounds, an announcing dream would be when the consciousness or soul of someone who's recently passed alerts parents that they've chosen them and they're coming to be their baby before they arrive. And a departing dream usually features someone who's recently died comforting the person grieving, saying, "I'm going to be reborn, and you can find me in XYZ location." It's just so fascinating, and it's common.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  This is a within-thesame-family case. The father's older brother was named Pho. Pho is the person who the mother and father both apparently were visited by in their dreams. Now, I want to be very clear. When Ian got involved with this case, the parents, the mother and father here, were already dead, so this is what he was told from multiple sources that they had said occurred before Ting, their son, was born. Now, after Ting was born to these parents, they noticed distinct birthmarks and defects on his body. The most sort of obvious one was this back-left head scar that was prominent, and it looked like the remnant of having been hit with something sharp in the back of his head.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  And he also had an interesting right big toe malformation. I don't know what to call it, really. It wasn't quite a defect, but it was a birthmark that wasn't quite right on his right big toe. And that will come into play in a second. Now, the thing that's really interesting is Pho, the father's older brother, who had apparently come to them in their dreams, that's the story, had been killed by a machete-knife wound to the back left of his head. Pho was killed about a year before Ting was born, and Ting, he was born 25 kilometers from where Pho died. And what we know now is that Pho was a cattle rustler. He was a cattle thief. And in 1923, he went into a village, presumably to go steal a bull.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  The villagers in that village knew of Pho's crimes, and there was a posse of 30 people who came out to basically confront him. And in the course of that posse, he was hit in the back of the head with this large machete and apparently, from what Ian could determine, died instantly. This is all basically confirmed by witnesses how this occurred.

• 9:35Ky Dickens?

  So after the murder of Pho in a house about 25 kilometers away, Pho's younger brother had a baby boy, and that boy is born with a birthmark that looks like a scar on the back of his head.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  As a child, Ting started saying, I am Fo. He would say, he would get very upset when people referred to him in the Thai word for baby or boy or child, and he would get, no, I'm Fo. That's my name. He pointed at the birthmark. And he would say, this is from how I was killed. And he was very angry.

• 10:03Ky Dickens?

  Now, a little boy saying, I'm Fo, and pointing to his head doesn't necessarily prove anything. What makes the case interesting is what came with that claim. Ting wasn't just pointing to the mark on his head and saying how he got it. He would also describe people and events from Fo's life that investigators could actually check against fact by talking to witnesses and looking at police reports.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  So this little boy claimed that on the day this posse killed him, he hadn't done anything wrong, and he was just in the village. So this posse knew of his past and killed him in cold blood on that day. And that's why he apparently had this anger. Over time, as an adult, he told Ian, that revenge motivation waned, but he was still very upset about it, even as an adult.

• 10:48Ky Dickens?

  And this idea of coming back angry or even wanting revenge is something that was brought up last week, too. And I have to admit that I'm having such a hard time making sense of it. For almost two years now, across different seasons of the telepathy tapes, we've heard so many accounts of what people describe as the other side. And the themes that come up again and again are the ego falling away, a sense of interconnectedness, and more than anything, complete acceptance and love. So the idea that someone could die, come back, and still be furious at the people who killed them feels almost like the opposite of that. We've spent some time looking at near-death experiences, and people often come back from those totally changed and more at peace and more loving. So in these cases, I'm just wondering what on earth it all means?

• 11:29Ky Dickens?

  Does reincarnating and remembering what happened actually force someone to confront a lesson that they still need to learn? Or maybe remind them so they're kind of more set up to win regarding the spiritual growth they need to have? Or is there a more complete, permanent afterlife that's more in line with what people describe in near-death experiences or that religions describe? And maybe that place is somehow different or a little higher up than whatever happens in between lives? Or maybe the answer is even more unsettling? Like, could holding on to anger itself or having unfinished business be part of what pulls us back so quickly? And then there's part of me that's like, well, maybe I'm trying to fit all of this into a spiritual framework when there's just so much ordinary explanation, which, outside of coincidence, I can't figure out what that might be. So I don't know.

• 12:12Ky Dickens?

  But I do want to assure you that before the end of this season, we're going to come back to this question. And we'll hear from non-speaking individuals about what they understand about death and reincarnation. We'll hear from religious scholars from different traditions and speak with Laurel Lynn Jackson, a medium whose work and claims about talking to the other side have been extensively double-blind tested and studied and researched as we looked at in season two. So we'll see if any of these people can help us understand something that, right now, feels like a total contradiction to me. Because if consciousness ultimately moves towards love and unity, why would someone come back angry and wanting revenge? But I digress, because we are at the University of Virginia, and the team at DOPs is not trying to answer these spiritual questions. They are interested in investigation, documentation, and research.

• 12:56Ky Dickens?

