S3E6: Could a Baseball Prodigy Be Lou Gehrig Reborn? | The Reincarnation Records

Before he could barely speak, a little boy named Christian displayed an uncanny ability with a baseball bat. He spoke of playing beneath stadium lights, traveling by train, and memories of another family. But when he inexplicably announced that he was angry with Babe Ruth, it sent his mother on an investigation she never could have anticipated, leading to one of baseball’s greatest legends. Meanwhile, another toddler, Hunter, watched footage of golf icon Bobby Jones and declared, “That was me.” His parents soon noticed unusual golfing abilities, including a swing and technical habits they say he was never taught. We also dig into the University of Virginia’s archives, where researchers have documented remarkable cases of children displaying extraordinary talents and abilities seemingly connected to past lives. Together, these stories raise a fascinating question: Could we inherit more than memories from the lives we’ve lived before? _______ 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/ _______ Thank you to our sponsors! Alloy http://myalloy.com/ - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com http://myalloy.com/ and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! Ka'Chava http://kachava.com/ - Go to kachava.com http://kachava.com/ and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order. Lola Blankets http://lolablankets.com/ - Our listeners can get 40% OFF select Lola Blankets products with code TAPES at checkout, go to lolablankets.com http://lolablankets.com/. Luminara http://luminara.care/ - If you’re curious about experiencing energy healing for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session. Go to luminara.care http://luminara.care/ and use code TAPES20. One Skin https://www.oneskin.co/TAPES - Get 15% off OneSkin with the code TAPES at https://www.oneskin.co/TAPES. Progressive http://progressive.com/- Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all. Visit Progressive.com http://progressive.com/ and find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price® tool. TruDiagnostics http://trudiagnostic.com/ - Go to TruDiagnostic.com http://trudiagnostic.com/ and use code tapes for 20% off your entire order. Quince http://quince.com/tapes - Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to Quince.com/tapes http://quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Zenni http://zenni.com/podcast - That scratched up pair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenni. Got to Zenni.com/podcast http://zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order + free shipping on all orders over $65! 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.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you, along with 24/7 claim support and great customer service. So when you think about it, that's like four great decisions. That more than makes up for the TV debacle. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. Hey, everyone. This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.

• 0:45Ky Dickens?

  Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Reincarnation Records. This is episode six. Last week, we were in Sri Lanka with a young man named Isra, who, from the time he was a toddler, remembered being a 14-year-old boy named TMR, who drowned in a river in Sri Lanka. And Isra's story didn't stop at names and places, or a map he drew when he was only four years old to what he claimed was his previous house. It went somewhere else that I honestly was not expecting. It went to talent that seemingly carried over from his past life. TMR, the boy who had died in a river in 2001, had been an excellent cricket player, an award-winning young actor, and a trained Kandian dancer. And then, when Isra was born nearly 200 miles away, he seemed to show up in the world able to do all of it. And the way he talked about it struck me.

• 1:28Ky Dickens?

  He said it felt like these things were already in his blood. And that opened up a question that I'd never thought about before the season. We've all heard of prodigies, kids who just arrive in the world knowing how to do something that nobody taught them. And when we try to explain it, we usually reach for one of two things: nature, that they were born with the genes for it, or nurture, they were trained and coached and exposed to this thing from day one. And in our last season, The Consciousness Cassettes, we did an episode on savants, where we proposed a possible third explanation. We asked whether knowledge or talents that had never been taught could be somehow accessed or downloaded from a larger informational field. And at the time, I thought, maybe that's a really reasonable other explanation. It challenges what we know about the brain, but it is possible if consciousness is indeed

• 2:13Ky Dickens?

  fundamental. And now I'm wondering if there's an alternate explanation. What if, in some cases, talent is being carried over from a past life? So today, we're going to dig into what that possibility looks like when it starts unfolding in real life, and not in a family searching for reincarnation, or one that believed in any of it, but with a Christian mother in Southern California, whose little boy wasn't just fixated on baseball. From the moment her little son could stand, he seemed to know how to play the game.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  My name is Kathy Byrd. I was raised Christian, went to the youth group, and grew up in the church, and never really explored, you know, things outside of that parameter. Like, I wasn't a big fan of psychics or the mystical zone. So, yeah, pretty traditional upbringing.

• 2:56Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so how many kids do you have, and how old are they?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I have two kids, Charlotte and Christian. Charlotte is now 21, and Christian is 17. And he was obsessed with baseball from a very young age. And I spent literally, like, eight hours a day throwing balls, playing baseball with him, before he could really even speak. He wasn't even two, and there came a point where he would only wear a baseball uniform every single day, and even sleeping in it at times.

• 3:22Ky Dickens?

  Was anyone else in your house a baseball player?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  We were not a baseball family. My husband is German, not a baseball guy. It wasn't like we had the TV on, watching baseball games, you know, when he was growing up. So, Christian, this whole baseball obsession really came from him. Christian was very self-taught when it came to baseball. It was something that he just kind of naturally did. You know, we never had to teach him, like, how to swing the bat, how to catch the ball. He just did it.

• 3:49Ky Dickens?

  This is strange, and I can actually say this with authority, because I coached my daughter's coed T-ball team when the kids were five and just starting out. And at that age, everything had to be explained. Which hand to put the glove on, which direction to run, how to position your glove to catch a ball. And the hardest thing, even for the most naturally athletic kids, was often swinging the bat. Which foot goes forward? Which way do you face? Where do your hands go? How do you turn your body? It's a surprisingly complicated movement that does not come naturally to most kids. And even after showing kids and repeating it, I constantly had to put a line on the ground so they knew which direction to face their body. And this little boy, Christian, was only two, and he seemed to already know.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  He would play with the kids in the neighborhood. He had us pitching to him inside of the house, outside of the house, nonstop.

• 4:30Ky Dickens?

