Anyone who has done much afterlife research has encountered the work of skeptics and debunkers. Honest skeptics have contributed tremendously to the advancement of our understanding, but sadly most of those who claim to be writing as skeptics are just debunkers. You cannot learn a thing from a debunker, so it will be important that you know the difference!

Honest Skeptics

Skepticism is a healthy approach to dealing with extraordinary claims. Some of the greatest afterlife researchers began their careers as honest skeptics. From Ian Stevenson and Raymond Moody through Bruce Lipton, Helen Wambach and Gary Schwartz to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Bob Monroe, most of the best afterlife researchers were startled to discover some seeming anomaly. They were curious, and with an open-minded skepticism they set out to study that anomaly enough to be able to explain it and move on. Of course, the phenomena that they had paused to study turned out not to be anomalies at all, so none of them ever did move on. Today their wonderful work forms the basis of modern afterlife-related scholarship. Others, of course, have studied some phenomenon, been unconvinced, and said so. But no honest skeptic ever will attempt to mess with the evidence, or will consider his own view to be determinative of anything.

Debunkers

Skepticism in researching the afterlife is a healthy thing. But many purported skeptics now dealing with afterlife-related evidence are not operating as honest skeptics at all. They are operating instead as debunkers. When they encounter an afterlife-related phenomenon, their first reaction is not curiosity, but fear. The most common debunkers are scientists whose materialism-based careers might be at risk if reality turns out to be more complicated than what mainstream science long has supposed. Many of them are atheists as well. For them, debunking afterlife-related phenomena is a two-fer: not only can they protect their careers, but they can maybe also give God the boot!

Debunkers try to pass for honest skeptics, and it can be hard to tell them apart until you have some experience. To help you recognize debunker foolishness when you see it, here are four common debunker techniques:

1) They might choose what they think is a key aspect of some afterlife-related phenomenon and try to reproduce it under laboratory conditions, thereby in their minds proving that no supernatural explanation is necessary. In doing this, of course, they ignore whole swathes of other aspects of these phenomena which could not be so easily explained! But since they can (for example) produce tunnel vision and visual spots of light by whirling people in centrifuges, the whole well-documented phenomenon of NDEs is thereby “debunked” in their view. Someone conceivably could have opened the film-box that was on the table at Scole while a session was underway, so all the extraordinary photographic evidence which instantly appeared there must be ignored. Whenever a purported skeptical researcher focuses on just one aspect of a phenomenon, that is your cue to be skeptical of him.

2) They speak and write as if scientific hypotheses are the final word on something. As any good professional scientist knows, all scientific claims remain hypotheses. If that were not the case, then how could basic scientific advancements occur? Since all scientific claims are working hypotheses which can be revised or rebutted in the face of new information, when some “skeptic” claims to have the final word, you know he is no scientist.

3) They deny that some well-documented event actually happened. If they cannot find a way to debunk something, they simply say that it has been debunked and move on. Don’t let anyone try to tell you that any afterlife-related phenomenon has been debunked until you yourself have impartially examined all the evidence.

4) They refuse to consider bodies of afterlife-related evidence as a whole. It is in the very nature of afterlife-related phenomena that the evidence for them is extraordinary and usually highly subjective. In general, these phenomena are difficult to study and usually impossible to reproduce. You were the only witness to the appearance of your mother at the foot of your bed while she was dying half a world away? Good luck getting anyone to believe that!

5) They selectively lie. A strong word, true. They specialize in negative propaganda in areas where their lying cannot be balanced, so to do an internet search on any so-called paranormal phenomenon is to decide before the fact that you are not interested in an open-minded search for the truth. To give just one example, William Stainton Moses was arguable among the greatest natural mediums who ever lived, but yet if you attempt a Google search on his name you will learn that he is a thoroughly discredited impostor. He is not that. Check out a blog post by the venerable Michael Tymn for a more balanced view.

To honestly research the afterlife is to begin an extraordinary voyage! When I started doing afterlife research, I assumed that most of the purported afterlife communications that I was setting out to read would be nonsense. What I was looking for was a few bits of similarities among some of them, hoping that I could use those bits to get some idea of whether in fact there was an afterlife and what that afterlife was like. But in reading many hundreds of communications from the dead received over nearly 200 years, I found no outliers whatsoever and I cannot recall finding one duplication. Sure, if you look at one afterlife communication, it might have been faked. But, hundreds? And they all perfectly agree? The odds against chance for such a finding are so long as to be nearly incalculable. Personally, I find this amazing result to be my own surest evidence that all of this is real. Debunkers, however, generally insist on dealing with each event individually.

Everything that a debunker says or writes is fear-based propaganda. Ignore it! Instead, concentrate on reading honest skeptics’ original research, and draw your own conclusions.

Our growing understanding of how reality is structured makes us realize how near the dead are to us. They are right here! We’re told that there are something like eight primary levels of energy-based reality, separated from one another by their rates of vibration, and all of them are exactly where we are. But far from making communication easier, the fact that reality is an energy spectrum all located in a single place makes unaided communication from there to here seem impossible. Think of your Channel Five weatherman and your Channel Seven newsman trying to chat with one another while both are on air, and without a phone. The fact that communication between levels through mediums has become a well-documented phenomenon is a wonder! But what if we never consult a medium? How else can our loved ones signal their survival?

It seems that over the millennia the dead have wrestled with this problem. They are more aware of us than we are of them, and as they transition and adjust to their new surroundings they are anxious to get word to us that they are still here. We are coming to understand that even long before there were earth-based scientists, there were clever and dedicated teams of dead researchers trying to understand what they were dealing with and puzzling out how to deliver signs to us that they lived on.