  And so what Philip brings up next is called private knowledge.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  He was four to five years old, and he met this investigator. And Ting immediately recognized him and said, oh, that's the person who's investigating me for my crimes. Called him by his name. Also correctly named, many of the people that people in that village knew had killed Fo. So he was able to actually say, these are the people who were in that posse.

• 13:19Ky Dickens?

  The little boy was able to name the people that killed him?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yes, some of them. I'm not saying he knew all 30 of them.

• 13:24Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  The investigation knew who these people were. And he apparently named a number of them accurately.

• 13:30Ky Dickens?

  And as he got older, he started sharing details and recognizing things and people that there's absolutely no explanation for.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  He recognized at the age of five, the house that Fo lived in, objects that Fo possessed, even specific cattle, based on their markings, which ones had been Fo's. And because, again, he was born about a year after Fo died. When Ting was seven years old, he was just on the side of a road, walking around the village, and he spotted a woman, and he recognized her as Fo's daughter. And he actually ended up convincing the daughter of this dead person that he claimed to be, told Ian that she was convinced, based on their conversations, that this was her father, Fo. Now, again, remember, this is all a same family. Ian is very clear in his writing about this case that there's always, whenever you're

• 14:20Speaker 03

  talking about a 25-mile kilometer of a same-family situation, there's always the opportunity for some of these kinds of things, recognizing cousins, recognizing objects or homes.

• 14:32Ky Dickens?

  So Philip, how did, like, Fo's widow, his wife, react to news that her husband was back in the body of a toddler? I mean, did she believe it?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Fo's surviving wife brought to Ting a bunch of objects, some of which belonged to Fo and some didn't. And Ting was accurately able to pick out the objects and was able to say, that was mine, that was mine. And the surviving wife of Fo said, yeah, he got them all right. He knew which ones were Fo's and which ones weren't. He also apparently was able to talk with her about moments from their life that she told Ian were accurate, that he knew things that he shouldn't be able to know.

• 15:08Ky Dickens?

  Wild.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  And Ian did his best to verify and corroborate with others.

• 15:12Ky Dickens?

  Okay. And then, so Philip, why was the birthmark on Ting's toe in the file?

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Well, it turns out that Fo had injured his right foot on that toe some period before his death. Now, Ting claimed it was 10 years. Ian wasn't able to verify when that was. But apparently, multiple people who knew Fo said, oh, yeah, he had a real bad issue with that toe. It was infected, and it was bad. It made his life difficult. And we have a photo of that, too, where you can see on Ting, his right foot, the big toe, has this mark on it where apparently people said, oh, yeah, Fo's right toe looked like that.

• 15:49Ky Dickens?

  I find this detail interesting, because an infected toe is not some dramatic death wound. It's a nuisance. And this man, Fo, limped around with it for years and even died with it. And that's interesting to me, because whatever these processes that we're investigating this season with these birthmarks and birth defects, it's clearly not just copying the moment someone died. It seems to be copying the significant injuries or moments the last body had been through. So Philip, any other final notes on this case before we move on to another one?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  One thing that I thought was really interesting was that Ian spoke to the captain in the Royal Thai Army. Ting ended up being a sergeant for...

• 16:22Ky Dickens?

  So quickly, Philip is fast-forwarding to when Ting, who claims to be the reincarnation of Fo, is a grown man.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  His captain said that Ting would claim that some property around their base really belonged to him. He came into that base, basically saying, all that land there is mine. And what he meant was, it was Fo's. And the captain said, that's actually true, and I'm not sure how he knows that.

• 16:43Ky Dickens?

  That's so wild. Last week, we talked at length about how cases get investigated. And we're not going to rehash all of that. But I just want to reiterate how a strong case typically unfolds. So it starts with a very young child talking about another life, often saying, you're not my real parents, or when I used to be big, or I want to go see my real mom. And investigators only tend to get involved if they start giving specifics about names, places, how they died. And sometimes, they carry over things as unexplainable as talents or preferences or even a language from that past life. When investigators have specific details, they then try to identify a deceased person whose life matches those memories. Only after that match is made do they compare the birthmark or birth defect, which are

• 17:23Ky Dickens?

  present in over a third of the cases, with either an autopsy report, police report, medical or family reports that detail the injuries, marks, or death wounds on that deceased person's body. And here's Dr. Ian Stevenson himself from a talk he did at UVA in 2004.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  In the last 15 years, we've given more attention to the cases with birthmarks and birth defects, because we've sought autopsy reports and been successful in 65 or 70 cases. And that consumes an immense amount of time in obtaining those. One has to drink cups of coffee with the bureaucrats who have access to the records, and then perhaps in addition, give an American-made shirt to the clerk who will actually find the record. But it's all very worthwhile, because an autopsy report in black and white, made before the child in question was born, and in many cases, we find a close correspondence between the postmortem report and the birthmarks and birth defects.

• 18:19Ky Dickens?