  But the talent was only part of what caught Kathy's attention, because once Christian could really talk, he started saying things that didn't sound like a little boy imagining who he might become. They sounded more like memories.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  He started saying things like, you know, "I used to be tall. I was a tall baseball player." And I would correct him, and I'd say, "Oh, yes, you will be tall. You will be a tall baseball player someday." And one day, I'll never forget it, I was throwing him baseballs in the living room. He always would stand in front of our fireplace, and he got really upset with me when I corrected him, and he said, "No, I was tall. I was tall like daddy." And it was the first time that I really kind of just went along with it and kind of played with it, and I said, "Oh, okay." And I kind of stepped back and listened to what he had to say, and I thought, well, maybe he's trying to tell me something beyond this, but didn't think much of it.

• 5:23Ky Dickens?

  So life keeps moving along like this. Their son is obsessed with baseball, insisting he used to be a tall baseball player. But what his parents are really marveling at is how naturally he just seems to play. He swings, throws, and runs like someone who's been doing it for years. And like a lot of proud parents, Kathy captured it on her phone.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  When Christian was two years old, I did a little video when we did a tour at Dodger Stadium. The video was just pictures of him hitting and pitching, and, you know, the crowd was gathered around him, because he really just kind of had unique skills for that age. And I put it up on YouTube, so I could share it with my family.

• 5:57Ky Dickens?

  And here's what's wild. At around the same time, casting agents were scouring YouTube for something very specific: a young baseball player who could convincingly play a baseball prodigy for an upcoming movie. And they were looking for a child as young as possible who could play like a pro.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And a couple of days later, we got this email from a casting director, saying, you know, "We'd love to have your son come to Boston to do a movie with Adam Sandler."

• 6:19Ky Dickens?

  And just like that, Christian was cast in the film titled "That's My Boy."

• 6:23Speaker 01

  And we went there sight unseen, like, they had never met him before they flew us there.

• 6:27Ky Dickens?

  Wow, wild.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  They needed this little kid to upstage the adults in the movie when it came to baseball.

• 6:33Ky Dickens?

  So then, how old was he when he starred in this movie?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  It was right before his third birthday. And that trip was really when he started coming out with more things that just made sense, but they didn't make sense.

• 6:46Ky Dickens?

  Like, what was he saying?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  So it started on the airplane. He didn't want to wear a seatbelt, and he would say things like, "Well, when I was tall, I didn't wear seatbelts, and I drank alcohol." You know, things like this, where I'm looking around, hoping nobody's listening. Flight attendants are laughing.

• 7:01Ky Dickens?

  And then something happened that researchers see in a lot of these cases. The child encounters a place, a person, or an experience that seems to unlock more memories. For Christian, that happened on this specific trip out east.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  That's really where a lot of Christian's past life memories started really flooding, because we were in Boston, and at these historical baseball places, there happened to be a Yankees playing the Red Sox game while we were there, so I got to take him to Family Park, which is one of the oldest stadiums in the United States. And that was kind of when the floodgates really started opening, because he was in this historic ballpark, and he saw this big picture of Babe Ruth. And as he walked by it, he says, "He was mean to me," and got really, really upset, like, upset to the point where, like, we had to leave the game. He was waving his bat. So this trip was kind of where I feel like I really did kind of start listening to him.

• 7:54Ky Dickens?

  And it kept happening when they got back home.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  We got back to LA, and we were in an elevator, and he said, "Mommy, this elevator kind of looks like a hotel." And I said, "Yeah, it kind of does." And he said, "You know, when I was a tall baseball player, when I was tall like daddy, I used to stay in hotels almost every night." You know, and at this point, instead of countering him like I did when he was younger, I said, "Really?" And I said, "Well, did you fly on airplanes?" And he said, "No, mostly trains."

• 8:22Ky Dickens?

  And had he ever been on a train before, or, you know, like, traveled by train?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  No. He would shock me with things like that, like, he'd never been on a train, never played with a train, never watched TV at this point. I thought, like, how does he know that baseball players stay in hotels? And how does he know that in the era of Babe Ruth, they traveled on trains? So this is where it started to get really, really interesting, to the point where I was interested in figuring out what was going on with my son.

• 8:47Ky Dickens?

  What was his mood or disposition like when he'd talk about these memories?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  When he would talk about his memories, it was very matter-of-fact. It was very adult-like. It wasn't a sing-songy, you know, fantasy kind of talk. So I always kind of knew when he was in that zone. And that was when I was taking notes and taking note of the things he was saying.

• 9:10Ky Dickens?

  Is there something, you know, that you that he'd be doing that would cause these memories to come out more?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  He would generally talk about this like right before we would go to bed or right in the morning when he would wake up. So what happened in the elevator, he'd just woken up from a nap. And so he kind of got in there and made that comment. So there was that common theme. So sometimes before bed, he would say things like, you know, when I was a tall baseball player, I was tall like daddy. He always would frame it like that. And he said, you know, we, we wore metal cleats, but we didn't wear helmets, you know, and things like that. And then he'd fall asleep and I would go downstairs and I'd get on my computer and I'd start Googling. And sure enough, like baseball players didn't wear helmets in that era, but they did wear metal cleats. And he would say, you know, we did, we had most of our games during the day. There were no lights, you know?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  So he, I would Google, you know, I, I went down like, what is this? You know, what's happening here?

• 10:02Ky Dickens?

  And it checked out for the most.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everything that he said did check out.

• 10:06Ky Dickens?

  And if you remember from earlier this season, Carol Bowman discovered that most kids open up about their memories when they are super relaxed, right before bed or maybe after bath time. But Kathy didn't have a framework for any of this. This was all new to her and unbelievably strange. So the first person she went to was her pastor.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I felt like there was a spiritual component to this too. So of course, my first stop was to talk to my pastor about it. That was the first person I confided in, like my son's coming to me with these things and historically accurate information about being a baseball player, pretty much like around the 1920s. And my pastor was a little bit horrified, actually. It kind of said like reincarnation is not part of our faith and perhaps your son is possessed by the spirit of a dead person. You know, so this was, this was like, as a parent, the last thing I wanted to hear, right?

• 10:53Ky Dickens?

