"Once ensconced at UVA, Stevenson began breaking the academic mold by publishing serious articles on parapsychology. His work
With the endowment, Professor Ian Stevenson founded a new research division that conducted methodical experiments on campus, its work earning coverage in august publications such as the hundred-year-old The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Stevenson stood up defiantly to detractors, writing: “Those who forget that science is fundamentally a method and not a collection of facts will righteously challenge new concepts which seem to question old facts.” He boldly proclaimed that the “data of parapsychology portend… a conceptual revolution which will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison.”
In such uncharted territory, he gave chances to people from a diverse range of backgrounds who wanted to join the team, including those from outside science. One was Champe Ransom, a young lawyer who became fascinated with parapsychology and jumped at the chance to leave the Alaska state legislature, where he served as counsel, to join Stevenson’s radical department in Virginia in 1970.
In one systematic experiment, individuals were sequestered in rooms to look at emotion-inducing photographs clipped from magazines. In another room, individuals who claimed psychic abilities sat. The psychics, attempting to pick up signals from the other room, would record their observations, and Stevenson’s team would compare data. Results of such experiments were sometimes more promising than expected.
Octavia suffered from a severe case of diabetes, and a period of stability precipitated a downturn. Their only child had been stillborn, a trauma embedded in his memory. Stevenson would never have any children, a fact he always lamented. As he watched the person closest to him decline, he became even more obsessed with discovering whether a human soul could survive beyond the body. Even many hardline skeptics were impressed by the approach he took. “He’s an incredible methodologist, hard to fault,” Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania medical school commented to the New York Times.
On one of his swings through Southeast Asia in the fall of 1972, he got a message from U Win Maung, a trusted colleague. U Win tipped him off about a case of purported reincarnation he heard about from a town elder in Burma that Stevenson ought to check out for himself. From the time he laid eyes on Ma Tin, now 19, he was intrigued by how she presented herself, stoic and tough, and “overtly masculine.” In the only known published photo of her, she stands between a male and female sibling. She carries and presents herself in a way similar to her brother, which felt natural for her.
He cataloged Ma Tin’s “memories” from what she claimed was her
By the end of his visit, Ma Tin could breathe a sigh of relief. The expert may not have been able to prove her claims, but neither had he disproved them.
Throughout the country, reincarnation wielded an unpredictable power that stretched from common villages to elite palaces. Its power was even felt in the upper echelons of the criminal world. Khun Sa, the drug lord, had not always been Khun Sa. A few years earlier when he was thrown into a high security prison, he was Chan Shee Fu. In prison, Fu, one of the country’s most prolific opium dealers before his arrest, pored over a smuggled copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a massive 14th century Chinese novel interwoven with supernatural elements. Emboldened by that heroic story, he embraced an ambitious new narrative for his life: his opium trafficking was a means to revolution. And inspired by his discoveries about reincarnation while in prison, he announced a spiritual rebirth. He was now Khun Sa. His followers kidnapped two Russian doctors and successfully bartered for his release.
Stevenson, meanwhile, explored the anecdotes he had gathered that Ma Tin had spoken an unusual language as a child. He could refer to a case back in Virginia of a woman who spoke German — a language she didn’t know — when hypnotized, leading to intense speculation about whether she could have carried over the language from another life. But Ma Tin’s early language was another inconclusive lead in Stevenson’s search for undeniable proof. Ma Tin’s relatives did not know if the strange words she spoke in her youth had been Japanese, and the informant herself couldn’t recall them.
For Stevenson, the way to respect this young woman the most was to take her claims seriously. He urged her to give him a name. If Ma
What turned out to be surprisingly more specific was a series of dreams. These dreams belonged to Ma Tin’s mother, Daw Aye Tin. She experienced them 23 years earlier when she was pregnant with Ma Tin. Once a week, the expectant mother had a recurring dream about a Japanese soldier. The stocky Japanese man was shirtless, with short pants, and reminded her of an army cook that she’d met during Japan’s occupation of the region. In the dreams, the soldier said he would stay with them, but she ran from him. Stevenson previously had traced a belief existing in Eastern cultures that reincarnation was prefigured by “dreams in which a deceased person appears to the dreamer and announces his intention to be reborn as a child of the dreamer’s family.”
Into his old age, Stevenson continued following clues to paranormal experiences around the world in hundreds of cases, many of which centered around claims of rebirth, and applied the most rigorous scientific methods to supernatural questions in history, leading the San Francisco Chronicle to label him “a scholarly reincarnation detective.” When he passed away at age 88, Stevenson left behind a combination lock in one of his filing cabinets in Charlottesville, so that if he was reincarnated only he could open it. The still-locked cabinet, if ever opened, may well contain secrets of Ma Tin’s case and others never before revealed.