Show Notes
⚠️ Heads up: this episode opens with combat footage from the Tet Offensive and includes graphic descriptions of battlefield injury, a child in medical crisis, and animal experimentation. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at 988.⚠️
Jeb and Blake look at the birth of NDE research: a field of study with a significant footprint in the metro-Atlanta area. Rats are bothered. Soldiers are wounded. Canadian teens are frozen. ...and we're here to talk about all of it. 📺 Episode Summary Despite the title, this one isn't really about proving there's an afterlife - and that turns out to be the most interesting thing about it. In Search Of takes the near-death experience and, instead of building a case for Heaven, spends most of its runtime on a much stranger question: when, exactly, is a person dead?
We get four threads. A grievously wounded Vietnam veteran who watched his own body being worked on and then went back to the battlefield to talk with the men he'd already put in bags. An Emory physiologist chilling rats into a state he calls clinically-but-not-biologically dead. A Manitoba teenager whose heart was stopped for well over two hours in a snowbank and who came back with nothing to report but darkness. And a woman recalling a 1952 polio vision full of white light, a dead grandmother, and a complete moral audit of her own life.
Between those, the medical talking heads keep circling the same admission: nobody agrees where the line is. It's a surprisingly restrained ISO episode ... and there's a very large name conspicuously missing from it.
👔 Nimoy Fashion Alert
(NFA fashion consultant, Pedro Mendes)
👥 Who's In This Episode Tommy Clack — Army captain, artillery forward observer with the 25th Infantry Division "Wolfhounds." Wounded 29 May 1969 near the Cambodian border, losing three limbs; 22 months at the Atlanta VA and 33 operations followed. He finished college as an honors graduate, spent a long career at the VA, and became one of the country's more relentless veterans' advocates. He talks about the out-of-body experience, but - as Jeb found - he almost never leads with it. As of our recording he's still out there supporting veterans.
Dr. Michael Sabom — Atlanta cardiologist. He's here to say that medicine can't pin down the moment of death. Two years later he publishes Recollections of Death, built on 116 interviews which form the closest thing the field had to a quantitative baseline. His later work takes a considerably more explicitly Christian turn.
Dr. Vojin "Voja" Popović — Yugoslav-born physiologist at Emory, and the episode's designated rat botherer. Central casting could not have done better. He chills rats into apparent death and brings them back, drawing his line between clinical and biological death at the two-to-three hour mark. His actual career is a wonder: hibernators, ground squirrels, tumor-bearing hamsters, cooled dogs, hamsters submerged in oxygen-rich fluorocarbon, and a rat experiment slated for a Spacelab flight that never happened. Frequently co-credited with his wife, Dr. Pava Popović.
Ted Milligan — Sixteen, and a student at St. John's Cathedral Boys' School near Selkirk, Manitoba, whose curriculum included a 27-mile snowshoe hike in temperatures around forty below. Found with no heartbeat, no breathing, and a core temperature below 25°C. By the time of filming he's a private in the Canadian Armed Forces. His account of the experience is the shortest in the episode and, for a materialist, the most instructive: darkness, then waking up.
Dr. Gerald "Gerry" Bristow — The episode calls him "James." He's not. Later Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a genuine world authority on hypothermia; he and Dr. Robert Smith declined to do the sensible thing and kept working on a boy every indicator said was gone. An eyewitness account from anesthesiologist Dr. Arnold Tweed fills in what the episode leaves ou
More from In Research Of
Jeb and Blake go in research of... MOON MADNESS! Does the full moon drive people mad? Will this episode drive your hosts mad? Was In Search Of... not able to afford a fact-checker in season five? SO MANY QUESTIONS! This is our Halloween Episode for season five. This is our TIME TRAVEL episode for season five. This is... MOON MADNESS.
Note: This episode briefly touches on the topic of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
Jeb and Blake tackle In Search Of...'s S05E03 topic of Lee Harvey Oswald. Episode Summary This In Search Of episode examines the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through the lens of (at the time this aired) newly discovered acoustic evidence and Cold War intrigue. Rather than accepting the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the episode presents "new evidence" suggesting a conspiracy involving multiple gunmen, potential Soviet involvement, and even the extraordinary theory that the man killed by Jack Ruby may not have been the real Lee Harvey Oswald. The episode relies heavily on acoustic analysis of the Dallas police motorcycle tape (1978), testimony from KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, handwriting analysis of Oswald's Soviet diary, and the fringe theory of British investigator Michael Eddowes that a Soviet lookalike carried out the assassination. Notably, this episode aired just three weeks before the election of Ronald Reagan, and sits chronologically between two major investigations: Dr. James Barger's acoustic analysis work (1978) and the National Academy of Sciences' debunking of that analysis (1982).
Blake and Jeb discuss ISO's coverage of FAITH HEALING. The episode goes to places new and old. Jeb gives us historical context. Blake gets angry. Nimoy wears a lab coat.
Weirdumentary has a forward by Stephen Bissette who wrote a book also likely to be of interest to listeners: Cryptid Cinema (affiliate link) (A follow-up to that book is under construction and will include research by your's truly about the "4-walling" tour of the PGF.) I linked to Feral House's page for Weirdumentary above at the request of Gary. If you're curious about their catalog, we talked with their owner recently about monstrous food and they also produced Al Ridenour's new book about Carnival. This is not a complete list of the films in the book - and it also covers a few TV series including In Search Of... and Arthur C. Clarke's _____ (he had three ITV series covering topics similar to ISO with each season getting a slightly different name). 1970: Chariots of the Gods, The Unexplained 1971: The Hellstrom Chronicles, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow 1972: Bigfoot Man or Beast, Monsters! Mysteries or Myths?, The Devil's Triangle, The Legend of Boggy Creek 1973: In Search of Ancient Astronauts 1974: Deadly Fathoms, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, In Search of Dracula, UFOs: Past, Present and Future 1975: Mysteries from Beyond Earth, The Force Beyond, The Legendary Curse of the Hope Diamond, The Man of Miracles, The Outer Space Connection 1976: Beyond Belief, In Search of Noah's Ark, Mysteries of the Gods, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Legend of Bigfoot, The Legend of Loch Ness, The Miracle Healers, The Mysterious Monsters, World Beyond Death 1977: Aliens from Spaceship Earth, Journey into the Beyond, Mysteries of the Great Pyramid, The Lincoln Conspiracy, The Underground Doctors, The Unknown Force 1978: Are We Alone in the Universe?, Beyond and Back, Curse of the Mayan Temple, Manbeast! Myth or Monster?, Mysteries from Beyond the Triangle, Mysteries of the Mind, Mystery of the Sacred Shroud, Secret of the Bermuda Triangle, The Amazing World of Ghosts, The Late Great Planet Earth, The Lost City of Atlantis, The UFO Journals, UFO - Exclusive! , UFO: Top Secret, Unknown Powers, World of the Unknown 1979: Attack from Outer Space, Charles Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle, Death: The Ultimate Mystery, Encounter with Disaster, Hypnosis and Beyond, In Search of the Historic Jesus, The Doomsday Chronicles, The Prophecies of Nostradamus, UFOs Are Real, World of Mystery 1980: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (TV), Land of Celtic Ghosts, Mysteries of the Mind, UFO Syndrome 1981: Search for the Titanic