Dead and Back? Crash Survivor to Recount Afterlife Journey

Before being miraculously raised from the dead, Don Piper claims, he spent 90 minutes in heaven, visiting deceased relatives amid a whirl of electrifying colors, spellbinding music and gold-paved streets.

On Friday and Saturday, Piper will visit Los Alamitos to discuss his afterlife adventure, which followed a grisly 1989 car crash in Texas and eventually led to a bestselling book.

Piper, a Southern Baptist minister, has plenty of company on the near-death circuit. Over the last four decades, he and other authors have sold millions of books recounting alleged trips to the afterworld.

Although it's impossible to prove or disprove the tales, some invite more doubt than others.

Years ago, I investigated the near-death phenomenon for the Los Angeles Times and discovered a number of surprises.

Clerical Errors and Nintendo Characters

For starters, it's a myth that all near-death experiences are remarkably alike. Although many returnees say they floated toward the famous "white light" through a tunnel, others reach the hereafter aboard taxis, cows or even ferries that crossed the River Styx.

Culture seems to greatly influence how a person experiences the afterworld. For example, resuscitated Americans invariably say God sent them back because "it's not your time yet." But people from India are commonly told there was a "clerical error."

And children zapped back to life on the operating table have said they were greeted in heaven not by dead relatives but by living schoolteachers and Nintendo characters.

Some of the most compelling evidence that near-death visions are a product of the mind comes from Carol Zaleski, a religion professor at Smith College. In a highly regarded study comparing modern vs. medieval near-death accounts, Zaleski found some uncanny similarities, but also uncovered enough differences to conclude "we can no longer insist that [near-death visions] paint a true picture of what occurs at the [end] of life."

One key discrepancy: In modern near-death accounts, nobody goes to hell.

"Gone are the bad deaths, harsh judgment scenes, purgatorial torments and infernal terrors of medieval [near-death records]," Zaleski wrote in Otherworld Journeys. "In today's upbeat near-death literature . . . the being of light communicates, but never excommunicates."

A Vivid Trick of the Mind?

Curiously, some people have near-death experiences without even dying. As I explained in the L.A. Times:

[Near-death researcher Dr. Melvin] Morse writes of two miners who thought they talked with deceased relatives and saw heavenly realms while trapped underground for a few days. Otherworldly visions also turn up in studies of mountaineers who survive falls, prisoners of war and people held hostage by bank robbers, says Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences at UCLA.

"The tunnel, the light, the feelings of floating or flying . . . they're all very common," Siegel says. The trigger seems to be "some form of sensory isolation and life-threatening stress."

Such visions can also be induced in the lab, with electrical stimulation of the brain. In each case, the experiences seem "very concrete, very vivid . . . [and] very powerful," Siegel said, "but they're happening in mental space, not physical space."

Piper at the Brink of Death

Piper said he too was once skeptical -- until an 18-wheel big-rig plowed into his Ford Escort near Houston. Pronounced dead by paramedics, he found himself shrouded in light, then standing outside a heavenly gate, surrounded by dead ancestors and mesmerized by "colors I would never have believed existed" and music that seemed to play "in and through my body," he wrote.

Back on planet Earth, paramedics checked his pulse twice over a 90-minute span and found no sign of life, he said. Then, miraculously, Piper revived.

Medically speaking, it's a dubious claim. The brain cannot survive that long without oxygen.

But Piper offers an explanation. Shortly after the wreck, another Baptist minister, Dick Onerecker, walked up to the scene and began praying over Piper's lifeless body, asking God to heal him.

Also worth noting is that 90 minutes isn't the longest near-death experience on record. In the New Testament, Lazarus was in a tomb for several days before Jesus raised him from the dead, although he didn't write a New York Times bestseller about it.

"No matter what researchers may or may not try to tell me," Piper writes, "I know I went to heaven."

To read more about near-death experiences, click here.

Event information: Piper is scheduled to speak Friday and Saturday from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, 11600 Los Alamitos Blvd., Los Alamitos.

To purchase tickets, visit www.wecarelosalamitos.org or call 562-598-9790. Cost is $20 per person, with proceeds going to and Rising TIDE of Long Beach.