Is there anyone out there?

Dear Editor,

UFO research has, almost overnight, become respectable and is now deemed to constitute a more or less legitimate mainstream pursuit, after decades of ridicule being heaped on anyone who as much as expressed a casual interest in the subject.

I wonder if another subject, for long also dismissed as a crackpot or misguided pursuit will be taken more seriously: The search for evidence of life after death.

I specify evidence because, although I respect freedom of worship as a fundamental human right regardless of which religion one

adheres to, it is unfortunately a fact that all religions ask followers to accept their teachings or doctrines on faith.

Though the various doctrines and scriptures of the great theological belief systems are rich in allegory and philosophical insight and have enhanced the lives of many people, they do not provide actual evidence that we survive the destruction of the physical body that occurs at death.

Of greater value in my view is the work of paranormal investigators who are devoted to searching for answers to the question: Is there an afterlife, and if so, what form does it take?

Such researchers have been active for the past century and a half, mainly in Britain and the USA but almost every country has groups committed to resolving this ultimate mystery. They cite apparitions, near death experiences, mediums who have been tested under stringent ‘laboratory’ conditions, out of body accounts, among other phenomena in their deliberations and literature.

An interesting project focusing on afterlife research was the so-called Scole Experiment. In 1993 a team of investigators arrived in the Norfolk town of Scole to conduct a series of experiments with healers and mediums.

Electrical engineers, psychologists and astrophysicists attended to observe and everything that transpired was

recorded and noted. At the end of the long process of experimentation attendees were convinced that contact had been established with the ‘dead’.

Hardened sceptics and materialists will of course scoff at the slightest hint of survival, not because they have studied the evidence and found it wanting, but because they have closed their minds to any possibility of an afterlife.

They are entitled to their belief or unbelief. Unfortunately, like the fundamentalist religious person who believes that only his/her version of an afterlife is the true one, the closed-minded materialist is impeding progress towards ascertaining exactly what happens when we ‘pop our clogs’.

Radio telescopes in several countries are awaiting a signal that might indicate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.

Should the nations of the world not also be diverting considerable resources to investigating life after death?

Just as we await an answer from space, we ought to be serious about hearing from those who may have crossed to what religious folk call the ‘other side’, if it exists.

I think most of us would like to hear from them and personally, I believe they are, like the aliens, somewhere out there!

Thanking you, John Fitzgerald Callan, Co. Kilkenny.