America's Strangest History

The Reincarnation Files: 2,500 Cases. 60 Years Inside the University That Studies Life After Death.

America's Strangest History

Show Notes

Since the 1960s, a division inside the University of Virginia's medical school has quietly built a database of more than 2,500 cases of young children who describe verifiable details of lives they never lived, beginning with founder Ian Stevenson and continuing under Dr. Jim Tucker today. From a Louisiana toddler's nightmares of a burning WWII fighter plane to birthmarks matching the wounds of the deceased, the case files are documented, coded, and still unexplained. This is the story of the strangest research program in American academia and why almost nobody knows it exists.

More from America's Strangest History

Oct 20, 2026

During the Cold War, the CIA ran programs that went far beyond espionage. Project MKOFTEN, a little-known offshoot of the agency's mind control research, reached into the occult, witchcraft and ritual magic. Did the U.S. government really study black magic and supernatural forces as tools of national security?

Oct 16, 2026

In 1987 a three-year-old girl at the Presidio of San Francisco pointed at a man in an Army store and said he was a bad man. The man was Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, a military intelligence officer with an above-top-secret clearance, co-author of the Pentagon paper From PSYOP to MindWar, and founder of the Temple of Set. At least 58 children at the Presidio daycare showed signs of abuse, three agencies investigated, the building burned on the autumnal equinox, and nobody was ever convicted.

Oct 13, 2026

Twelve American military specialists allegedly boarded an extraterrestrial craft in 1965 and vanished for thirteen years, bound for a world orbiting Zeta Reticuli. Thousands of leaked pages describe training curricula, packing manifests, medical protocols and debrief transcripts. Either the most elaborate intelligence hoax ever crafted, or the greatest secret in U.S. history.

Oct 9, 2026

On November 8, 1965, the most powerful female journalist in America was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse, in the wrong bedroom, fully dressed, with an unprescribed drug in her blood and no drinking glass in the room. Dorothy Kilgallen had covered the Jack Ruby trial from the defense table, obtained his secret Warren Commission testimony, traced his ties to Carlos Marcello, and told people she was about to blow the Kennedy assassination open. Her file was never found.

Oct 6, 2026

February 1932. A man lies face down in the snow on the Eagle River with seven bullet holes in him, still holding his rifle. It took 48 days, 30 men, 133 dogs and the first airplane ever used in a Canadian manhunt to put him there. Nobody in the western Arctic recognized his face, and when scientists exhumed him 75 years later, DNA eliminated every named suspect. His identity is still unknown.

See all episodes →