  And as we discussed last week, it's often a multi-year investigation to verify a match, because the majority of children remembering past lives do not come back to the same family. It happens, but it's not as common. Here's Dr. Coslino again.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Only 20-some percent of our cases are within the same family. And many of these cases are far removed in distance, geographically, from where this past person seems to have lived. And you have to remember, these are cases from the 60s, 70s, 80s. There was no internet, and these are in communities, very poor communities. So there was no travel. Their lives were in their village, and that's what they knew.

• 18:56Ky Dickens?

  Right, right. And that's important, because it makes it harder to say, it was just coincidence or something the kid heard.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  When you can determine that the child and the family didn't know who that person was, and they lived in another country, then I don't know anymore if it's just coincidence. I also don't like that word as much. People like, oh, this is all coincidence. But coincidence isn't really just... It's describing, it's not explaining.

• 19:15Ky Dickens?

  I actually love that. And I've been repeating my own version of it ever since, which is that, you know, calling something a coincidence is not a finding, it's a decision to stop counting. We're going to stop and take a quick break here. But when we come back, we'll look at birthmark cases involving people from entirely different families, where explanations like insider info or shared knowledge become harder to apply.

• 19:37Ky Dickens?

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• 20:22Ky Dickens?

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• 21:50Ky Dickens?

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• 21:58Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back. We're going to pick up with a phone call I had with Marietta and Philip after leaving DOPs, where they walked me through a few birthmark cases in detail. So I'd love for you to walk through a few cases that are not same-family cases, you know? And actually, also where Dr. Ian Stevenson was kind of first to the scene.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'll start with this case from Thailand, and the child's name was Chinai. Chinai was born in 1967, and he had two birthmarks on his head. I will show you this picture from the files. As you can see, there's a small birthmark in the back of his head, and then a larger birthmark in the front of his head, just above his left eye.

• 22:35Ky Dickens?

  So Philip, what were some of the early statements he was saying?

• 22:37Speaker 03

  When he was three years old, he would declare himself regularly as, "I am the teacher, I am the teacher, let me teach you all." And would start then telling his grandmother, who actually raised him, that "I was a teacher." Not just that I am a teacher, but that when I once was an adult, I was a teacher. At three and a half, he started begging his grandmother to take him to see his previous family. He would say, "My parents, my wife, my children." And he actually said a name. He said, "I was once a person named Buakai," and that he had been a teacher, but he had been shot and killed in the head.

• 23:14Ky Dickens?

  Okay, those are a lot of specifics for a three-year-old, and specifics are the only reason any of these cases can be checked at all. Because if a child says, "I live somewhere," that gets you nowhere. But when they give you a village and a name and an occupation, as an investigator, you are off to the races.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Before he turned four, the grandmother capitulated and said, "Okay, we're going to go to this village. You're asking too much, so we're going to go." What's interesting in the notes is they arrived near the village, off the bus, however they got there. It wasn't actually the proper village. And Chinai, as not even a four-year-old, basically started leading his grandmother as if he knew where he was going. And he walked up to a house, and he said, "This is where I used to live." And it turns out that Buakai was a real person who lived in that house, and the mother and father of Buakai still lived there. They were this deceased person's parents.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  And they told Ian and other investigators that Buakai had been a schoolteacher who was shot and killed in 1962. So that was five years before Chinai was born.

• 24:19Ky Dickens?

  And then Buakai's parents looked at the boy's head.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  The parents of Buakai saw the birthmarks on Chinai's head, and they were blown away because they thought, "Well, that's what we saw in terms of our son when he was murdered." And they were so impressed that they invited him back. And on a second visit, Chinai was able to recognize other family members who they had invited to come, because obviously at this point, they're like, "Oh, this is a story. Maybe this is Buakai coming back." And Chinai recognized family members and objects. Again, people would show, "Did this belong to you or not?" And he did very well, apparently, according to the informants.

• 24:55Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so just pausing for a second, like, who was Buakai? Because it's hard for me to believe that he was like the beloved town science teacher if he was shot in the head.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  He was a teacher. He was also someone who was notorious for having many affairs with married women. And apparently, I'm going to use the modern term of a side gig, a side hustle, as a local gangster. So the Wild West of Thailand in the 60s. Because of this notorious criminal side gig, he had been shot once before at a fair and survived and realized, "Okay, like, this other part of my life is starting to infringe on my well-being." So he tried his best to avoid it again. He literally relocated where he did his teaching. He thought, "Well, maybe I need to move to a different village to teach somewhere else where they don't know who I am." And he did that.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  But then, in January of 1962, Buakai was riding his bicycle to work to go teach, and someone came up from behind him and shot him from behind in the head, and he died instantly at the scene. He was examined by a doctor, as relatives of Buakai also were there and saw this. And these were the documentations of how the sort of wounds occurred in Buakai's death.

• 26:10Ky Dickens?

