The Boy Who Remembered His “Past Life”

In the early 2000s, a young boy named James Leininger, from Louisiana (USA), began having terrifying nightmares. He was only two years old, but night after night he screamed about a plane crash, shouting: “The little man can’t get out!”

His parents were bewildered. James soon began giving startling details:

• He said his plane had taken off from a ship called “Natoma.”

• He mentioned he flew a plane called a Corsair.

• He even recalled the name of a fellow pilot—“Jack Larsen.”

The boy insisted he had been shot down by the Japanese during World War II. His father, a former skeptic, began investigating. To his shock, every detail checked out. There had been a USS Natoma Bay, an aircraft carrier active in the Pacific. There was indeed a pilot named Jack Larsen. And there was one pilot who had been killed in action from that carrier—James Huston Jr.—shot down near Iwo Jima in 1945.

When shown old photographs of WWII planes, little James could point out the Corsair and explain why its tires often blew out during landings. His parents had never taught him any of this.

As James grew older, the memories faded, but his case became one of the most widely studied examples of possible reincarnation or past-life recall.

Strange but True

How could a toddler know intimate details of a war, a ship, and a fallen pilot he had never met? Science still struggles to explain it, but his story stands as one of the most compelling “life after life” cases ever recorded.

Moral for the Young: Life may hold mysteries beyond what our eyes can see. Keep an open mind—because sometimes, truth is stranger than imagination.