Death: the final frontier
DR LEO RUICKBIE talks to Robert Bigelow, one of the world’s most unusual billionaires. The onetime owner of Skinwalker Ranch, he has poured a fortune into space exploration, parapsychology and consciousness research and is now offering $1.5 million in prize money for proof of the afterlife
It had been snowing in Las Vegas – something so rare that people were taking photographs of it – and Robert Bigelow had been delayed by the weather. John Waite’s 1984 No. 1 hit ‘Missing You’ played over the phone while I waited to talk to the American billionaire about his latest project. I had done my background research; I knew there were people he had lost, and his project, an essay competition on life after death, was surely connected to that. And the total amount of prize money he was offering – close to a million dollars – for a subject blighted by underfunding was even rarer than snow in Vegas.
After making a fortune in commercial real estate, Robert Bigelow invested in his true passion – space exploration – setting up Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 (FT131:46?? )and launching his first payload in 2006, the unmanned inflatable module Genesis I. But this has not been his only passion. Over the years, he has funded research into consciousness, UFOs and the paranormal. Working with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he helped develop the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (see FT362:2, 363:28-29, 398:21) – an early warning system for alien attack – and had once owned the infamous Skinwalker Ranch, an anomaly hotspot in Utah known for reports of UFO activity, Bigfoot-like creatures and poltergeist phenomena (see FT169:44-47, 363:38-41). And in June 2020, he established the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Robert Bigelow is certainly not your average billionaire.
His assistant came back on the line and I was transferred through. The phone rang again briefly somewhere in his huge facility biting into the desert sands on the edge of Las Vegas. The global pandemic had ruled out a face-to-face interview. Instead, the disembodied voice of a man 9,000km (5,600 miles) away magically emerged in the air in front of me. Time zone differences meant that I was nine hours in his future. While he was enjoying the new morning, I was shrouded in deepening darkness, with only the small pool of light from a desk lamp to stop me thinking that this was like being at a séance.
The New York Times had broken the story of the contest and newspapers around the world quickly picked it up. It came out of the blue for the parapsychological community. I had been working on an edited collection of essays on exactly this subject called Is There Life After Death? I had drawn together some of the world’s leading experts to discuss the problem. It had caused quite a stir and I was looking for a publisher – and now I had been trumped.
Just who was Robert Bigelow and why was he offering so much money now to answer a question that has baffled humanity for millennia?
INVESTIGATING THE UNKNOWN
He spoke with a deceptively lazy American drawl, choosing his words carefully, but getting straight to the point.
“I have had four losses in my life, starting with my father when I was 18 – he died in a private plane crash as a passenger in a plane belonging to a friend of his – and then my wife and I lost one of our sons, and then we lost a grandson in 2011.”
In 1992, his son Rod Lee committed suicide
at the age of 24. His grandson, also called Rod, also committed suicide, aged just 20.
“And then I lost my wife on 19 February last year. We were married for over 55 years.”
Bone marrow disease and leukemia had taken his wife Diane at the age of 72. Being a billionaire does not make any of these things easier, but Bigelow seemed reconciled with his personal tragedies, seeing in them the origins of his interest in the subject.
“Most people 50 on up, or even 40 on up, have lost somebody, and that’s how these things begin. I’ve had an interest over the years and I’ve formed different organisations.”
He had begun with the Bigelow Foundation in 1992, working with then high-profile ufologists such as Bob Lazar; then there had been the National Institute of Discovery Science in 1995 (FT363:38-41), and his endowing the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in 1997. He also served for a time as a director of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, established by pioneer parapsychologists Joseph and Louisa Rhine (now called the Rhine Research Center).
Bigelow had put $3.7 million into establishing his Chair of Consciousness Studies in addition to long-standing patronage of the university reflected in the naming of two facilities, the Robert L Bigelow Physics Building and the Rod Lee Bigelow Health Sciences Building. The Chair was intended to be an annual appointment to allow a visiting scholar to develop and promote a consciousness studies programme. Coming from the Insitute for Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, Charles T Tart, recognised as one of the early pioneers of transpersonal psychology and an authority on consciousness, was the first holder of the Chair. He was succeeded by the renowned near-death experience researcher Raymond Moody (who coined the term ‘near-death experience’ in his 1975 book Life After Life). It was an all-star line-up and should have boded well for the
“I’M AWARE THAT I HAVE BAGGAGE, BECAUSE I’M KNOWN FOR BEING INVOLVED IN ESOTERIC SUBJECTS LIKE UFOS”
future, but Moody was the last appointment. I wondered what had happened.
“Well, the endowment process sometimes doesn’t work as well as you hope,’ said Bigelow. “I won’t get into any details about that, but after a few years I realised that the research was not moving and was suffering.”
There was clearly another story there, but Bigelow kept talking, getting back to the present.