  And these wounds appear to correspond with Chinai's birthmarks, and not just where they were located, but the forensic characteristics of the injuries themselves.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  On the back, you have the entrance wound, which is almost always, if not always, smaller than the exit wound. And then it releases with a larger exit wound, and they were perfectly in line with each other, and according to all the informants, were exactly in the places that Buakai had been shot. He also made, again, recognitions of objects. He made statements about where he lived, about realities, narratives of his life. All told, about 19 of those that Ian was able to say seemed to be accurate to this deceased person's life.

• 26:49Ky Dickens?

  After hearing Chinai's story, especially right on the heels of Ching's, my questions were honestly becoming more metaphysical. Because if any of this is real, what does it mean that the remembered lives in both of these cases belong to people who've done some pretty harmful and dishonest things? And I just can't help but wondering if then maybe remembering is part of the point? Like, did the consciousness of these unsavory guys come back remembering what happened because it gives them a better chance to correct something or grow beyond whoever they were before? And then that thought leads me even further down a rabbit hole, where I start to wonder if Earth, this place we keep coming back to to work things out, is almost like a kind of purgatory? And if the state people describe in near-death experiences, that beautiful place with an

• 27:32Ky Dickens?

  overwhelming sense of love and unity, God, source, whatever you want to call it, is the more permanent place and the place that's more real than here? But I digress, because Stevenson was admittedly not interested in the healing aspect of these cases. He was interested in something much more evidential: the gunshot wounds. Because within the already strange world of birthmarks, the bullet hole cases almost form a category of their own. And Stevenson became fascinated by these cases precisely because those two holes gave him something very unusually specific to compare. Here's Dr. Stevenson from a talk he gave in 2004.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  We have about 15 cases where there are two birthmarks corresponding to bullet wounds of entry and exit.

• 28:12Ky Dickens?

  It wasn't just, you know, whether a mark appeared in roughly the right place, but whether two marks appeared in the right places, in the right alignment.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Forensic pathologists know that nearly always, if you shoot somebody, the bullet wound of entry is small and round, and the bullet wound of exit is large and irregular in shape. And that's the way our birthmarks in about half of these cases, they correspond exactly that way.

• 28:35Ky Dickens?

  And Stevenson would see this bullet hole birthmark pattern enough that if he met a kid who talked about being shot, and there's only one birthmark, he'd look for a second one. Here's Dr. Jim Matlock again.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And in a couple of cases, Stevenson actually predicted that. He'd learned that we often see them in pairs, and so when people showed him one and told them that it was a result of that, he said, "Well, do they have a birthmark in the corresponding place on the backside of the body?" He sure as they did.

• 28:58Ky Dickens?

  And here's Dr. Philip Cosellino again.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  There was one case where Ian found from the autopsy report of this past person that there would potentially be another wound on the back of a head. The boy had a thick head of hair, and the mother claimed that the boy was born with a full head of hair. And Ian literally said, "Can we shave the boy's head?" And they shaved the boy's head, and sure enough, where the postmortem report said there would be, there was another birthmark there. So they didn't even know that it was there.

• 29:25Ky Dickens?

  It is hard for me to explain that away. And even still, my brain does something that is like, "Ah, I just can't believe it." Because there's no way to explain it. And it's like, what's funny to me is that Stevenson was also really skeptical about all of this at first. In fact, for the first part of his career, when he encountered reports of birthmarks in the field, he largely dismissed them. Here's anthropologist Dr. Jim Matlock again.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  He had read about birthmarks in the older literature and he sort of dismissed them. So when Stevenson first went to India, he was not prepared for the birthmarks. It was only when he got to studying the Klinkit Indians in Alaska, from birthmarks are very important. They check newborns for birthmarks as clues to their identities. And they taught him then on some of this. And he started looking at birthmarks with the same rigor as he brought to the other cases.

• 30:13Ky Dickens?

  So if you're having a hard time out there, just know the father of reincarnation research had looked at these cases at first and also set them aside. But what changed his mind was time with natives in Alaska, because they've been paying close attention to birthmarks for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And decades later, Jim Matlock, who's in this episode, says he also dismissed birthmarks at first.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  I was willing to keep an open mind about maybe there could be reincarnation consciousness or something like that. But the birthmarks, that was a bridge too far for me. I was reading so many of these and it actually took me some years, like before it finally sunk in. And I realized I need to take them seriously and had to start figuring out how they could come about.

• 30:55Ky Dickens?

  So by this point in the episode, we've spent a lot of time talking about marks on the skin itself. But in the DOPs archive, Stevenson documented another genre of cases. And these are children born with parts of their bodies malformed, underdeveloped, or in some cases entirely missing. So I asked Dr. Marietta Pelavanova, who co-leads the Past Life Memory Research Program, to walk us through one of those.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  We'll talk about the case of Lek Paul, who is an Indian boy who was born with his fingers on his right hand missing. So Lek Paul was a boy who was born in December of 1971 in Indian village called Nagla Devi. He was born in a very simple family. His parents were illiterate, of very modest economic means. As soon as he was born, his family noticed that the fingers on his right hand were missing. So it seemed to be a birth defect. So jokingly, they decided to call him Lek Paul because the phrase Lek Paul means in Hindi, a tax collector

• 32:01Speaker 05

  whose hand had been cut off by a taxpayer.

