PMH Atwater, NDE Reseacher |586|

PMH Atwater… near-death experiencer… near-death experience researcher… NDE after effects… NDEs in children.

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: on, this episode of Skeptiko,

[00:00:04] Alex Tsakiris: you gotta deliver the goods.

[00:00:06] Alex Tsakiris: So the goods right now that I’m holding you accountable to is those IQ score. And you say you got ’em, and if you got ’em, you gotta show ’em. ,

[00:00:14] PMH Atwater: you keep your re research for 10 years and after 10 years you can throw away those.

[00:00:20] PMH Atwater: So I’ve thrown a, a number of ’em away, of course, cuz I, I’ve been doing this for, for 44 years. I’ve, I’ve only got O one box left now. , so that there’s just simply no way I can go back. .

[00:00:33] Alex Tsakiris: , it just doesn’t ring true. It, I’ll just straight up, it doesn’t ring true to me.

[00:00:37] Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality. Today we welcome near Death experience, researcher and author PMH Atwater. Her latest book is The Forever Angels Near Death, experiences in Childhood and Their Lifelong Impact.

[00:00:58] Alex Tsakiris: A book that done other. Then Bruce Grayson calls unprecedented Kenneth ring calls. Truly groundbreaking and pin Von Lamel says is a very important, valuable contribution now. If you know anything about near-death experience science, that is the real study of the phenomenon. You know that all of the folks I just mentioned are very prominent researchers with distinguished credentials, so their endorsement of this book I think is quite significant.

[00:01:30] Alex Tsakiris: P M H welcome, it’s great to have you here.

[00:01:33] PMH Atwater: It’s good to be here.

[00:01:35] Alex Tsakiris: Very good. So pmh, you’re known as a real trailblazer innovator, within the near death experience community, particularly because you have always maintained this focus on. NDE After Effects. And that’s been your thing. And you’ve brought forth some really important insights and changed the direction of this research.

[00:01:59] Alex Tsakiris: In this latest book, the Forever Angels you took it a, in a slightly different term, you looked at lifelong after effects among 120 people who had experienced an N D E very early in life. Why did you, uh, choose that particular.

[00:02:17] PMH Atwater: Well, bear in mind this is 397 people, so I’m looking at my previous research of those that were maybe, you know, kids up to maybe twenties and thirties, and then I’m now extending it to people in their seventies and eighties, and I’m saying to them, Did having a near-death experience as a child make any difference in your life?

[00:02:52] PMH Atwater: Uh, more or less an essay kind of thing, I suppose. Um, but I was asking them to tell me about it. And, and I’ll tell you , some of the replies were so tear stained. I could hardly read them. Well, one man sent me a book, I mean, literally a book, including pictures of his family. And although the things that it was now retired and looking back and you know, Bruce Grayson said, Nobody’s ever done this.

[00:03:29] PMH Atwater: Nobody’s ever thought of doing this. You know, looking at kids as kids from birth at the age of five especially, and then, you know, a little bit older. And then, you know, looking at the near death experience. Had a lot of experience with adult experiencers, teenagers, and. and, you know, you know, my research base is nearly 5,000 adults and children.

[00:03:56] PMH Atwater: And, um, so, you know, I, I’ve been pursuing this kind of subject for a long time, a and looking at it deeper and deeper and deeper. So this time I wanted to compare what the younger ones are saying with what the grandmas and grandpas are saying, looking. and, and it, it’s really interesting with, with these older people, really anywhere from about 50 to 80, they had to be able to, uh, establish that they had had a near death experience at, at, you know, when they were dead.

[00:04:37] PMH Atwater: And, and this one woman who’s 82 , she had a sister about 10 years younger. and I talked with his sister and she said, everything she’s telling you is absolutely true. I could validate it. So I got validations with all these stories. And, um, one of the things I’ve learned as a near death, near death researcher, I do not wanna stay in the same place.

[00:05:05] PMH Atwater: You know, most of your scientific researchers will pick a particular hospital or a particular group of people and they’ll stick. All their research is, is very, very good research, but it’s, you know, it’s, it’s within that particular arena. No, I wanna get, get out there and see as many people as I can in as many parts of our world as I can, and I do indeed in this book.

[00:05:37] PMH Atwater: um, and, and, and different classifications of, you know, of echo and eco economics. And, and this, this one, wo woman wrote me back and she said, you know, near death, exper near death. Researchers never contact people like me. Never. I’m poor. I don’t have hardly any. But I wanna participate. And do you know, she saved her pennies until she could pay enough for a folder to send me, uh, you know what?