“When I formed the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies last June, we looked into the number of organisations and the number of researchers in this field and it seemed as though the field needed some energising.”
Did the rest of the field feel that it needed energising? There are several organisations already working in this area: notably, the Society for Psychical Research and the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena in the UK, and the Parapsychological Association and the Institute of Noetic Sciences in the USA, among others. I wondered how he saw his new Institute fitting into the existing culture.
“There’s always territoriality among organisations, especially if there’s a new kid on the block – everyone is suspicious of the new kid on the block. Our philosophy is to try to be harmonious and not disrupt the work of other people, but to encourage more interest. Each one of these other organisations, I would assume, is not so insecure that they don’t want to see growth and interest from everyone.”
But there was more than just territoriality – there was Bigelow’s own past to contend with.
“I’m aware that I have baggage,” Bigelow volunteered, “because I’m known for being involved in other esoteric subjects, like ETs and UFOs.”
Back in 2017, in another scoop, the New York Times revealed that the US Government had continued to secretly fund research into UFOs, or what the Pentagon now preferred to call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies was connected with two inter-related Pentagon initiatives: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (2007-2012) and the more sinister sounding Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (2008-?). The US Department of Defense has since issued a number of contradictory statements about the nature of these programmes. Whatever their true purpose, they are part of a jigsaw putting Robert Bigelow at the centre of serious, high-calibre UFO research, with his involvement going back at least to the 1990s. Bigelow had gone on record during a 60 Minutes interview on US network CBS in 2017 as saying that he believed extraterrestrials existed. So why the apparent change in direction?
“The research in the UFO/ET field is fairly hostage to occurrences, to sightings, to interactions and there has not been, in the last decade or more, the kind of interaction of prior decades – from the 1940s to the 1990s – so there’s been a significant reduction of interactions and sightings, with the exception of a couple of things, such as the craft exhibiting themselves off the coast of the United States; but, aside from that, there is not the amount of opportunity that there used to be. We had finished up a lot of work over quite a few years and we just felt that it was time to shift some attention to this very, very, very, important subject of survival of consciousness and let’s focus on that for some long period of time, hopefully, and maybe we can help the community and the researchers.”
That seemed reasonable, but given that he
had funded ‘serious’ research in the past, why make this a prize competition?
“It’s a faster path, creating a contest,” he said. “You can achieve greater acceleration and awareness – and that was my objective, to accelerate awareness of the topic. So I thought, let’s have this contest – it’s a way to begin. It hasn’t been done before, certainly at least not with this scope. And what could it hurt, if it were properly put together?”
The international news coverage ensured that he had already accelerated awareness and everyone was talking about it in my own circle of parapsychologists and others who seriously study this subject. Nobody could ignore the huge amount of money he was putting up: $500,000 for first place, $300,000 for second and $150,000 for third, with a further $50,000 for each of eleven runners-up to give a grand total of $1.5 million.
“This field relative to other kinds of scientific endeavours is poverty stricken,” he explained. “It always has been poverty stricken. UFO research had a history of being poverty stricken until I got into it, with my own money and then with money that came through a programme that I was instrumental in helping to form and shape with many millions of dollars. So, I hope that, at the end of the day, I’m going to be viewed as having a positive effect on this.”
SPIRIT, TECHNOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Research into survival of death might be underfunded, but that’s not to say it’s a subject that has simply been ignored. Serious research in this area has been ongoing for some time – the organisation I work for, the Society for Psychical Research, was founded in 1882 – begging the question why the existing published evidence was not enough? What more do we need? What more could we have?
“The amount of literature that you can read is a mountain high and from so many diverse sources over the last 150 years – it’s huge – and the care and attention that was paid to scientifically controlling mediums was admirable, the effort put in to legitimatising the mediums and the results and so forth was very well done, and you have world-class scientists involved in the 1800s. In the mainstream science community today, it’s just the opposite: materialism has become another religion; science has become another religion. That has dominated the 20th century and probably will do so for the rest of this century.”
What does that mean for alternative explanations?
“The idea of spirit and Spiritualism has taken a seat in the very back of the bus. And that’s bad. That portends serious consequences, potentially, for the human race. It’s very simple. You can graph this, it takes two lines. You position the beginning of the lines anytime you want – you can do it in 1800, you can do it in the Dark Ages, you can do it any time you want. And one line represents the spiritual growth of the human race, the other line represents the technological growth of the human race and nowhere, up to the very current moment, do those two lines remotely coincide. Spiritual growth has practically flatlined. The 20th century was noteworthy for the greatest number of deaths and wars in human history. So, we have gone nowhere in over 5,000, maybe 8,000 years of recorded history. For technological growth, it is a whole different story. Technological growth is vertical. So the point is, how irresponsible is the human race willing to become if it has tremendous technological capabilities and maybe not the conscience of a spiritual type of humanity. How happy would you be to be an intelligent organism on another planet and all of a sudden you’re being visited by Earthlings?’
