At two years old, a Louisiana boy named James Leininger started waking up screaming from the same nightmare almost every night. Airplane crash, he would say, on fire, little man can’t get out. His parents assumed it was just a toddler’s fear of something he had seen on television, until he started adding details a two year old should have no way of knowing, the name of the ship he flew from, the make of his plane, and the first name of a fellow pilot.
His father, skeptical at first, began quietly researching naval records. He eventually traced the details to a real pilot, James Huston Jr., who flew off the USS Natoma Bay and was shot down near Iwo Jima in March 1945 when his Wildcat fighter took a direct hit and went down in flames. A psychiatrist at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, Jim Tucker, documented the case formally, noting that many of the boy’s specific statements were made before the family had identified Huston at all.
The Leiningers eventually met Huston’s surviving relatives, and by their own account, the family found the resemblance and the details too specific to dismiss.
The truth may be far stranger than we have been told when a two year old can describe, in specific detail, a death that happened more than fifty years before he was born.
Coincidence built from old war records, or memory that should not exist?
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What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
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