  If you believe that a soul survives death, the pastor's explanation might make a certain kind of sense. But the birthmark cases we explored earlier this season make that explanation much less feasible. If you missed episode four, Dr. Ian Stevenson wrote his seminal work about children with past life memories, who were also born with birthmarks or birth defects that appeared to match the wounds that injured or killed that last person. And in many cases, he was able to check those matches against autopsy reports and other medical records. If this phenomenon could be chalked up to a spirit possessing a child or even a child somehow picking up memories from an informational field, why would that child be born with a mark matching the wound on the person they remember being? But Kathy wasn't asking those questions because she didn't know about any of this research.

• 11:36Ky Dickens?

  She was just a concerned mother, turning to someone she trusted for help. And what she heard was that her three year old might be possessed. And it wasn't just her pastor raising these types of concerns.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  So I did have two friends that were not so thrilled with me about it. And one of them was like, you know, Kathy, you don't want to be on the wrong side of God. And, you know, that it was actually like, don't let him be even entertaining this idea.

• 11:58Ky Dickens?

  So Kathy ended up with more questions and being more frightened when what she needed most was someone who'd listened to her and wouldn't dismiss what Christian was saying or displaying or scare her further. She needed help to make sense of this and guidance in what to do. And that's what led her to Carol Bowman, the mother turned researcher that you met in our first two episodes. And here's Carol Bowman again.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  In November of 2011, I got an email from a mother in California, Kathy Byrd, who believed that her son was having memories from a past life. One of her son Christian's baseball coaches knew about my work and said, contact Carol Bowman. She knows about past lives and children.

• 12:39Ky Dickens?

  Gosh, that's really, I think that's fascinating that the baseball coach was also putting it all together.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  She tried to go through her church and it did not go well. I think that's part of why we don't know of more cases.

• 12:50Ky Dickens?

  So Kathy, then what happened after you met Carol?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  She, you know, metaphorically took me by the hand and really explained to me how this happens. And, you know, what Christian was displaying, how it was always right before he would fall asleep, but right after he would wake up. This was really common. You know, at this point, he was about three years old. And she said, this is exactly when these kids are having these memories and when they're talking about things like this. And so what her advice to me was just listen, you know, don't ask leading questions. Just let him carry the conversation and take notes. And so I did that. I followed her lead.

• 13:27Ky Dickens?

  And on Carol's advice, Kathy tried something we talked about in episode three, a controlled recognition test.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  One of the things Carol told me to do was show him photos from that era.

• 13:38Ky Dickens?

  You put photographs in front of a child, give them no clues or cues about what you're looking at and see what they recognize on their own.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So I printed out some photos from the internet of like the 1927 Yankees, for example, because he had given me that hint that he didn't like Babe Ruth and he traveled on trains. And so I took that picture and I showed it to him and I said, you think there's anyone in here who doesn't like Babe Ruth? And he, he immediately pointed to a tall guy with dimples and he said, that's me. Okay. And so this was again at night, he fell asleep. I went downstairs, I Googled and I found out that that man was Lou Gehrig.

• 14:17Ky Dickens?

  And what makes this bit of the story so interesting to me is just how close Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig once were.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  The man Chicago pitchers love to hate, Mr. Lou Gehrig. Step right up and take a bow. Thank you, Rudy, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to say a few words on my favorite topic. That said topic being a gent by the name of George Herman Ruth. What a man.

• 14:40Ky Dickens?

  They weren't simply teammates. They were good friends. They vacationed together, spent time with each other's families. For years, they were two of the biggest stars in baseball, side by side and genuinely close, almost like family, which makes the way the friendship unraveled feel especially relevant to something we keep encountering this season. The idea that we don't just carry love forward, we carry wounds and resentment and unfinished relationships too. In Lou Gehrig's case, the fracture with Babe Ruth was deeply personal. And it started after Babe became furious over something Lou's mother said about his family. And Lou Gehrig was extraordinarily devoted to his mother. But the most important thing to know is that this argument between the two men didn't just blow over. The resentment lingered and then other injuries piled on. Personality clashes and professional tensions and public jabs.

• 15:22Ky Dickens?

  And over time, these two men became almost completely estranged.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  In contrast to the steady, methodical Gehrig, there was the flamboyant Big Bambino, Lou Gehrig, lived in the shadow of Ruth.

• 15:34Ky Dickens?

  So when three year old Christian, who claims to have been Lou Gehrig, looks at Babe Ruth and says, he was mean to me. There's actually emotional history underneath those words. And here's Carol Bowman again.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  He still held a grudge against Babe Ruth. And to see that a grudge can span lifetimes was really interesting. It was very clear.

• 15:55Ky Dickens?

  And once they had a name, Carol wanted to do a test to see whether Christian recognized not just Lou Gehrig, but other people in his life.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I was still skeptical, even as he was telling me all these things. So then what I did on Carol's advice was print out pictures of Lou Gehrig's mother and father and of the coach of the Yankees at the time, Joe McCarthy. And Carol had advised me to ask him, could he recognize these people? And he sure enough was able to identify them by name. He was able to point Joe McCarthy. He knew that was the coach of the team, you know, things that he would have never known. You know, she had me ask questions, is this Joe? Is this Dan? Is this Heinrich? The father, and he said, no, but then he said yes to Henry and the father went by the name Henry.

• 16:39Ky Dickens?

  So he got Lou Gehrig's father, who went by Henry, his manager, Joe McCarthy. And Kathy told me that none of this was landing on her as good news.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Even as I got more information, I was still very skeptical. He remembered being married and he, one night he said, she was a drunk.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  You know, and it was really interesting because I researched it. I thought, oh, let me find out if this Eleanor Gehrig, that was Lou Gehrig's wife, if she was a drunk. And sure enough, I found information that she was a big drinker and Lou Gehrig was not.

• 17:07Ky Dickens?

  And this is the kind of detail that I find much harder to wave away because this isn't some famous fact that you pick up about Lou Gehrig on a baseball card or on ESPN. It's intimate, personal history about his marriage. So how does a four year old even arrive at something like that? At that age, most kids don't even know what drunk means. And the way Christian talked about Eleanor, Lou Gehrig's wife, is as interesting as what he actually said.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  He would talk about the wife, but he always said it like kind of derogatory. He wasn't complimentary of her. And there was this big rivalry between Lou Gehrig's mother and his wife. He was like siding with the mom instead of the wife.