[00:06:16] PMH Atwater: She had to say, what she had to offer, and I almost cried. I mean, it was just, Fantastic. And, and she felt so thrilled to be able to participate. And, you know, people in, in Ecuador had a lot of people in Ecuador. Ecuador. I don’t know how they found out about me, but they did. I had, uh, three, um, three people who were raised.

[00:06:44] PMH Atwater: Um, um, In, um, it in, in religions and that, um, these, the voodoo people, yeah, voodoo three of them. And they did not know each other. They never spoke to each other different parts of the, of, of the southern world. And in each of the three near death, experie, , they were met by Jesus and they knew his name. They didn’t know the Bible.

[00:07:21] PMH Atwater: They didn’t know the name of the Bible. They didn’t know words for Bible. They didn’t know words for Christianity, but they knew Jesus. Now, I can’t explain that that’s an anomaly, obviously. Uh, but what do you do with that? Well, I reported it.

[00:07:38] Alex Tsakiris: lemme play off of that for a second, because, Let me pull up a page from the book.

[00:07:44] Alex Tsakiris: , can you see that?

[00:07:45] PMH Atwater: Oh, okay.

[00:07:47] Alex Tsakiris: So, you know, you’re out there collecting these stories. , you mentioned that other near death experience research has done different ways.

[00:07:55] Alex Tsakiris: Some stick very close to in-hospital. Others have seen the need, like you have to go for accounts. But invariably what we’re coming back to is what we can get, what we can verify, and you claim to have some verifiable. Information on these people, and one of the things that immediately caught my attention was IQ score, which is very interesting cuz, I mean, IQ score is really kind of, I mean, where did you get IQ scores on all these people?

[00:08:28] Alex Tsakiris: The parents. How parents? I have four kids. I don’t, I have four kids. I don’t, they’re all grown. I don’t have IQ scores. They don’t do IQ scores in schools anymore. There’s no such thing, you know when they do, what’s that? All of did tell me Ecuador, they did. And the, and the voodoo people did.

[00:08:48] PMH Atwater: Uh, and sometimes the, uh, uh, uh, these children, as they grew older, they knew their scores.

[00:08:57] PMH Atwater: Um, so I, I, I just ask them, I didn’t have any

[00:09:01] Alex Tsakiris: problems getting those figures, you know, these figures in and of themselves. They’re stunning. Well, there’re a statistical anomaly that you know, you would just wanna really investigate. You. You say that 50% of them had one 50 to one 60 IQ score. You know, the odds of a one 50 IQ score is like one in five,

[00:09:24] PMH Atwater: 48%, not 50.

[00:09:26] PMH Atwater: 48,

[00:09:27] Alex Tsakiris: 8%. Well, if we’re gonna be precise, it’s about one 50 to one 60. Okay. 48%, but it’s one in 500 people have that. And then you say IQ score begins at 180 for this other group

[00:09:43] PMH Atwater: of. And look at the kids that had

[00:09:47] Alex Tsakiris: it. You, you gotta verify this, you gotta, 180 is one out of 10,000. So how many people do you have?

[00:09:55] Alex Tsakiris: How many people do you have that scored? How many people do you have that scored 180 on their IQ test? And. Where, where is, where can we find that data? Where can we ver That’s a very precise number. Do you, did you publish the IQ score numbers and where you got ’em and how they match to, you know, even if you kind of hide the identity

[00:10:17] PMH Atwater: of the people.

[00:10:17] PMH Atwater: I, I, I scored the percentages I found

[00:10:21] Alex Tsakiris: you scored. What percentages?

[00:10:24] PMH Atwater: Well, the subgroup. Only

[00:10:26] Alex Tsakiris: those, how many are in that subgroup? How many, how many people were, were one out of 10,000 in their iq.

[00:10:35] PMH Atwater: I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.

[00:10:37] Alex Tsakiris: Well, you, here’s what you say, right outta the book, there’s a subgroup. You say there’s a subgroup. Yeah. Those under six, right? How many people

[00:10:46] PMH Atwater: are in that subgroup? I can’t tell you off the top of my head. I’d have to go in my research to

[00:10:53] Alex Tsakiris: tell you that. Okay.

[00:10:55] Alex Tsakiris: Well I can, I can wait cuz it’s 80% of them. I’m sorry. Eight. Let’s be precise. 81% of. Were in this. Yeah. So approximately how many people, this is an astronomically high number that, that’s, that’s what I published. If you can verify it. Which I, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to.

[00:11:18] PMH Atwater: Well, I did. And, and their parents,

[00:11:22] Alex Tsakiris: you again, it

[00:11:24] PMH Atwater: doesn’t, that’s the only way I have of verifying this is to talk to the parents.

