Reviewed by Fleur Greene, M.A.
In JRT Issue 6, Fall 1988

Elvis Presley was a phenomenon in his life. He may single-handedly have aroused the sleeping eroticism of the entire Western world. (He was known, you may recall, as Elvis the Pelvis). For good or ill, it is obvious that rock-and-roll has liberated us from our Victorian moorings forever!

A legend never dies. It only becomes more magnified with time. We humans love the very idea of one of us unbounded by conventions. And given to magnificence, the legend of Elvis will, without doubt, become more fantastic with time.

As that happens, accurate descriptions of events that took place at the time of his death will become more and more difficult to find. The legend, fulfilling a collective need, will become inflated with falsehood and imaginings. And here, then, is the value of Raymond Moody’s book.

Moody has written a documentary covering various kinds of physical events that did occur. These events vary from precognition to strange movements of physical objects. And there is one very poignant account of a father who, with Elvis’s help, found his runaway son.
Moody is, first of all, a scientist. He asks questions with the open mind of a genuine explorer, and he reports his findings with exactitude. Because Elvis was a phenomenon in his life, and because he will grow as a legend, it is valuable to have these unusual psychic experiences documented now, in the time in which they occurred.

In large measure, the book’s importance has nothing to do with Elvis per se. As we continue to explore the wide variety of human events beyond our current understanding, we learn again of our own mysteriousness. A hundred years from now, this little book may well serve to inform and illuminate the psychic field that surrounds such a personage in death.

Thus, the value of Raymond Moody’s book is likely to be greater in the future. Today, it is a well-written series of vignettes of psychic experiences. But tomorrow it may assist humans in knowing more deeply the forces that move in and around us.