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?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
Field reports, theories, and intel from the X-Files straight to your inbox. No filler, no algorithms, just the work.
Phone is optional. If you add it, we may text you tour drops, book launches, and breaking news from the X-Files up to 4 messages a month. Reply STOP anytime. Msg & data rates may apply.