• 32:04Ky Dickens?

  Did he start saying anything kind of evidential or interesting early on?

• 32:09Speaker 05

  About the age of one, he started saying to his mom this phrase of Tal Tal and how he wanted to go to Tal Tal. So one of the very first things he said about presumably this past life was, I will not stay here and this is not my home. Again, very typical of these children. And then the sister started inquiring about his missing fingers. And he started talking about this past life where he had had his fingers cut off in a fodder chopping machine.

• 32:39Ky Dickens?

  Here's a quick clip from the BBC.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  In a village in northern India in the 1970s, a small boy lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder chopping machine. Later, the child died. But in a neighboring village, a boy was born who claimed memories of the dead child's life.

• 32:53Ky Dickens?

  So here's the story of the other boy, the boy who has died.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  His name was Hukum Singh. When he was about three and a half, his dad was working this fodder chopping machine that was used to basically cut up different crops to feed cattle. And normally the machine uses two people to operate, but the dad was trying to do that all by himself. And he didn't see his son, Hukum, kind of sneak up. And he thought he was helping, but he basically put his right hand through the machine and his fingers were immediately chopped off. His hand was stitched up and he recovered from that injury. But unfortunately, what happened is about 10 months after this accident,

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Hukum got sick overnight, almost very unexpectedly. And Hukum Singh essentially died in his father's arms. So very, very tragic end. So only 10 months after the accident with his fingers.

• 33:57Ky Dickens?

  Oh, it's so awful.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  So after this happened, Hukum's mom was just grief-stricken and just inconsolable. In her grief, she actually reported having two dreams in which Hukum purportedly showed up to her in what we would call an announcing dream. And he tried to console her, comfort her in the dreams. And he told her that he would be back to her. Can you imagine that as a parent?

• 34:27Ky Dickens?

  No, I can't. And I actually wonder, do you know if she dismissed it at the time? Or was kind of on like high alert, looking for him?

• 34:33Speaker 05

  So at age five, Lek Paul was allowed to go to Nagla Tal, the village of Hukum Singh. And while he was visiting, he recognized Hukum Singh's mom as she was sitting with some other women in the village in front of a house. And he said, this is my mother.

• 34:54Ky Dickens?

  And it's hard not to think about what this poor mother was living through. She dreamed twice that her dead son was coming back to her. And then she's sitting outside of her house with her neighbors and a five-year-old boy with no fingers on his right hand walks past this group of women and picks her out of the group and says, that's my mother. And it actually didn't stop with recognizing her. Because Lek Paul, this new boy, seemed to know stuff about Hukum's father too. Not just who he was, but what Hukum called him.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  When Lek Paul talked about this accident with the fodder chopping machine, he talked about how he was with Chacha. And Chacha was the person who was running the machine. So apparently, Chacha is a word that means uncle. And this is how the family overall would refer to Hukum Singh's dad as Chacha, because he was a Chacha to other family members. So Ian mentions in his notes that for that culture, it was customary for people to refer to someone by the name that most of their family members referred to them as. So even though it means uncle, it's very interesting and striking

• 36:00Speaker 05

  that Lek Paul would pull up this word for his father, who was present at the accident. In addition to recognizing his two brothers and his mother from this purported past life, he also recognized the place where the accident happened, even though at that point, the fodder chopping machine had been moved. He also recognized the place outside of the village where Hukum Singh had died.

• 36:27Ky Dickens?

  But the most compelling part of this case are obviously the missing fingers. And what I love about the rigor of Dr. Stevenson is he tried to count them out, not count them in. He went into the medical literature, as he did on all birthmark cases, to try to find a standard, kind of boring, medical explanation for a missing fingers birth defect. And he couldn't really find one.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  So the closest thing he found is this birth defect called brachydactyly, which means that some of your fingers are shorter than other fingers. And what's interesting is that typically it's most commonly bilateral. So both hands have shorter fingers or missing fingers. So it is already unusual to have a case where only one hand is affected. And it wasn't that his fingers were short, his fingers were just missing. He had these short little stubs.

• 37:22Ky Dickens?

  And this type of birth defect shows up in one out of 40,000 children. But what Lek Paul had didn't seem to be brachydactyly, the only normal explanation, because not both hands were affected, only one. And it wasn't just shorter fingers. There is like a clean line, it looks like a slice, where all the fingers are cut off on one hand. And the investigator who worked this case alongside Ian Stevenson was an Indian psychologist named Dr. Satwant Pasrika. And the BBC actually put this question to her as well.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  Being born with missing fingers is very rare. And the corresponding feature in the previous personality adds to its importance. The same fingers were chopped off. Also, there was no family history of missing fingers. And there was no such case in the whole of village.