[00:11:31] Alex Tsakiris: And so I’m just saying, you know, like when Trump, uh, A few years ago, he kind of criticized somebody for saying their IQ score and everyone in the media got on ’em and they said, this is outdated. There’s no such thing as an iq. You can get an IQ score, but you don’t get it Normally, like in going to school, like I say, my kids don’t have an IQ score.

[00:11:52] Alex Tsakiris: None of the people I know have an IQ score. They get tested like crazy kids do in school, but not this IQ score. So it just struck me as. Unusual. And if you do have

[00:12:03] PMH Atwater: iq, not unusual for people of those ages.

[00:12:07] Alex Tsakiris: I, I I don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s true either. I don’t have an iq, I don’t know my IQ score.

[00:12:14] Alex Tsakiris: I don’t know anyone. My, I, who knows their

[00:12:16] PMH Atwater: IQ score I didn’t mine, but have long since forgotten it. Um, I mean, it was just part of school you knew.

[00:12:31] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I mean, how, how do you, how does, how does a researcher who claims this, what, what do you think you, what do you think is appropriate for me? Because I’m pushing on you pretty hard here. What is, what is the appropriate level of. Pushback I should do in terms of you saying you have an extraordinary, uh, data claim here, that you have a significant number of people.

[00:12:58] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, you have, I don’t, I I 20 people that had an IQ score of 180, which is one out of 10,000. You have 20 people in your group that

[00:13:08] PMH Atwater: I

[00:13:09] Alex Tsakiris: had very few in that group.

[00:13:13] Alex Tsakiris: Still, if even if you. You have 48% of, uh, genius level one out of 500. Given the stories of these people, what, what do you think is. What do you think is your reasonable obligation to back that up, to verify that, to show that you really do have scores? Did you, did you publish any of the scores? Did you publish the actual data?

[00:13:35] Alex Tsakiris: Even with, even if you don’t, of course not, not in the, but you don’t have to, you don’t have to tie it

to

[00:13:40] PMH Atwater: the individuals. The kinda book I wrote, I wrote the book for the general public, you’re, you are not going to have those kind of scores in a book for the general public. Why not? They’re not gonna

[00:13:52] Alex Tsakiris: read.

[00:13:54] Alex Tsakiris: Then, then publish it elsewhere so that people who follow this research can feel confident that these extraordinary claims are, are backed up with data. You have all the case studies in there. You, you give the names and case number. Maybe you, uh, gave a, a fictitious name, but you have ’em all in there.

[00:14:13] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. Do you have their, do you have IQ scores on every one of them?

[00:14:19] PMH Atwater: No, not on every one of them. Most.

[00:14:22] Alex Tsakiris: Like what percent do you have IQ scores on?

[00:14:26] PMH Atwater: I couldn’t give you that because

[00:14:27] Alex Tsakiris: I don’t know. Because you’re making claims. You’re saying 48% were 150 to 160. So

[00:14:35] PMH Atwater: even then, sir, I did all of this a number of years ago.

[00:14:41] PMH Atwater: I don’t write now. Remember all those detail? I’d have to go back to the boxes that are stored in my storage room and pull it all out and go through at each one and read them. I don’t, I don’t have a photographic, photographic memory, so I’m not able to pull out of my mind right now. All of the answers, what I’m showing you is what I found.

[00:15:12] PMH Atwater: With, with, with those that I worked with, it gives you then an idea if you want, it gives you then a trend or it gives you then, um, um, it, it, it, it gives you what I found. in dealing with these kids because it’s you. You have a child between birth and the age of five, who has a near death experience? Most of them.

[00:15:45] PMH Atwater: Not all of them. Most of them come back. Unusually intelligent. Okay. Where’s that coming from? We don’t know. Nobody knows. Look, one third of them could remember. Life in the womb. Most of them could remember birth and could tell you all about, you know, the delivery room. This is pushing on things like abortion and all the, all this other stuff.

[00:16:24] PMH Atwater: A and, and I’m, I’m inviting people to look again at all these subject. That we think we know all about and that we think we can prove one way or another scientifically or not, and we’re not looking at, well, what at the lives of these people and how they live and what they deal with. We’re not looking at from birth to the age of five, and then there’s, and then they’re now much older.