• 17:39Ky Dickens?

  And then there were things that don't fit into any neat little box, little synchronicities that Kathy couldn't wave away.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Christian has big dimples like Lou Gehrig. He is a lefty like Lou Gehrig. And Christian's dad is from Germany and his parents are actually from the same province that Lou Gehrig's parents immigrated from, from Schleisveg Holstein. I'm probably saying that wrong. So there were just a lot of weird synchronicities that would come up along the way. And my Christian beliefs were still kind of holding me back too, as if this really isn't something I should even explore with him. And we should probably just crush it while we could.

• 18:11Ky Dickens?

  And part of Kathy wanted to stop asking questions, but then the story turned toward her. And once that happened, it became a lot harder to simply crush it and move on.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  One of the most disconcerting parts of me exploring these photos with Christian was at some point, he saw the picture of Lou Gehrig's mother Christina and he would say, you were her. And he was very adamant about it. Like it was something that would come up kind of constantly was like, oh, you were her, you were my mom.

• 18:38Ky Dickens?

  Hold on to that. We'll come back to what Kathy did about that claim at the end of this episode and also in next week's episode. But for now, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Christian's case lands at the University of Virginia in front of the people who've studied children's past life memories longer than anyone else.

• 18:55Ky Dickens?

  OneSkin is different from your typical skincare brand, and that's why I keep coming back to them. Rather than focusing only on lines and wrinkles after they appear, OneSkin works to address how skin ages in the first place. Founded by four PhD longevity scientists, they developed OS1, a proprietary peptide designed to target dysfunctional cells that affect the healthy cells around them. It's the foundation of every product they make, helping skin look firmer, smoother, and more radiant over time, with a more even tone and visibly fewer lines. The one I keep reaching for is the OS1 Face Rich Cream. It's so nourishing, and it feels like such a treat to put it on in the morning and night. And over the past few weeks of using it, I've noticed my skin feels more hydrated and has this healthy, fresh glow. And this isn't just my experience. OneSkin's results are backed by four peer-reviewed clinical studies,

• 19:40Ky Dickens?

  over 10,000 5-star reviews, and they've been recognized by Bloomberg and Fast Company as a leader in skin longevity. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, OneSkin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using Tapes at oneskin.co/tapes. That's 15% off, oneskin.co with Tapes. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet that you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. This holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim.

• 20:24Ky Dickens?

  Quince also has gifts that keep giving all season long, like their high-quality down outerwear and cozy cashmere gloves and scarves. Everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you can give luxury-quality pieces without the luxury price tag. My closet is stacked with their clothes, but recently I've discovered their jewelry, and I love their 14-karat gold diamond bezel station bracelet. It's beautiful and slight and more than 50% off what you'd pay retail. And when it comes to gifting, Quince has a lot more than clothing. Think leather bags, hotel-quality bedding, chef-grade cookware, and 5-star luggage. Basically, plenty of ways to find something special for everyone on your list. Give the gift of quality this season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com.

• 21:09Ky Dickens?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Telepathy Tapes. It's the best way to support our show.

• 21:24Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back. The next step in Kathy's journey was to bring Christian's case to the University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies, where researchers have spent decades studying children who report past-life memories.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Carol was really my mentor for the first couple of years in the process, and then I was led to Dr. Tucker at the University of Virginia.

• 21:42Ky Dickens?

  Dr. Jim Tucker led the Division of Perceptual Studies immediately after Dr. Ian Stevenson, but he has since retired. But at the time, he was the one to investigate Christian's case.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  He agreed to come to our house and talk to Christian and interview Christian about his past-life memories. And this was when Christian was about five years old.

• 21:59Ky Dickens?

  And five was late for these cases. Christian was getting close to the window, where kids start to forget these memories.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  I knew from Carol, six years old or so, like right around school age is when it all kind of starts to disappear. So Jim Tucker made a trip to Southern California to interview Christian, and it was great because he played catch with Christian out in the street, and they got a conversation going. And he just asked him questions about his past life and specifically about Lou Gehrig and the life of Lou Gehrig. And one moment I'll never forget is they were inside playing baseball, and Christian was up on the stair landing. And Dr. Tucker asked him, "Do you remember how you died?" And Christian said, "My body stopped working."

• 22:45Ky Dickens?

  Lou Gehrig died of ALS at 37, the horrible disease that would eventually take his name. ALS shuts down the body while the mind stays intact.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  The one thing that's really interesting about these kids having these past-life memories is there's a high correlation with these kids dying an untimely death in the prior lifetime. Either a traumatic death or traumatic experience, or like Lou Gehrig, died at 37 years old of ALS. So it may be no accident that these memories came through.

• 23:17Ky Dickens?

  But it was the next thing out of his mouth that Kathy has never gotten over. It had nothing to do with dying. It was about how he got here.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And then he said to Dr. Tucker, "I picked her to be my mom." And Dr. Tucker continued the conversation without missing a beat, and he said, "Well, when did you pick her?" And he said, "I was in the sky." So those were things that Christian had never said to me. So when that came out that day, that was like a bit shocking to me, and that was something that Dr. Tucker said was fairly common with these kids, that they did have memories of preexistence, like before they were born, like choosing their parents.

• 23:54Ky Dickens?

  I asked Carol Bowman about this, and she said she's been hearing children say a version of this her whole career.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Some children will talk about that intermission between lives, and they'll say, "I remember choosing you." That happened in the James Linehan case. He remembered seeing his parents. I think on their honeymoon, he described where they had stayed in Hawaii. Other children have described kind of trailing their parents. The soul is trailing the parents and reporting situations that occurred before they were even conceived. And some children, when they're two or three, will tell their parents directly, "I'm so glad I chose you." Apparently, there's a lot of activity in that interim period, you know, where the consciousness, which does not end at death,

• 24:41Speaker 03

  is still somewhere, and it's in this intermission state. We can call it heaven, we can call it another dimension, and they are planning their next incarnation, which goes with the concept that if we can have cases where you can reincarnation into the same family, it is not a random process. And that is really an important point. It's not like shuffling a deck of cards and arbitrarily handing out assignments. I think that this shows that souls who return to the same family have volition and agency in the process. If there's a need to come back into the same family,

• 25:21Speaker 03

  somehow they can direct that energy and come back to a specific family.