• 38:07Ky Dickens?

  Here's tape of Dr. Ian Stevenson from an interview he did in 1992.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Birth defects are the kinds that we have in these cases are uncommon and they're not the sort that you find in the textbooks of birth defects. Fewer of them are, but most of them are not.

• 38:21Ky Dickens?

  So I know none of this is easy to digest. And this episode for me was the most difficult emotionally to create. And to be honest, we're not even at the most confounding and wildest part yet. So we're going to take a quick break, get some coffee or a drink. And when we come back, we'll talk about whether or not you can purposefully mark a body to try to find a loved one when and if they are reborn.

• 38:47Ky Dickens?

  So, welcome back. And by now, you've heard me say that this episode has really thrown me through a loop. And when I start to feel really destabilized about something, one of my favorite things to do is to look backwards. What did people know and understand to be true when they were depending on observations? And what I mean by this is, is that long before modern science and technology, people learned about the world by watching it. They tracked the stars and the moon. They watched animals and seasons and weather. And cultures passed down knowledge and formed beliefs about the patterns that they noticed. So you'd think that if this birthmark, birth defect phenomenon is a real thing, it would have been documented throughout history long before Ian Stevenson started looking at it. And it turns out it was. Across cultures, separated by enormous distances, from Asia to West Africa to indigenous communities in North America and Alaska,

• 39:32Ky Dickens?

  people had traditions of examining babies for marks that resembled wounds, scars, or other identifying features on people who had died. Here's Dr. Jim Matlock again.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  The very same signs that Stevenson was looking at is evidence of reincarnation. These indigenous societies were noticed in relation to reincarnation. And we've got reincarnation beliefs recorded in upwards of 50% of indigenous societies. And so it's sort of clear that for them, reincarnation was an empirical conclusion. It wasn't a belief. It wasn't just something where somebody thought up. It was something they concluded on the basis of having seen children who had a birthmark matching a wound of somebody in their family or somebody they knew who had died, you know, or who had the personality of somebody that they put these pieces together.

• 40:25Ky Dickens?

  And then in some places, people took that observation one step further. Because if a mark on one body could somehow appear on the next one, why wait for nature or luck to provide that mark? Why not put one there yourself and see what happens? So people in cultures throughout the world began deliberately marking the bodies of people who've died. And then they watched. So experimental birthmarks or the cadaver marking is primarily a South Asian phenomenon. And it seems to be very, very old because it's been reported from India all the way.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  To Japan and then from Thailand and Burma all the way up to China to Mongolia. So a huge, huge, huge cultural area there as well as a geographical area. And one of the axioms of anthropology is that the more widespread a phenomenon is, the older it's likely to be. Right. And so this suggests that it's really very, very old.

• 41:18Ky Dickens?

  Stevenson called these experimental birthmarks, but Dr. Matlock prefers a much more literal name.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  I prefer the term cadaver mark because that's what it is. Bodies are marked after death with the intention of tracking the person into the next life. And that's why Stevenson called them experimental birthmarks. They're experimental on the part of the deceased family to try to track the person. They then look for somebody who has a birthmark in the corresponding place.

• 41:49Ky Dickens?

  This is not a ritual for grief. It's more like a tracking device. You mark a body so you can find the soul or the consciousness of the person who's died in the next body in which they come back.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  The marks are usually made in inconspicuous parts of the body, like soles of the feet, parts of the body that are normally covered up by clothing, less often in the back of the neck and the hands and forearms and things. And then they're usually larger than most birthmarks are.

• 42:20Ky Dickens?

  Okay. So I get they do this, but does it work?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yes, this is why it's continued because it seems to work.

• 42:27Ky Dickens?

  Something that is this old and practiced in many separate cultures does not survive centuries of failing. So I'm still a little unclear on like what they use for marking the bodies.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  It is an interesting question because it depends on the culture. In a lot of areas, particularly in South Asia, in Burma and Thailand, they're used soot from a cooking pot, from the bottom of a cooking pot. And so the birthmarks that show up on the children tend to be black, you know, in the same color as the mark was made. And it's quite striking if they use butter, something light like that, then that you have a light birthmark. If they use something dark, you have a dark birthmark. If they use red lipstick, you've got a red birthmark.

• 43:10Ky Dickens?

  It all just seems so, I mean, it's like I'm in this conversation and I'm hedging the belief, but I just cannot understand how putting lipstick on a dead person could create a birthmark on another body.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  There's actually a modern Thai case of a mark that was done in red lipstick on the back of the neck. And the birthmark that resulted from this was red, just as the mark was with the red lipstick.

• 43:35Ky Dickens?

