False Prophecies In Near-Death Experiences

Gregory Shushan's recent book on the paranormal and the afterlife discusses a negative aspect of near-death experiences (NDEs) that doesn't get as much attention as it should:

Public revelations "received" during NDEs demonstrate that even if some NDEs might have veridical content, others demonstrably do not. In the early days of NDE research, Kenneth Ring, an American psychologist and an important figure in the field, published an article called "Precognitive and Prophetic Visions in Near-Death Experiences." With data gathered from NDErs in the United States ranging from the 1940s-1970s, he found that prophecies were often conveyed to the experiencer as divine revelation, that is, occurring "in association with an encounter with guides or a being of light." Reminiscent of many historical examples, some NDErs even believed that they had been chosen by their god to deliver his message to people on Earth.

Ring (1982: 54, 6) found that the prophecies in the thirteen cases he analyzed bore remarkable consistencies, including that Earth will suffer devastation on a global scale due to a nuclear event and/or widespread natural disasters, and that this will occur sometime in the late 1980s, with 1988 being the most frequently specified year. A few years later, British psychologist Margot Grey (1985) independently replicated these findings, collecting a number of prophetic NDE visions that were astonishingly consistent with Ring's. Obviously, the prophesied events did not come to pass, demonstrating that the alleged divine revelations were false.

(The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], approximate Kindle location 714)

For more examples of such characteristics in NDEs, characteristics that support a more subjective view of the experiences, see my collection of posts here.