It reminded me of a cartoon where the planet Earth is feeling unwell and goes to see a doctor, and the doctor says, gravely: “I’m afraid you have humans.”
“You know,” adds Bigelow, “We could be the Klingons for all we know.”
The wording of the competition is precise: “What is the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death?” ‘Consciousness’ caught my eye: consciousness is a hotly debated if not controversial subject in modern science. The old psychical researchers (before the field became known as parapsychology) used to talk about the survival of the human personality – the idea that what survived was recognisably the same as that which had once lived, so that points of identifiablility could be found with whatever it was that was apparently communicating from the beyond. But what did Bigelow think consciousness was?
“Well, my personal definition of consciousness would have to use and incorporate and embrace the power of thought. So, personality, to me, is incomplete. And we know from laboratory experiments that human thought is capable of acting upon objects in a macro or micro situation; so micro-PK [psychokinesis] and macro-PK are absolutely possible, and they have been proven and in camerafilmed situations, under controlled laboratory conditions… and that’s only in one particular kind of category in the entire basket of psi. Whether it’s clairvoyance or telepathy or remote viewing and on and on, thought is huge as a force. And it’s completely outside all of mainstream physics.
“All of the world’s universities, practically all I would imagine, when they produce a curriculum for physics and graduate students with PhDs in physics, don’t get into the power of thought. That sub-atomic particles can’t be identified until they are observed, well, that’s as far as they’ll go. It’s very incomplete and our entire physics doesn’t understand any of this area we’re taking about at all.”
I asked him to elaborate on ‘thought’. “Thought is key in terms of consciousness; the personality is just the skin covering thought, it is superficial, it is important, but it is not foundational. If you read the literature, from many diverse sources, thought is absolutely key and instrumental in creating everything on the other side, including transportation, including anything of surroundings, whatever they might be. Thought is absolutely what you transition into as a spirit and you are emotional thought, depending on what level you’re at, you are a human, you consist of human emotional thought.”
According to Bigelow, the power of thought is not constrained to the human level.
“Thought is key,” he continued, “so even forming the Universe, if we want to go out on the super macro scale. I don’t buy off on a conventional creation of a Big Bang, for example. Cosmologists say, “Well, the Big Bang exists because of the Doppler effect, everything going away from us, and therefore the only thing we know going away from us is something that has had an explosion of some sort.” I don’t believe that. If you don’t know what 95 per cent of the Universe is, what it consists of, then you only see five per cent and that’s all you know. Well then, don’t tell me that you know enough to tell me how it originated. I think there is more organisation than meets the eye.
“I think that thought and consciousness are synonymous, and I don’t think that thought is contained in the brain alone. I think that the brain is just a tool that is used. I do believe in the separation of mind and brain, and that mind is now thought, because it’s lost its container.”
Another thing mentioned in the question was specifying permanent bodily death, which would seem to rule out looking at things like near-death experiences because of course the person is near death but comes back, is it intentionally worded like that?
“We did intentionally use that word “permanent” so that we avoided the confusion around the state of death being temporary. We wanted to make it certain, so that there was no doubt, we want to go past the temporary condition. So whatever kind of out-of-body experience or near-death experience would be characterised by a temporary state, we want to avoid that. We want to say, OK, we are facing permanent death of your container, and in that circumstance, we’re interested in the survival of your consciousness – you shouldn’t have any, you shouldn’t have any consciousness if you’re brain dead, if you’ve been brain dead for half an hour, how on Earth are you coming back with information that you should have no business obtaining.”
Traditionally, religion has always had a lot to say about life after death and the guidelines for the competition were open to religious interpretations, but had to go beyond statements of belief.
“Religion is terribly, terribly powerful in shaping and guiding people’s minds, but anybody can quote scripture, so that’s too sophistic to accept.”
It brought us to the question of proof. Religion already believes that it has the proof, but it is scientifically unacceptable. So what would it take to convince Robert Bigelow?
“There are many ways to get to a point beyond a reasonable doubt in establishing proof. We’re willing to accept witnesses. We acknowledge that it matters who the witnesses are or were and how many were
there. The witnesses matter in any kind of jury, in any kind of convincing the court of public opinion. Is this a good case that you’re presenting? Witnesses really matter and proof beyond a reasonable doubt doesn’t say you have to be 100 per cent sure, but you have to have ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.”
It was a good point. If this were a court case, I think we would have already established that there was life after death.
“Absolutely, yes. This is not circumstantial evidence.”
Bigelow has said on record before that he personally believes that there is life after death. What had convinced him of that?