  Man, it's wild.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It's incredible.

• 43:37Ky Dickens?

  And I just want to note here that in this episode, we're talking about cases that have been researched and published. There's thousands of cases and we can't go deep into all of them, but we'll put links in the show notes of books to get you started. Okay. Have you found this practice anywhere else in the world?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  There is in West Africa, the same idea that children and adults will reincarnate. Right. And that they can be recognized through birthmarks or birth defects. But in West Africa, it's something that again is a very longstanding because you find it throughout West Africa. Really from Central Africa all the way to Senegal on the coast, a very broad area. And the idea here is that children who die very young are being called back up by their discarnates. They want them back.

• 44:22Ky Dickens?

  Okay. Okay. So like selfish spirits on the other side want to keep souls of children who die specifically for themselves, like wherever they are.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're doing this to torment the parents is the idea, right? But this is imagined to be a very vain bunch of discarnates. And if you just figure a child who dies young like this, then they won't want that child back. And they will allow it then to reincarnate and live. Like the Ibo of Nigeria, they'll cut off the tip of a finger. The Senegal, they'll clip the lobe of an ear, for instance. In Ghana, they will mark it in other ways. It's always defacing the body though. It's not simply marking it.

• 45:01Ky Dickens?

  So then the same question, like in Africa, does this work? Are kids born without fingertips?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  What Stevenson found is the children are born among the Ibo without the tips of their fingers. They're either children born among the Senegal with the lobes of their ears cut off. It's so, in a way, it's the same sort of thing as the cadaver marking you have in Asia. The cadaver is marked in some way. And this shows up in this case as a birth defect as opposed to a birthmark. But you can see how there's sort of similar phenomena.

• 45:33Ky Dickens?

  It's like everything you talk about brings up 100 more questions. And so what I'm thinking about right now is that like in the UVA archive, right? The little kids who have usually died traumatically, remember a tragic death and talk about it. Only in 20% of those cases do they go back to the same family. It seems like maybe in these tribes, they're going back repeatedly. And I don't know, maybe that means that like there's a cultural expectation or a duty to do something that our consciousness also carries with us. Right. To the beyond. However, um, I'm sure some people will be like, ah, I'm not going to go back to that tribe, that country, that family. So, I mean, have there been kids born in France or Ecuador with their earlobe missing or a tip of a finger missing?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I have heard of occasional Westerners born with one of these defects. But there's nothing in our culture that would lead one to suggest that. And so one has to wonder whether these children had a previous life in those cultures and were marked in these ways. And that's why they're showing up.

• 46:40Ky Dickens?

  It's not hard to understand why Dr. Stevenson dedicated so much of his career to trying to make sense of these cases in particular. At one point, when he started looking into the birthmark cases, he told colleagues he was going to publish the books on birthmarks the following year. And it came out 20 years later. And I think the reason this is so much for me is because there's a huge distance between documenting something and explaining it. And Stevenson actually wrestled with how it could happen. How could a mark left on one body suddenly show up on another? And Stevenson put forth a hypothesis. A possible answer was that something unknown yet might carry information between lives. Not just the memory and aspects of personality, but like an imprint of the physical body itself. So here's Dr. Ian Stevenson from a talk he did at UVA in 2004.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  I think there is some kind of vehicle, which I call a psychophore. That's just an English adaptation of a Greek word meaning mind carrying.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  A psychophore is basically his term for an astral body. That in addition to a physical form, that we have a sort of a spirit body, right? And the spirit body survives the physical body and death. And so what Stevenson suggested is that the mark gets made on the astral body, the spirit body. And then through that spirit body, then it's conveyed to the new body.

• 47:58Ky Dickens?

  And Dr. Stevenson was about as far from woo as you could get. He was measured cautious, rigorous, almost painfully conservative in the way he wrote about his work. And just a reminder that when Carol Bowman, who was featured in our first two episodes, finally met Dr. Stevenson, he basically said, I'm not interested in the healing stuff. He was solely focused on researching, documenting and evidence, not healing, which left her disappointed and led to her pioneering her own research around the healing effects of revisiting past lives. So to me, it's pretty remarkable that where Stevenson landed was pushing against the boundaries of materialist science. Because whatever the explanation was or could be, it had to allow information about one body to somehow reach another.

• 48:38Ky Dickens?

  And when data seems to be telling you something and you don't have a mechanism or framework to explain it, you do what scientists have always done. You propose one. And what's interesting is Dr. Jim Matlock, the anthropologist who's been with us over the past few episodes, he disagrees with Stevenson's hypothesis and has a different one.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  A psychophore, I see some difficulties with that. For one thing, the idea of a spirit body, we don't really have much good scientific backing for it. You can say, oh, people who see auras, maybe that's evidence of it, maybe apparitions are evidence of it. But that's kind of controversial, right? My idea is different and I think it's more straightforward. I think that it's psychogenic. I think it was simply the reincarnating consciousness, which is making the mark on its new body.