• 25:27Ky Dickens?

  So if some children really do return with intention, it made me wonder if Christian had unfinished business with his mother from when he was Lou. But before anyone could really untangle that question, the window began to close, because almost right on cue, Christian's memories began to fade, just as researchers say they often do before the age of seven.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Right after Jim Tucker visited, around the age of like six is when I really saw a shutdown in Christian, where he wasn't talking about it as much or as freely. It would come up now and then before bed, but it was like he really was ready to be Christian, which was really a blessing.

• 26:03Ky Dickens?

  And now Christian is 17, and though his memories have faded, his talent has not.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Even to this day, Christian's a baseball player. He's going to be playing baseball in college. He got a scholarship offer his junior year to play at the Division One program, and his teammates call him Lou, like, it's great. So when he's pitching, when he's hitting, they're like, "Let's go, Lou, let's go, Lou."

• 26:24Speaker 03

  That's cute.

• 26:24Ky Dickens?

  So as I noted earlier, we're going to come back to this story because there's another side of it that has to do with his mom Kathy. But because this episode is about prodigies, I first wanted to know whether Christian was an outlier. So I went back to the team at University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies and asked a pretty simple question. Does this show up in other cases? And have they ever looked at prodigies specifically? And it turns out, they had. In fact, a few years ago, the team at DOPS brought in someone from an outside field to look at exactly that question. So here's Dr. Marietta Pelvinova, who co-leads the Past Life Research Program at DOPS.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  We had a collaboration with this Canadian researcher who is a mainstream talent researcher. So not from our field at all. He researches talent in sports. He's originally from Brazil, and he's quite interested in this.

• 27:12Ky Dickens?

  The talent researcher that they brought in is Dr. Raphael Tedeschi. He's a professor of sports studies at Bishop's University in Canada. And Raphael did not go looking for reincarnation research specifically. He didn't even know it existed. He had already been researching talent and sports prodigies when he just happened across Dr. Ian Stevenson's work. What stopped him was the scale of it. Decades of cases, thousands of children, and pages of data, all documenting things that might be looked at through an entirely different lens.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  I learned about the work of Ian Stevenson, that huge database of cases. And my mind was blown away. I didn't know such data existed, and I needed to investigate this further. And I connect this somehow to my own work in understanding better what talent is, where does talent come from.

• 27:59Ky Dickens?

  And here was a database pointing to an answer, a far-out one, but an answer nonetheless, that no one in his field would ever think to say out loud or maybe even thought about at all. So he took his questions to Philip and Marietta, the co-leads at the Division of Perceptual Studies.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  Is it possible that, in addition to genes and nature and nurture and environmental factors, such as hours and hours of training, good coaching, access to facilities and so forth, is it possible that something else is also contributing to these child prodigies? And that something also carries over from a prior life? And the database at University of Virginia offers a great place to start investigating this question.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  He visited DOPS for four or five days and specifically looked through our database, anything that was coded as the child had skills that seemed to be related to the previous personality. That's the variable in our database.

• 28:56Ky Dickens?

  Dr. Tedeschi's first job was to narrow the field. The UVA archive holds about 2,500 cases. So he started with a category that researchers there had already been tracking. Children who showed what they called unusual skills.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  In about 9% of the cases, the children they investigated would have what is called unusual skills. And these unusual skills would be a skill that the child displayed, which was not common in the family. Another reason to call them unusual would be for the child's skill not necessarily having been taught to the child.

• 29:31Ky Dickens?

  So they were specifically looking for kids who were talented in things that they'd never been taught or exposed to. And from there, Dr. Tedeschi kept narrowing the field.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Many of the domains where these children were considered skilled and talented, they were not necessarily traditional usual domains.

• 29:48Ky Dickens?

  When he says domains, he's referring to things like talents or gifts.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  Some kids were reported to be very talented at hunting, others at hairdressing, others at cooking, others at cleaning fish. And so we realized that there will be some limitations in terms of our assessment as experts of the level of talent of the individual in these non-traditional domains. So we had to exclude these cases as well. So we only kept cases where the child demonstrated a talent in a traditional domain, such as sport, arts, music, math, intelligence, et cetera.

• 30:22Ky Dickens?

  So he threw out the unlearned talents that were unusual, not because they aren't fascinating, but honestly, how do you objectively grade prodigy-level fish cleaning? He wanted to research domains where an expert could look at it and flat out say, this is real measurable talent.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  We went from the 9% of cases total with unusual skills to only five cases.

• 30:43Ky Dickens?

  After throwing out cases due to language barriers, or where a previous person was not identified, or the talents were too unusual, they were left with five cases.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  He specifically looked at the strong ones. And he read those files and tried to apply current mainstream standards of what is considered prodigy-level talent.

• 31:02Ky Dickens?

  He used a formal framework for judging prodigies from a Harvard-trained psychologist named Ellen Wiener.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  The first sign would be this child learns faster than the average. So what we call the ease of learning. The second criterion would be precocity, meaning a child is displaying a high level of talent much earlier than expected. Another sign of early talent would be the passion. It could also be called obsession, because the intensity of the interest that these kids would have in their domain, it's so intense that it bears an obsession. The kid only wants to do that. They don't care about anything else. And then the fourth criterion would be relative autonomy or independence in developing the skill.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  They would pretty much develop the skill by practicing on their own.

• 31:53Ky Dickens?

  So run all four of those criteria back over what Kathy told us about Christian, and he checks every box. He was as much a prodigy as anyone. And of course, he's not the only one. We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, we'll meet another child whose story follows an eerily similar pattern to Christian, but in a completely different sport.

• 32:13Ky Dickens?

  You know those little things that keep getting pushed to the bottom of your to-do list? If getting new glasses is one of them, Zenni makes it easy. I have so many pairs of glasses, sunglasses, readers, transition lenses, and all of them are prescription. I love having different options for whatever I'm doing. And honestly, I couldn't have all these pairs if it weren't for Zenni. Zenni is an online eyewear shop with stylish prescription glasses and customizable lens options with frames starting at under $30. Typically, a pair of glasses can cost a few hundred dollars, and when you add on special features, it skyrockets above that. With virtual try-on, you can see how frames look before you order. Just find a pair you love, enter your prescription, customize your lenses, and have them shipped right to your door. Check new glasses off your list today with Zenni.

