“My aim has never been to prove reincarnation, but only to find and report whatever evidence there is to make it seem possible.” Dr. Ian Stevenson.

Ian Stevenson 1918-2007 University of Virginia School of Medicine, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry 1957-1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001 and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002-2007.

According to Stevenson, “actual life memories may need a vehicle in order to emerge into the conscious mind, and the mind with its enormous range of powers creates a fictitious previous life to enable the delivery of real memories. Such a procedure may to some extent be correlated with a dream process. A few items of memory from a real previous life may become separated in some way and attracted to a fictitious previous life that is created by the mind. The outcome is the narration of an apparently coherent previous life”.

Rather than outline Dr. Stevenson’s work, I feel it is more important to view what others in the academic community have said about him.

In all his works, Stevenson adhered to the strictest standards of scientific exploration, including the collection and interpretation of data.

On reviewing his book, the Cases of the Reincarnation Type (1975), The Journal of the American Medical Association states: a "painstaking and unemotional" collection of cases that were "difficult to explain on any assumption other than reincarnation.”

In the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, September 1977, psychiatrist Harold Lief described Stevenson as a methodical investigator and added, "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known (I have said as much to him) as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.”

Doris Kuhlman-Wilsdorf, Medal for Excellence in Research of the American Society of Engineering Education (1965 and 1966), Heyn Medal of the German Society of Materials Science 1988, University of Virginia professor of Physics and Materials Science…
Kuhlman-Wilsdorf surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that “the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that, cumulatively, the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.”

Robert F. Almeder, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgia State University…
In the following video, Dr. Almeder examines the logic of believing, or not believing, evidence for reincarnation, like that provided by Dr. Stevenson. His discussion suggests contemplation, without automatically accepting or dismissing the evidence.

A video review of the book “Twenty cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” is found at:

Below is a summation of this video:

Almeder states that there is a force to the case studies that is enticing, enthralling! He says “it must be wrong” but that, the more he read, the more he realized the importance.

He states this is good empirical research -it rendered a scientific question- and he could not think of any other alternative or plausible explanation for the data that some people reincarnate. If the data is acceptable, it shows our way of explaining human behaviour has to break out of the existing paradigm.

Dr. Ian Stevenson MD