Carol Bowman

Welcome back to episode two of this series.

Last week, we met Carol Bowman, whose five year old son Chase described being a soldier on a battlefield.

Chase started talking in the first person tense.

I'm a soldier.

I was in the kitchen, and I heard him yell out the door, "Trevor," which is his older brother, "Get out of the street, the bus is coming." So I went to the door right away to make sure Trevor's okay, and when I got to Blake, he had his hand on his ear and he said his ear hurt.

And so I said, "Well, why does your ear hurt?" I'm thinking he has an ear infection or something, and he said, "A truck hit me." And [laughs] right away I'm confused, and I'm, "Well, who hit you with a truck?"

Here's Carol Bowman again.

Colleen assumed he was confused and meant a child had hit him with a toy truck in preschool.

The traditions we'll get to later would say that fear is a thread, and that if you follow it, it leads somewhere.

There's a story that shows what following the thread can do, and it comes from Carol Bowman.

Bowman is an American counselor, and her interest began at home.

Her son Chase, at about five years old, was terrified of loud noises, and he had a chronic case of eczema on his wrist that wouldn't heal.

Small circles of souls who keep returning near each other, trading roles from life to life.

Someone who was your sister once might be your friend now, or your teacher, or the person who sits beside you on a bus.

Carol Bowman looked at a narrower version of this.

She studied what she calls family return, when a soul comes back into the same family.

Mia was the first girl with non-speaking autism to enter my life.

She lives in Mexico, and her mother Ileana is deeply Catholic.

And when Mia first said she could read minds, Ileana was so frightened that she even asked a priest about an exorcism.

And then Mia said something even more shocking.

I did not want to open another door that would shatter my reality even further, and especially not this door.

But the more families I met, the more it happened, again and again, whether the families were Hindu or Christian or agnostic or Jewish.

Like Jennifer, the mother of a non-speaker named Ethan, who we interviewed for the talk tracks.

He remembers all his past lives.

But around age eight, they do start to not hear it anymore.

James Leininger is the famous case that, uh, uh, Carol Bowman and Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia studied, where he remembered being a World War II pilot, and his father tracked down his crew members on the ship.

So they were in their 80s talking to his son, who remembered [laughs] all of them, and who they were, and what their names were, and th- where they were from.

And it was this uncanny get-together.

How do we come into our, to being? And in those cases, there are 1,500 historically accurate reincarnation case studies in Dr.

Jim Tucker's book before.

Carol Bowman's book, Children's Past Lives, um, she was with her child one day and, and he went into a Civil War cemetery and pointed to his tomb.

And, "Mom," you know, "that's who I was." And that allowed her, because she knew he wasn't making it up...

So it's really an extraordinary case.

And it's like so many other cases that, you know, Ian Stevenson's looked at and Carol Bowman and Jim Tucker, and it, it really does, when you look at so many of these cases, it has such a strong suggestion that reincarnation is a reality.

And one thing I like about, in the book that you deal with, is the skeptics.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, Shermer and, uh, the other guys and what they say?