• 49:23Ky Dickens?

  So Matlock's hypothesis doesn't require a psychosphore or an astral body. He's suggesting that information comes with the consciousness itself. It's like encoded into consciousness and somehow that consciousness influences the body it's entering. And the key word here is somehow, because we don't know. I don't think anyone knows, but the team at UVA's Division of Perceptual Studies is thinking up some incredible ideas to start investigating this. Here's Dr. Philip Cosalino again.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  We're thinking about going in directions of like epigenetic and genomic studies to try to understand. Because if you can carry over a birthmark, then maybe you can carry over some sequence of genetic code. Let's start digging into what's actually happening here and be open to any answer. Maybe it's complete fraud, maybe it's complete chance, maybe it's purely natural. And maybe it's something completely unexplainable at this point, but we could eventually help explain it.

• 50:11Ky Dickens?

  So you want to do a study where you'll take maybe a child who's remembering a past life, do like a DNA test on that child and a DNA test or something on that past life that that they're remembering to see if there's any genetic link?

• 50:22Speaker 03

  There's two ways that I want to go about it. The first one is that we want to swab a past life memory child and find the past personality descendants. We could be doing any number of comparisons in that way. But there's also a more exciting one, which is the epigenetic one, which is recently there have been papers published. The case that I read about was a Holocaust survivor whose grandchildren had epigenetic markers of trauma. The child has never experienced trauma, but somehow that got encoded and passed on. The bulk of our children talk about trauma. And wouldn't it be interesting if somehow there are trauma markers in that child that don't exist in their siblings? And yet they're claiming they had trauma. You're not going to imagine yourself into genetic change.

• 51:01Ky Dickens?

  No. And this is why I keep coming back to the value of open-minded skeptics in science. Not people who believe everything or dismiss everything, but people willing to say, okay, if this is the claim, how do we actually test it? Stevenson spent decades doing the hard part first. He documented these cases obsessively, carefully, and in enormous numbers. But he didn't have the tools we have now to start looking underneath them. And that's what feels really exciting to me because now you can bring in genetics and epigenetics and neuroscience, psychology, all of the fields that have advanced so much since Stevenson started this work. Even Carol Bowman's ideas about healing don't have to remain anecdotal. We could actually study what happens psychologically when children are encouraged to talk about these memories versus when they're discouraged from talking about them.

• 51:45Ky Dickens?

  There are so many places this could go, but we're never going to know if the questions themselves are considered too strange to fund, too strange to publish, or too strange to seriously investigate.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  It will cost a lot of money and it will take a lot of time.

• 51:57Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  But I think there's a really exciting way of looking at it from that perspective.

• 52:00Ky Dickens?

  And what's funny for me is that the longer I've worked on this season, I find myself asking less proof-oriented questions and more questions about the parameters of how all this works. Like if consciousness survives, how much agency does it have? Do we choose when we come back or where or to whom? And what happens in the time between lives? And my biggest question now is whether or not people who are still living have any role in the rebirth process. I just think about the millions of people who've grieved around the world, praying to see their loved ones again, or for assurance that they aren't gone forever, or even praying to bring them back. And could that longing matter? Could love itself somehow be part of this equation? So I wanted to find a modern case where we could look at all of these questions at once. A case where I could talk to the person who says they

• 52:45Ky Dickens?

  actually remember their past life. But I also wanted to find someone who remembers dying and who remembers something about the intermission period between lives and who might be able to tell us what, if anything, they believe brought them back. He started to remember his past life. He started his coffee while he was drowning. So next week, we travel to Sri Lanka for a case that shook me to my core. He was a very good swimmer. So he couldn't understand, he could not have drowned. And the Harvard neuroscientist who brought us this case began investigating reincarnation because he entered an essay contest, asking whether or not consciousness could survive death, just like Dr. Ian Stevenson did nearly 70 years ago.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Hundreds of people from around the world have been competing in a contest to show there is life after death.

• 53:29Speaker 06

  Maybe the biggest essay contest of all time to solve the biggest question of all time.

• 53:35Ky Dickens?

  It feels strangely full circle. So join us next week as we follow a case that brings nearly every question we've been asking this season together into one extraordinary story. Because if consciousness survives death, maybe the biggest mystery isn't where we go, but what brings us back?

• 53:55Ky Dickens?

  Thank you to the small team who made this season possible. Our amazing producer, Cooper Mall. Our audio mix and sound design was by Jeremy Cole. Music was by Mike Robino. My right hand was Selena Kennedy. And I'm Ken Dickens, your executive producer, writer, editor, and host. And if you haven't listened to our last season of the podcast, The Consciousness Cassettes, I highly recommend you do so as it will give even more context to this season. And if you want to go in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to connect with other members on our Discord. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more

• 54:39Ky Dickens?

  info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. This is The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.