• 32:55Ky Dickens?

  Go to zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off, plus free shipping over $65. Style sell out, so don't wait. That's Z E N N I dot com slash podcast, promo code PODCAST15. Zenni dot com slash podcast, code PODCAST15. Weight Watchers now offers access to affordable GLP-1s. With our program, our members are losing more weight with expert nutrition and side effect support. Better results, expert support. Get started today for as low as $25 at WeightWatchers.com.

• 33:34Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back. So out of the roughly 2,500 cases in the UVA archive, Dr. Rafael Tedeschi narrows them down to just a handful of children whose abilities could be judged against mainstream standards for prodigious talent. And one of the strongest cases involved a two-year-old who seemed to arrive in the world knowing how to play a sport that no one in his family played, and his name was Hunter. Here's Dr. Philip Cozalino again.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  We were contacted, I think when the boy Hunter was three, his second birthday. Hunter received for a birthday present, plastic golf clubs. He was very excited when he opened the package, but it's, you know, a child opening a birthday present, who isn't excited? But then I watched this video of this two-year-old, and he walks up to the ball, and he properly takes a stance. His grip is exactly what you'd expect for a proper grip to be. He's a lefty, so that's interesting. And yet he takes these swings with the little plastic ball and the plastic golf clubs. And it's miraculous to watch for a two-year-old. It's not just like what you'd imagine a kid slamming a club or kind of just wildly taking a baseball swing. Golf swing's an unnatural thing. That's why it's so difficult.

• 34:39Ky Dickens?

  And Dr. Cozalino's a pretty good golfer. He himself plays to attend handicap, so he knows firsthand how unnatural a golf swing can feel.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  He's doing everything that a golfer does. He's getting the ball, setting it properly, stepping back, setting his stance, putting the club down, checking to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be, takes the swing. The ball flies perfectly straight for, I would guess, 30 yards, which for a two-and-a-half-year-old kid, I mean, you have to understand, this is, it's just unbelievable to watch. And at one point, he walks over to the camera that they're video doing him in. The mother, I think, says, what's your name? And he says, Bobby Jones. I'm Bobby Jones.

• 35:18Ky Dickens?

  But that wasn't his name. His name was Hunter.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  Of course, Bobby Jones was a very famous golfer back in the early 1900s.

• 35:26Ky Dickens?

  So I had to look up who Bobby Jones was, because to be honest, I didn't know. And it turns out, he was a huge deal. So here's a quick recap. He was born in Atlanta in 1902. He was a lawyer who played golf as an amateur, and he became the best player in the world. Between 1923 and 1930, he won 13 major championships. And in 1930, he won all four of the majors as they existed then, in a single calendar year. That's the Grand Slam. Nobody had done it before him, and nobody has done it since. And then he went on to found Augusta National and co-founded the Masters, and he died in 1971. So this is not just any random golfer. He's like the golfer. And a two-year-old who seemingly came out of the womb knowing how to tee up a golf ball and swing a driver is saying that he was him.

• 36:07Speaker 06

  The thing that's really interesting is that this boy Hunter has this little move, without getting too technical about golf, that no modern golfer does. It's a very old thing that they used to do with their legs and their feet, because the technology was so different. The clubs were made of stiff wood, and it just was a different way of playing. And yet Hunter does that. He has this move with his front leg where the knee goes deep in and his foot lifts up, so it's on a toe. And the funny thing is, is that's exactly how Bobby Jones swung the club.

• 36:37Ky Dickens?

  So this is a move from the era of stiff wooden clubs, a technique that no coach teaches anymore, because the equipment that needed it has been gone for 100 years. And this toddler does it. It's so weird. And it feels like he's the golf version of Christian, who we met earlier in the episode. His body didn't just know the sport, it knew the period. Like in Christian's case, he talked about the metal cleats, not wearing helmets. And it's the small stuff that gets the golfers who watch this video. It's not the long drive, it's the habits you pick up only after years of being around a course. And here's Dr. Philip Cozalino again.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  There are some things in this video that I was talking about with a colleague that are just astounding. Where people will often say the money is made in golf is what they call the short game. Sitting around the green, chipping the ball close to the hole so that it can easily get in for the birdie, et cetera, the par. There's one shot in this video, this two-and-a-half-year-boy chipping off the side of the green. And I showed it to my colleague who used to golf. I mean, it's just unbelievable to watch. There's a technique to chipping that this boy just, he knows. And the father in this video says, he's never received a second of training at this point. He's two-and-a-half years old. Would you take a two-and-a-half-year-old to a golf teacher? But he makes this chip with the proper stance, the hands ahead of the club.

• 37:49Speaker 06

  And I've played golf with 50-year-olds who couldn't chip as well as this two-year-old did. And it wasn't luck. Everything, the technique, it's like, it has just something this boy had done for decades, is what you'd imagine when you watch him do it. And the ball stops two inches from the cup, and he walks up and he taps it in. People would pay to be that good at doing that.

• 38:08Ky Dickens?

  It's hard to explain this level of precision and technique at two-and-a-half, but let's just argue it's extraordinary coordination. But Dr. Cozalino noticed something else in the video that has nothing to do with coordination or athletic skill.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  There's just one other subtle little moment where he's standing on the driving range, and the ball is teed up, and he's just kind of stepped back from it. And he's got the club in his hand, and he's just kind of washing the club with a towel, wiping the club head. And he's kind of poised in a way that I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of golfers stand as they're preparing a shot, and they're looking forward, cleaning the head of the club to get off the dirt and the muck. And the mother says, what are you doing? He goes, I'm cleaning my club. And then he puts the towel down, he steps up, does exactly what he did before, takes the stance, makes sure everything's, takes a swing, and the ball goes perfectly straight. And to me, it's almost those little subtle moments where even if he had been to a coach,

• 39:01Speaker 06

  no coach would say, this is what it looks like when a golfer is like preparing a shot and wiping the head of the club. That's not what you do. You think about stance, you think about grip, et cetera, et cetera. But these little moments like the chipping and the wiping the head of the club, they just emanated this, when you watch it, I just looked at it, I was like, oh my God, I've done that in those years when I was golfing.