[00:17:00] PMH Atwater: What was that like for them? And it was not pleasant for most of them or for many of them. If you read through that book, you can see

[00:17:11] Alex Tsakiris: I read the whole book and you know, yesterday we were scheduled to do this. It’s funny how things turn out. Yesterday we were scheduled to do this interview

[00:17:20] PMH Atwater: and, uh, yeah, we couldn’t get through

[00:17:22] Alex Tsakiris: I, I don’t, I, I have a hard time. I do a lot of these interviews, P M h I do a lot of these interviews. I’ve been interviewed a lot. The circumstances surrounding the delay in this just, it, it, it just ringed a bell in my head. It just didn’t ring authentic and the whole thing changed and it started going through my mind.

[00:17:41] Alex Tsakiris: And the first thing that popped up is iq. That just jumps out at me as, why is somebody talking about IQ score across the board that they interviewed these people around the world? and they all have their IQ scores, and I have, I just said 50% and you corrected me 48% show the data. If you have that data, you have an extraordinarily powerful result, and you should be kind of catapulted to the front for some kind of prize or something like that.

[00:18:13] Alex Tsakiris: But if you don’t have the data, if you can’t dig through the boxes, If you can’t show, not me, but I can show it, you can publish other people IQ scores and say, here are the cases that I’ve laid out in this book, and here are the IQ scores associated with those people. And if you don’t have some people come through and backing that up, well then that’s the kind of scrutiny I think you have to stand.

[00:18:34] Alex Tsakiris: You have to stand up against if you’re gonna claim to be a near death experience researcher. So do, do you have that, are you willing to go that extra mile to prove what you’re claiming here? Cause I have it in black and white. What you’re claiming, you’re saying that nearly all of these people in this, nearly all in this group, scored 180, which is one out of 10,000.

[00:18:55] PMH Atwater: Yeah. There there

[00:18:56] Alex Tsakiris: weren’t that many show. Show us who scored 180 2. You have all the people listed in your book. You, you have extensive clips from what they provided you. We have all the names and the case numbers. Show us, right? You would want to show us, you’re a, you’re a researcher, you’re not a author, you’re a researcher.

[00:19:16] Alex Tsakiris: Show us.

[00:19:19] Alex Tsakiris: Will you do that? Will you, you know, you can come back on, you can show me the data and you, you can come back on and we can, it

[00:19:26] PMH Atwater: would take a lot hours and hours and hours.

[00:19:30] Alex Tsakiris: It’s worth it. It’s worth it because your claims are, are quite extraordinary and they deserve to be backed up by that kind of data.

[00:19:41] Alex Tsakiris: and you don’t have to have all of ’em. I mean, you, you know, we are talking about 120 cases here. It’s not like it’s I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you to, to, for your time

[00:19:50] PMH Atwater: to go through it. Nobody can pay me to do that. Okay.

[00:19:57] PMH Atwater: It would take too, uh, it would take up too, too much time in my life right now. I understand. Right now I’m dealing with p. I’m, I’m dealing with some significant health issues and there is no way I’m going to do that. I understand. I’m sorry, but I’m not, there were, there was no r reason for me at the time to do that.

[00:20:29] PMH Atwater: I’ve never done that. I’ve given you my percentages as I’ve found. But I’ve never gone back at any time and said where that came from. I’ve given you the generals, the generalities. Was it black people, was it white people? Was it, was it Asians? I’ve given you that. I’ve given you what part part of, of the world that came from.

[00:20:56] PMH Atwater: I’ve given you that, but I’m not a Bruce Gray.

[00:21:04] PMH Atwater: I don’t go back and give you that kind of scientific data because I’m not a scientist.

[00:21:15] PMH Atwater: I’m not. I don’t do Bruce. Bruce Grayson’s work rather, I’m an observer

[00:21:26] PMH Atwater: and to the best of my ability.

[00:21:32] PMH Atwater: I give you material, I give you data that is based on what I find. It’s, it, it’s based on those numbers. Um,

[00:21:51] PMH Atwater: it’s not my intention to be a Bruce Grayson. It sounds to me like that’s what you want. You want a Bruce Grayson? I’m not, I’m a cop on the beat. I was raised in a police station. I use police investigative techniques as, as my protocol. I do not use scientific, um, methods and pro protocols. I consider me a cop on the beat.

[00:22:24] PMH Atwater: The difference is when I go up to.

[00:22:32] PMH Atwater: I never say this, that, or the other. Rather, I say something like, you have something to tell me. I’m here to listen and as much as I can, I get into the people’s homes, I talk to them. I talk to their HE caregivers whenever I can. I talk to their families whenever I can to give, give both sides. I don’t wanna just give one side.

[00:23:05] PMH Atwater: I wanna get a well rounded view of, of what’s going on with that individual. Especially with that, that one girl who had 17 near death experiences by the age of.

