Lightning shot through the telephone and into Dannion Brinkley's body, welding the nails in his shoes to the nails in the floor--and sending his soul on one of the most bizarre near-death sojourns ever recounted.
According to his best-selling book, "Saved by the Light," Brinkley traveled to a luminous crystal city where he met 13 silver-blue spirit beings, learned of calamities in store for the Earth and saw his entire life flash before him.
Or so the story goes.
For decades, Americans have been mesmerized by the tales of modern-day Lazaruses like Brinkley. They've bought millions of books about the afterlife, watched a litany of the ex-dead on talk shows, and devoured countless back-from-beyond tales in the media.
Some are so eager to hear about the hereafter that they seem to be blinded by the light. Despite the best shots from critics, they still give the benefit of the doubt. Even when things seem doubtful indeed.
Brinkley says his life review covered "at least 6,000 fistfights" that he had between fifth and 12th grades. That averages out to two brawls a day, nonstop for eight years, making Brinkley the Wilt Chamberlain of schoolyard pugilism.
He also says he was a Marine Corps sniper during the Vietnam War, dispatched to Cambodia and Laos to assassinate enemy officers and politicians. But military records show that Pfc. Brinkley was never a sniper, never saw combat, indeed never left the United States during his 18 months in the service.
He was a truck driver stationed in Atlanta.
Brinkley declines to offer any evidence of overseas duty, saying the government is covering up his record because it is classified. But several sources inside and outside the military (including ex-Marines involved in the same covert operations Brinkley claims a role in) say his tale is full of holes and that the so-called secret files are all public.
But his story isn't the first to be challenged.
Ever since Dr. Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist, coined the term "near-death experience" in 1975, the popular assumption has been that all such reports are remarkably similar and provide startling evidence for a hereafter.
Scratch beneath those flat EKG lines, however, and the stories are a veritable twilight zone of inconsistencies. Some near-death voyagers claim to have met God--but a few saw Elvis or Groucho Marx, researchers say. Others get to heaven not through the famous "tunnel" but aboard ghostly taxicabs, ferries that cross the River Styx, or spangled cows.