• 39:22Ky Dickens?

  And then something happened that seemed to confirm, at least for Hunter, what he'd already been saying.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  It's Sunday at Augusta, in a tournament one never forgets, even from that first gathering of friends.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  They were flipping through the channels on their TV, and they passed the golf channel, which the father claims they didn't even know they had. They're not golfers, the mother or the father. Somebody can reach the green in two, they might be able to run the ball. Close in for an eagle opportunity. And Hunter begged him to go back to the channel and became obsessed with the golf channel.

• 39:52Ky Dickens?

  And then he saw someone on TV that he seemed to recognize.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  To Bobby Jones, golf wasn't just a game. It was a science, a subject worthy of study.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  He saw a video of Bobby Jones and Hunter insisted that he was Bobby Jones. That was me, he would say.

• 40:09Speaker 07

  By focusing less on his score and more on the mechanics of his swing, he performed better than anyone in his day.

• 40:18Ky Dickens?

  For Hunter, seeing Bobby Jones affirmed something he'd already been saying. But for his family, it raised a harder question. Could this be real? And if it was, could he recognize anything beyond Bobby Jones himself? So just like Christian's family, they turned to photographs.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  At one point, the father started doing what we call the controlled recognitions, right? Where he's like showing him photos. And he had photos of other golfers of that era and Bobby Jones. And he said, can you look at these photos? And he said, which one is you? And he pointed, Hunter pointed to Bobby Jones and said, that's me. Now, of course, he had seen a video at that point. But what was really interesting from the father is, is that he also then pointed to one of the other photos and said, that's Harry Garden, my friend. And there was a very famous golfer called Harry Varden, and they knew each other. So to point to someone that even the father didn't really know who it was, and he almost got the name right and said, that's my friend. And one of the other fun controlled recognitions was, is that the father found Bobby Jones's

• 41:15Speaker 06

  home and he found other homes that looked like them of the era. And he put them out on the table and Hunter just pointed to them and went, house, house, house, home. And on home, it was Bobby Jones's home. So that again, becomes one of these moments where you start thinking, what is going on here?

• 41:36Ky Dickens?

  I've been mulling this case over in my own head and I've been trying to measure it against my own son, who's obsessed with basketball. And he's very aware of the greats, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And though he likes some of the stars better than others, including, I may add, Olivia Miles, who's a women's player for the Lynx, he never talks about being any of them. He talks about loving them. And to be honest, his heroes are recent. He's not reaching back 100 years. And when Hunter was a little boy, Tiger Woods was the golfer. And I asked about this and it's something Hunter's parents actually brought up to him.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  You would think that if this was about attention and I'm the next best golfer, you would just be, I want to be like Tiger Woods. I'm Tiger Woods. And he would say, no, no, no, no, no. Tiger's good, but I'm not Tiger. I'm Bobby Jones. So it would, he would fight. He knew who the other golfers were, but he wasn't trying to be just thought of as a famous or professional golfer. He was convinced he was Bobby Jones.

• 42:24Ky Dickens?

  And so I just find that interesting. He wasn't obsessed with the most famous golfer alive at the time or wanting to be referred to as Tiger Woods. He said he was one specific man who'd been dead for decades. And both boys, Christian, the baseball player who you met earlier, and Hunter, reached for the same phrase when trying to explain this to their parents, wording that is extremely common in the DOP's archive. When he would talk about his past, what would he say? How would he word it?

• 42:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have it right here. One of the quotes is, when I was big, I had a son. His name was Bobby. And it turns out that Bobby Jones Jr., the golfer, did have a son named Robert Tyer Jones III, and they called him Bobby. So he actually knew that, even though that wasn't in the commercial that he'd seen or even the parents, we wouldn't even have known that until they actually investigated it.

• 43:09Ky Dickens?

  But now, back to Dr. Raphael Tedeschi, the talent researcher working with the UVA team to ask where extraordinary abilities might come from. Hunter's swing had caught his attention, but he wanted to rule out the idea that the parents and even researchers were the only ones calling him a prodigy. What did actual golf pros think?

• 43:24Speaker 05

  The family got instructed to look at this two-year-old hitting golf balls. And even though the golf club accepted kids only from the age of five, they immediately said they wanted to take in two-year-old Hunter for lessons because he believed he was a prodigy. For most two-year-olds, they're barely walking and, you know, coordinating their movements. This PGA golf pro also saw this little boy when he was about three and said, yeah, definitely he's a prodigy.

• 43:55Ky Dickens?

  And I find that interesting because a golf academy waived its own age rule for a two-year-old and a PGA professional watched him and used the word prodigy without blinking. So this is clearly not just a proud mom or dad. These are industry insiders who know the game. So Philip, did anyone from UVA ever go meet Hunter in person?

• 44:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. When this call came in, it was during the era of Jim Tucker. So this was a Jim Tucker investigated case. And he did go to visit Hunter and his family. And he tried to do some of his own controlled recognition tests, but Hunter was one of those where the, the child just gets very shy and, and suddenly is just not interested in engaging. So Jim basically got to watch Hunter swing golf club on the backyard.

• 44:35Ky Dickens?

  So Dr. Tucker couldn't independently confirm the identifications the father described, but he did see the golf.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  You have a kid who's three years old, then can hit a golf ball better than some adults. I mean, it's weird.

• 44:45Ky Dickens?

  And as Hunter grew up, he continued to say things that defied explanation, including knowledge of courses and golf that went well beyond his years.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  He kept on displaying very unusual memories. And he would say that Augusta National was his favorite golf course. And it turns out that Bobby Jones actually founded and designed the Augusta National golf course in, in real life.

• 45:11Ky Dickens?

  And Dr. Tedeschi has tracked how this prodigy talent has developed over the years.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  By the age of seven, Hunter had played about 50 tournaments, kids tournaments. And he ended up winning 41 of the 50 tournaments and including 21 in a row. So that's a pretty amazing feat for anyone.