[00:23:24] PMH Atwater: you know, I mean, I mean, you, you’re not going to, um, you’re not gonna be able to get Ruth Grayson kind of material from her and her and her witchcraft parents. The only reason they birthed her, and so that they would have a baby to use. Un Satan’s al.

[00:23:49] Alex Tsakiris: I think that’s a very significant account. Like I told you yesterday, and I’ve interviewed several people who’ve been involved in Satanic ritual abuse cases and can back it up.

[00:24:00] Alex Tsakiris: But the important thing, P M H I I, there just has, we gotta be super strict about credibility. In this field and we have to be squeaky clean. And you gotta take the pushback, you gotta take the arrows both on the front and the back. I’m telling you, this is a different interview we’re doing today than we would’ve done yesterday.

[00:24:24] Alex Tsakiris: Cuz yesterday I had a whole different perspective and I was. Last night tossing and turning and first thing this morning I was looking at IQ scores. I was looking at the history of IQ scores and I was looking how they don’t have, they’re, they’re just not, it’s an old fashioned thing. They don’t do ’em anymore.

[00:24:42] Alex Tsakiris: There’s no way that, I’m not saying there’s no way, baby, you have way, but if you have that, you gotta back that up. And if you can’t back it up, then I don’t have any more questions. I’d love to you to talk about, um, the alien contact, extraterrestrial contact. I think it’s a significant question in this whole near death experience field.

[00:25:01] Alex Tsakiris: I’d love to talk about the Satanic ritual abuse connection and the consciousness and evil and how, how, how that all plays out. We are in a, a, you know, a battlefield. Here of materialistic science that denies this whole thing. But that’s all the more reason to double down on the research. And you gotta show, you gotta deliver the goods.

[00:25:25] Alex Tsakiris: So the goods right now that I’m holding you accountable to is those IQ score. And you say you got ’em, and if you got ’em, you gotta show ’em. And if you can’t show ’em, then we’re talking

[00:25:35] PMH Atwater: about something else. So some of them, you know, you keep your re research for 10 years and after 10 years you can throw away those.

[00:25:45] PMH Atwater: So I’ve thrown a, a number of ’em away, of course, cuz I, I’ve been doing this for, for 44 years. I’ve, I’ve only got O one box left now. Um, so that there’s just simply no way I can go back. I, I wish I could, but I

[00:26:03] Alex Tsakiris: can’t. Yeah, well there’s, it’s no way I can, there’s no way I can go forward. There’s no way I can go forward with the interview.

[00:26:10] Alex Tsakiris: I just don’t feel comfortable. Going forward. I, I, it just doesn’t ring true. It, I’ll just straight up, it doesn’t ring true to me.

[00:26:20] PMH Atwater: It’s what I found. I, it’s what I recorded. Yeah. And it’s the best I can offer you because it’s what I wrote down. It’s what I backed up. and I cannot go back to those boxes of material cuz they don’t exist.

[00:26:44] PMH Atwater: I’ve been doing this for 44 years. They don’t exist now.

[00:26:49] Alex Tsakiris: Well, I, I’ll just say this for people as we kind of wrap it up. The book is, Extraordinary. I gotta believe you do have these accounts, uh, you quote from them extensively in the book, and there’s a lot of interesting, uh, interesting information there.

[00:27:06] Alex Tsakiris: I was spellbound reading it so people can pick it up and then, you know.

[00:27:12] PMH Atwater: Sorry, I’m not Bruce

[00:27:13] Alex Tsakiris: Grayson. You’re not Bruce Grayson and I’m not, you know, all the nice people that have interviewed, I’m not Bruce Grayson either, who was very complimentary of your book, as was everyone else. So, hey, you know, everyone has a different opinion and you’re, you’re stand up strong and, and account for yourself, which is awesome.

[00:27:32] Alex Tsakiris: I appreciate you doing it Well,

[00:27:35] PMH Atwater: I, I,

[00:27:36] Alex Tsakiris: I did my best. Right on. Thank you,

[00:27:40] PMH Atwater: pmm. You betcha. Thank you. Bye-bye.

[00:27:43] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to PMH Atwater for joining me today on Skeptiko I’ve had a number of emails back and forth. With PMH and I’ve decided to release this show. Without comment. So. That’s what I’m going to do, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to hear from you. Johnny over in the Skeptiko forum.

[00:28:02] Alex Tsakiris: I’ve tried a bunch of other platforms. It’s the only place I like to be. If you want to talk to me. Go to the Skeptiko forum. Till next time. Take care. Bye for now.

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