Near death experiences

Reporter: David Richardson
Broadcast Date: October 10, 2008

For all of us, death is the final frontier and humankind's greatest mystery - do we simply cease to exist with our last breath or is there more?

Tens of millions of people around the world believe they have the answer, after undergoing something called "Near Death Experience", or simply NDE.

Danny Catz is arguably the luckiest man on the planet. He suffered a massive heart attack and died an incredible 29 times in just 2 hours - dead, brought back, dead, then alive again.

Danny's is not your run-of-the-mill NDE, but something happened to him - something he just can't explain.

"People ask me I've come back, or I've come back from the other side. I don't know if I was ever on the other side. The brightness, were they the oncoming train in the proverbial tunnel? God, I don't know," Danny said.

And was it coincidence his NDE and multiple deaths occurred 10 years to the day his wife Evelyn survived her own brush with death at the Maccabea Games in Israel - a bridge collapsed and four people died, but Evelyn came home.

"Ten years to the day she survived her incident, I survived something that I shouldn't have survived, so you've got to ask yourself is there a coincidence, if so what is the coincidence," Danny said.

Wendy Orr is the author of the children's book and Hollywood movie "NIMS Island". Seventeen years ago she died in a car accident and had an experience that changed her life.

"I was aware of going up a tube - I didn't see it as a tunnel. It was tight and uncomfortable and at the point I was very, very angle. I did not want to die," Wendy said.

Wendy had broken her spine, but she refused to go beyond.

"I think I was on the border and I could have gone either way," Wendy said.

Wendy believes if she'd taken the decision to go to the light she would be dead.

Scientists have done three comprehensive tests in the past 10 years to try to get to the bottom of NDEs, to prove they may be hallucinations, not real; dreams, induced by drugs.

"Hallucinations tend to be very disordered experiences and they're nothing like the ordered and structured experience of a near death experience," said Dr Jeff Long from the International Association for NDE studies.

In the documentary "The Final Frontier," his group set out to document the millions of NDE's around the world.

"There is so much more evidence behind something more going on with near death experiences, something that is not medically explicable," he added.

But not all NDE's are sweetness and light, love and paradise. Just ask Ian McCormack. "Standing in darkness, the darkness had an evil presence, cold and encroaching evil, pervading the atmosphere," Ian said.

Killed by the sting of a poison jellyfish, Ian remembers everything.

"A radiant beam of light pierced through the darkness above me. As this light touched my face I felt an awesome presence go through me and my entire body seemed to lift off the ground and be translated up into this light and presence," he added.

"Near death experiences are the dying experience and that's a scientific fact, not an opinion," said Doctor Melvin Morse.

Dr. Morse believes NDEs are natural and will hit us all eventually. How we see them may fall to faith.

"The interpretation of the experience is in dispute. Nevertheless it's a scientific fact, not a belief system, that we will all have this experience when we die," he added.

One in ten Australians believe they've had an NDE, while one in every five heart attack victims report an experience beyond their everyday reality.

It may take science hundreds more years to explain the so called "Lazarus phenomenon," but for some, no explanation is necessary.