Death Doesn’t Mean Gone?

The topic of life-after-death affects many people like a bad case of poison ivy. They avoid it with religious fervor. For others, it’s the twisted subject of horror movies or Halloween parties. Still others give even their own experiences the same whispered treatment one might assign to guilty pleasures. Finally, a growing number feel that the question of whether there’s life after death is no longer in dispute after centuries of anecdotal and sometimes physical evidence but defines a field ripe for investigation. However, among the thousands, maybe millions, of films, books, and interviews dedicated to the subject, not many attempt to prove validity by purely scientific means. The documentary film THE LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT 1 from Yellow Hat Productions attempts to accomplish precisely that. Within, science trumps art so its humble origin on the Sci Fi channel shows.

The four New York Times authors, three science professors, and three established mediums who constructed the film decided to focus on a single recently deceased person—one Forrest J. Ackerman who was a master of early horror films and esoteric puns. His larger-than-life personality and ego seemed to readily cross from life to after-life. An avowed atheist in life, he had promised his friends he would come back to provide proof and messages should he discover he had been wrong.

The investigation begins when a single sentence in an Ackerman document held by Paul Davids, filmmaker, is suddenly inexplicably blacked out—partially at the beginning of the line, then absolutely black with no bleed-over for the remainder of the sentence. Davids has the ink in the blot analyzed, and to the consternation of the doctoral level professional forensic analyst, the ink isn’t identifiable as any ink known on this planet. As Davids digs further, he discovers a message in the blot—one of many sly messages the deceased Ackerman supposedly inserts wherever he can—including in cutting edge technology devised by Dr. Gary Schwartz, from the Department of Psychology of the University of Arizona (his professional credentials include Harvard and Yale, as well).

As I attempt to summarize the film, I’m overwhelmed by the specificity and technology employed. I would need transcripts and a broader scientific education to discuss it fairly. The film’s creators finally agree that perhaps any one of the lines of investigation they use might be called into question by a dogged skeptic, but since their work is based on simultaneous corroborating lanes of inquiry, the likelihood that their conclusions are specious is extremely small to nonexistent.

The second film in the series (LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT 2: PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS) is as advertised—personal encounters. Those seeking only scientific scrutiny may not find this addendum of peculiar experiences, that occurred after the first film was completed, as satisfying as the first film, although some of the weird incidents are perplexing at best. Those who feel threatened by any suggestion that their negative conclusions about the authenticity of after-life experiences (and Near Death Experiences) will probably not be convinced by these films, but their reasons for discarding the experimental results would be interesting to study.