by Brad Steiger
Since childhood I have been challenged by the idea that we have lived before on this or other worlds. One of my early articles, “How Many People Are You?” (Exploring the Unknown, February, 1963) led to my first book-length exploration of past lives, The Enigma of Reincarnation (Ace, 1967).
By 1968 I was ready to begin personally exploring cases suggestive of reincarnation through individual regressions, but at that time my sole motivation was to prove that such phenomena existed. I sought to obtain solid documentation that would satisfy the most rigorous skeptic that the human soul might indeed express itself in more than one incarnation during the process of spiritual evolution.
But while extensive in-field research did produce birth certificates, death certificates, land grants, deeds and real estate transfers for many of the personalities who spoke through our regressed subjects, the rigorous skeptics remained unconvinced. I discovered that just as there exists in certain people the will to believe, the will to disbelieve rigidly thrives in others. Although I had accumulated the kind of proof of identity that would have satisfied any court of law in the nation, for the most part the materialists, the religious dogmatists, the physical scientists, and the behaviorists, remained unimpressed. Depending on their particular perspective, they all had their prized interpretation of what phenomena such laboriously amassed documentation might be demonstrating other than reincarnation.