“I’ve had personal experiences of different kinds, which always helps, and I have no other answers for the personal experiences that occurred, the way that they happened. There are no other causes that are imaginable – that are legitimately imaginable – and so it comes down to one cause and it comes down to the survival of consciousness and that these events were caused by some spirit or spirits on the other side. That’s pretty profound to me. And then lots of folks I know have had very dramatic experiences as well. These are people who are related to me, people who work for me, people who don’t work for me, people who are friends, and over many years, and their experiences are amazing and very in your face kinds of things for which there are no other prosaic kinds of explanations.”
In the course of my career as a researcher in this field, I have been to allegedly haunted houses with ghost hunters, attended séances with mediums and talked to countless people about the ghosts they claim to have seen, and I have found that these are very subjective experiences that are only ever subjectively convincing. Was there more than personal conviction behind his belief?
“I’ve done a lot of study and research, of course: the literature is huge and I have a substantial library. The research was very well done and the conditions of trying to replicate or trying to produce events and… you know, so much effort has been put into this over so many years by some really good people and that just can’t be ignored. It’s not as though those people didn’t exist and that they didn’t know what they were doing. Just because we’re in the 21st century, it doesn’t make people in the 1800s stupid.”
So much research had already been conducted, yet its power to convince appeared to have eroded over time, I suggested.
“I am an engineer by trade and so used to analysing and looking at things and trying to understand things, and for me it’s not that difficult to connect all the dots. If you have a lot of really good sources from many, many authors, and you just take the time and trouble to read them, you get to a point where other kinds of explanations are just goofy. If I look at the amount of evidence, should I sweep that under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist?”
One might ask, why go to all this trouble to investigate this question when we are all going to find out what happens eventually? But something Bigelow had touched on in previous interviews was the importance of the afterlife for what we do now.
“I think there’s a karmic effect. I think what you do here matters. It may matter very much and if that’s true, then that can shape and shift people’s behaviours, for the better hopefully, so there’s that kind of dynamic to it. If people are blithely going along in their lives and they’re not very kind people – but should they understand the other side exists and that it may matter as to whether you’re nice or not as a human being, then maybe you should think about it – just ‘who are you?’ – and if it has a karmic effect, some kind of an effect, on your existence on the other side, then it sure as heck matters.”
WHAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE?
The deadline for the competition is August this year, with the winners to be announced in November. What happens after that?
“We’ll be thinking about 2022, as to what we can do for that year. Is it going to be another contest? Is it going to be something that is going to involve some of the applicants, some of the people generating these essays? I don’t know what to expect in 2022 yet because it’s still too early. Maybe a broader contest where we have more prizewinners. We would want to come up with something that certainly wasn’t just a repeat. We’re interested in ideas as to what could constitute a new kind of contest for 2022.”
Bigelow was open-minded about any future direction, speculating about putting up more
money, possibly a round million this time, but his eyes were fixed on the present.
“At this moment, our main concern is birthing this programme properly and this contest and paying attention to details and following up, so that this is off to a good start; and then we have to manage it throughout this year to its conclusion. That’s our first job: to make sure that we take responsibility for this particular first programme to succeed.”
But he volunteered more.
“Proving whether the other side exists or not is actually just the first step. The research community going back to the 1800s has been dominated by the effort to prove its existence, in one way or another, or another, or another… so it has been dominated by the necessity of trying to prove the other side exists and that has gone on for almost two centuries. At some point, I want to move on and go to the next level up, which is probably much more profound than simply whether or not some aspect of your consciousness is going to survive your bodily death.”
The next level sounded intriguing. What did he mean by it?
“That level is essentially ‘what is the other side all about? If you’re going to survive, then you are going to spend 99.999 per cent of your existence, of your spiritual existence, on the other side. It ought to be very important that, at least from the point of view of curiosity, that people would say ‘Gee, shouldn’t I know a little something, if not a whole lot, if it were possible, about what constitutes the other side?’”
It is the next logical question: if we survive death, then what will it be like? But first the proof.
“We’re excited to just see how many contestants there are going to be and who are the winners and all that is going to be really exciting. We’d like to be able to put the winning essays and even some runner-up essays on our website, so that people can see for themselves the quality of each of these arguments that exist. I’m going to be intrigued as to what these essays say.”
Those interested in taking a shot at the prize have to apply first. Only applicants who have spent at least five years involved in research into the survival question will be eligible; and then they will have five months to produce not more than 25,000 words presenting the best evidence for a case that many people believe is unprovable.
✒ DR LEO RUICKBIE is a Visiting Fellow in Psychology at the University of Northampton, Editor of the Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research, and the author of six books, most recently Angels in the Trenches: Spiritualism, Superstition and the Supernatural During the First World War.
“JUST BECAUSE WE’RE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, IT DOESN’T MAKE PEOPLE IN THE 1800S STUPID”