It is from this perspective of ancient experimentation that we must look at the kinds of signs that come to us from those we love in the period soon after their deaths. Many are natural objects like feathers and stones, or growing things like flowers or insects; and some involve what seems to be the manipulation of the minds of animals and people. Some of the objects – and even the insects – are likely apports. They are objects materialized from there to here, in a process never studied and not well understood. There are hints that apports may be removed from this material level at some other point in time and deposited back here, often materializing in air, so a decades-old newspaper (for example) could plop onto a table looking fresh from the press.

So, what are some of the physical signs that our dead loved ones can send to us soon after their deaths?

1) Coins. People start finding coins in the same denomination – pennies mostly – or they find clusters of the same set of coins. The coins sent as signs will sometimes bear a significant date, such as a birth or death year or a wedding year.
2) Feathers. Some of the dead have made feathers their specialty. Of course, finding a feather loose beside your feather pillow isn’t going to mean much. But repeatedly finding feathers of all kinds on the ground, in drawers, even in your pocket can mean that someone you love is thinking of you.

3) Dragonflies and Butterflies. Beautiful insects are such a common sign. It may be that bees and ants also are used, but nobody takes much notice of them; however, a big dragonfly that comes to sit on your hand or a butterfly that dances in front of you is hard to miss. One spectacular insect sign happened soon after a teacher’s death. Her replacement reported that on the first school morning after her death, a yellow butterfly flew in through an open window and went up and down the rows, lighting briefly on the head of each wondering child, and then flitted out again.

4) Electrical Manipulation. You can imagine the joy in heaven when we started electrifying our homes! Since our beloved dead are energy beings, messing with electricity is easy for them, and just within the past century or so they have learned to do it very well. They blink lights, turn televisions on and off, and even sometimes put messages on computer screens. They can extinguish streetlights as we pass beneath them, cause cellphones to ring, and even (rarely) dial us up to have a chat.

5) Scents. Whiffs of cigarette smoke or perfume or perhaps the smell of lilacs or cooking: the dead seem to be surprisingly able to make us experience familiar scents. As someone who has enjoyed this phenomenon – my first scent communication, long ago, was of my grandmother’s perfume – I have wondered whether the scent is out there in the room. Could others standing nearby smell it, too? I have come to think not. I have come to believe that the dead are able to impress the scent directly on our minds, but whether that is true is anyone’s guess.

6) Physical Impressions. This kind of sign seems to be less common, but some of the dead will create phenomena which make it seem as if they are physically present. A surviving spouse might feel and see the other side of the mattress compress, or a spouse or parent might feel a physical hug. Someone who lost a beloved pet might feel and see the indenting of the coverlet by his feet, and then a depression where that pet always slept.

7) Visualizations. Sometimes, near the moment of someone’s death, he or she will appear to a loved one many miles away. Generally these apparitions will look younger and happy, they glow, they don’t speak, and often they are just bust-high or waist-high.

 8) Birds and Small Animals. The most common small-creature signs are birds swooping in front of our windshields. Or sometimes a type of bird will be reported far outside its range, like the Florida crane that graced a Long Island gravesite several days in a row. Freakishly unafraid squirrels that have approached and seemed to know us have been reported, too. There was one summer afternoon a couple of years ago when a huge owl came and perched on a light while a celebration of someone’s life was underway on a patio below it, and it stayed there until the last guest left. Our loved ones might be impressing their own minds onto the minds of these creatures to make them behave this way, although no one knows for sure.

9) Numbers. Seeing on a digital clock or a license plate a series of the same number repeated, or perhaps a date or other number that would be meaningful such as a birth, wedding, or death date, can be a sign from a deal loved one. Just one such instance isn’t meaningful, but if you repeatedly see a number like 11:11 when you randomly glance at a digital clock, your loved one may be reaching out to you.

10) Coincidences. We have had communications from upper-level beings who insist that there are no coincidences, and every seeming coincidence is the work of Spirit. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the chances that some of the stranger coincidences we see could occur at random are less than we suppose, so it is important to pay attention. When my mother died, someone sent me calla lilies, never realizing the importance that particular flower had in my mother’s life; and someone else sent a sympathy card that featured chickadees (Mother’s favorite bird) perched in lilacs (Mother’s favorite flower) oddly out of season. I assume that those were signs from my mother, but I won’t know for sure until I contact a medium.

11) License Plates. To be thinking of a loved one and at the same time see a license plate with his name or with some other significant term on it really brings you up short! Yet it happens. We have no idea how the dead are able to pull this off.

12) Songs. Here is something else in the category of: We have no idea how they do it. But they do. And often. A widow of someone recently dead will turn on a car radio or enter a store, and there will be playing the very song that the couple danced to at their wedding.

Don’t assume that everything that happens is a sign, but pay attention in the months after a loved one’s death. When you spot a possible sign, be sure to thank your loved one, since if the dead think they are being ignored they will generally give up.

How do we know that the dead send these signs? Because they tell us, over and over again. We are told that there are teams which help the newly dead to orient themselves to their new lives, and one of the things they offer to do is to teach new arrivals how to produce signs for their loved ones. Some of the dead become good at it, and a few are still delivering signs decades later. But for most of the dead, signs are given within the first year or two after their deaths, and once they see that we are past the worst of our grief they generally abandon the practice. They know that we’re fine. And they have lots to do!

It’s impossible to know what percentage of the dead will give us signs of their survival, but my research has led me to think that most of them try. They remain the same people after they die, and their love for us is as intense as it ever was. So, keep your eyes and your heart open!