• 45:31Ky Dickens?

  Forty-one wins out of 50, 21 of them in a row by the age of seven. And Hunter's now grown, so I asked what happened to him.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  This is someone to this day, golf is the thing. It is his identity. He is a young adult now. He's on a scholarship playing golf at a college. His swing is completely different. It is completely modern and professional and brilliant. And the guy probably will become a professional golfer because it clearly is still his goal. And the beautiful thing about it is, is that all the reports that Jim received over the years was that, like we've shown in our papers about following up on these cases, he was also not just becoming excellent at golf and continuing to be great at golf. He was excelling in school and socially. And now my recent check-in on him as an adult shows clearly that he is someone who is thriving in life.

• 46:23Ky Dickens?

  Hunter's swing no longer looks like Bobby Jones's. He's learned the modern game. He's won many tournaments and he's gone on to play college golf, just like Christian, who grew into a college baseball player too. When these two boys were little, they spoke confidently about another life. And though those memories have faded, Christian even saying he doesn't remember them for the most part, years later, their talent remains. And this reminds me of what Isra said in our last episode, that the talents he believed he mastered in a previous life didn't just carry over to this life, but gave him a head start. He didn't have to learn those skills again. He came into the world ready to hone talents that were already baked in. And I put this to Dr. Tedeschi. What does he theorize after looking at cases like this? How strong are they and what do they mean?

• 47:03Speaker 05

  So that to us suggests the possibility that talent might also partly carry over on a prior life by means of transmission of memories, transmission of aptitudes, transmission of preferences and tastes, and which are all consistent with general findings in the database of the cases of their reincarnation time.

• 47:25Ky Dickens?

  And here's Dr. Philip Cosalino again.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  These cases are really compelling because prodigies exist in the world and that makes sense. But it is interesting when they become prodigies, but start at an early age, as early as two, saying, I was once someone else. And it's like, you just wonder how many of these young prodigies have actually said those things and parents just simply saw it as like, yeah, yeah, you know, whatever. That's adorable. Let's just get better at this thing you're doing.

• 47:48Ky Dickens?

  And the existing files can only take them so far. So Dr. Tedeschi and the team at UVA want to research this from the opposite direction.

• 47:55Speaker 06

  We got to the point of you can flip it, right? You can go to find the people. You're a mainstream prodigy researcher. Go to those parents and ask the question that maybe no one's ever asked them, which is, has your child ever talked about being someone else in a past life? And maybe see what's the percentage of yeses you get to some of those folks, right? They're right there for you.

• 48:14Ky Dickens?

  So instead of starting with children who remember and hunting for a talent, you start with the certified prodigies, the gifted registries, the Mensa kids, and you ask their families a question that probably nobody has thought to ask them. But the catch is always the same. There's a clock ticking underneath every case.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  Most kids in the database start reporting memories from two to five years old. And the average age where they would stop reporting those memories, age seven. Timing is critical.

• 48:41Ky Dickens?

  Ages two to five and mostly gone by seven. So you have to find these children while the window is open. And the study still needs funding, which is its own dead end.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  Twice we applied, twice we were denied funding. So perhaps even within the realm of unconventional research, this may still be kind of pushing the limits a little too much for some people.

• 49:02Ky Dickens?

  So for now, Dr. Tedeschi's proposed study is still a proposal and the larger question, whether past life memories show up more often among prodigies, remains open. So now we want to turn back to something we can investigate. And this brings back in Kathy Bird, the mother you met in the beginning of the episode. Because if you remember earlier, she told us that her son Christian looked at a photograph of Lou Gehrig's mother and said, you were her. And Kathy did not know what to make of this. As a child, she never had her own spontaneous memories of a past life. So she didn't know how to look into this or investigate this, or if that was even possible. But she eventually tried something that we've deliberately kept out of the season thus far, past life regression. So I want to rewind super quick to when Dr. Jim Tucker, who was then leading the Division of Perceptual Studies, came to visit her son Christian when he was little.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  So as Dr. Tucker was leaving our house, you know, I was kind of intrigued by this whole idea of me being Christian's mother in another past life. And I had read about past life regressions where people go under hypnosis and actually travel to past lifetimes. And so I asked Dr. Tucker about this and he said, well, you know, it's not something we do in our research, but there are some really amazing, historically accurate things that come through regressions that are quite unexplainable. So just that little bit of an open mind from him gave me the, the gumption to reach out to a past life regression therapist. And that is really the moment where I found confirmation that made me believe that all

• 50:31Speaker 01

  of this was true.

• 50:33Ky Dickens?

  I told you at the start of the season that we're going to keep regression at arm's length. Up until now, everything you've heard in this episode and in the season is the gold standard. A little kid talking on their own before anyone went looking for anything. And regression is a different animal altogether. It's an adult under hypnosis and what surfaces is murkier, way more suggestible and way easier to contaminate. You cannot build science on one hypnotized session, full stop. And a memory that surfaces under those conditions can't be weighed the same way as something a child says totally unprompted. But Kathy Bird, in her quest to figure out if she was Lou Gehrig's mother, is the reason that we have to bring regression into the season. And that's what we're going to look into next week.

• 51:12Ky Dickens?

  Because Kathy says she learned specific insider knowledge type details about Lou Gehrig's mother and family in the regression that she was able to check against the historical record. And next week, we'll discover what she found and if any of it could be validated. And we won't stop there because if we're looking into regressions at all, we want to do it in the most scientific way possible. And we've uncovered what we think is the best data ever compiled on regression. We're talking UVA-style data compiled from over a thousand regressions. And what we discovered is remarkable. And the reason I feel comfortable putting regression into the season at all. What happens when you ask the kinds of questions we've been asking of the UVA files, but this time of adults under hypnosis? Do their stories fall apart when checked against history? Or do details emerge that leave us with an even harder question?

• 51:57Ky Dickens?

  How on earth could they have known? That's next time on The Reincarnation Records.

• 52:06Ky 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 Rbino. 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.

• 52:47Ky Dickens?

  Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. This is The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.