In Search Of... (2018) s01e08 Episode Script
Life After Death
[Zachary Quinto.]
Death one of the only certainties of our human experience.
Throughout history fears about the great unknown of the afterlife have terrified mankind.
From ancient cave drawings about being reunited with the gods, to Medieval manuscripts depicting the dark reaches of hell, the question of mortality and what happens after death is something that haunts us all.
But is there any way to truly understand what happens when we die? And what can we learn from the Texas man who actually touched death and lived to tell about it? I was on a kayaking trip with a good buddy of mine and got sucked into a pipe underneath the bridge.
I was under water for four or five minutes till I lost consciousness.
I went to this place I felt connected to many, many billions of souls.
I would say yeah, I was dead.
[Quinto.]
If accounts like are true, then what really happens when we die? Will we live on in some other place or dimension? And is it possible to find evidence of life after death? My search begins now.
My Name is Zachary Quinto.
As an actor, I've played many supernatural characters that blurred the line between science and fiction.
I'm drawn to the unknown, the otherworldly, and those experiences so beyond belief, they call everything into question.
I'm exploring some of the most enduring mysteries that continue to haunt mankind in search of the truth wherever it leads me.
Death is the inescapable end we all meet.
For centuries, mankind's quest to understand this phenomenon has led us to wonder and fear the potential for an afterlife that lies just beyond our world, from the ancient Egyptians Book of the Dead, thought to contain a guide to the afterlife, to the Greeks, who believed that the fate of the dead was a shadowy half life in Hades.
Our worldwide fascination with life after death has been depicted in movies likeThe Sixth Sense andWhat Dreams May Come, as well as TV shows likeThe Walking Dead.
In more recent times, technological breakthroughs have given way to the possibility of escaping death with advancements in anti-aging drugs and even cryogenics, leaving many to wonder if one day we may actually be able to bring ourselves back to life.
So where do we go when we die, what will we experience, and is it possible to come back from the dead? Today I'm meeting with Pat Johnson How are you? Nice to meet you.
a Texas business owner who cheated death during a horrifying kayaking incident in 2010.
So tell me a little bit about your story.
[Johnson.]
Well, it was September 10th, 2010.
I was on a kayaking trip.
Were you with somebody? Yeah, I was with my friend Bobby.
That particular day the river was up a couple of feet.
because we'd had a flood a few days earlier.
As we were coming up on the bridge, I hit one of the blocks and the current turned my kayak sideways and I slid out of the kayak.
I was just jerked under the water.
I knew I was getting sucked into a hole.
I would reach up and feel these bumps on the tops of my hands and I recognized immediately that I was in a corrugated pipe.
Since the water was so high, there was no air gap.
What kind of things were going through your head? Just thinking about how to survive.
That's it.
There's no tomorrow.
Physically you also must be incredibly strained.
Right? Yes.
I'd been under water for a long time.
I don't know how much longer I can hold my breath.
So I pushed myself forward.
I made it about two feet.
And at that point, it just felt like a bubble came over me.
I mean, I was just enveloped in this almost like an egg shell.
And just as soon as I felt that, just immediately it was like turning off a light switch, I lost consciousness.
I felt like I was in this hallway, like 75 yards long.
At the end of this hallway there was this blue stained glass, and there was this hole in the glass and there was this bright, bright white light coming through the hole.
I wanted to get to the light.
I was drawn to the light.
As I got closer to the light, there were people walking back and forth in front of the light I wanted to see who they were, but all I could see was the silhouettes.
I was almost close enough to tell who the people were.
The next thing I know I'd regained consciousness.
I was pushed down in the pipe.
And my friend Bobby was able to catch up to my body and resuscitate me.
Wow.
I told him, I said, "Man, Bobby, you're gonna think this is weird I know you're gonna think this is weird, but I'm really glad this happened to me.
" I knew in that moment that my life would never be the same.
Did you feel, when you were in that place, like this is what death is? It's hard to say You know, it's different.
It's different over there.
It's unexplainable.
Right.
But I'm definitely confirmed my belief in the afterlife.
Uh-huh.
[Quinto.]
He transcended something.
I mean, he's been through something that 99% of the rest of the planet will never understand until the movement when they come back anymore.
Whether or not there's something beyond that light at the end of the tunnel, I don't know, but I'm interested to see what we find out.
Pat is certainly not the first person to have such a vivid and terrifying brush with the afterlife.
The earliest known description of a near-death experience was recounted by Plato in his Myth of Er, which was written circa 400 B.
C.
And each year over 200,000 Americans report similar near-death visions of bright lights, tunnels, and a powerful feeling of being transported to another world.
But if these transcendent visions are true, then what really happens when we die? Will we live on in this place that Pat and so many have described, and could there be a way for us to get answers to these questions directly from the other side? To find out, I'm meeting with a man who claims to have tangible proof of direct communication with the deceased, including his own daughter renowned paranormal expert and inventor Gary Galka.
Going back 13, 14 years ago, I actually lost my daughter.
She was 17 years old.
What was her name? Melissa.
Melissa.
Before his teenage daughter's tragic death from a car accident in 2004, Gary was an engineer with no interest in the spirit world.
The day we came back from the hospital, we smelled her scent, her perfume.
We no sooner got into the house, and the doorbell started ringing.
From there it evolved to the TV changing channels.
There was one evening, my wife and I were going to bed.
We heard music just swirling within our room.
We're walking incrementally, just following the sound and went down the hallway, and then the stereo came on.
Nothing like this had happened before your daughter passed? Not at all, ever.
Ever.
If you don't have experiences, and then all of a sudden, suddenly, these weird things start happening, Now, you're given a choice.
Do you ignore it or do you become a believer? [Quinto.]
Melissa's death and the bizarre incidents that followed inspired Gary to invent a line of paranormal investigation equipment in her honor, including the Mel Meter, a dual sensor that tracks both temperature and electromagnetic fields to detect signs of paranormal activity.
He felt compelled to create these products because he couldn't ignore the signs that Melissa was reaching out from the great beyond.
I wanna believe in this stuff so much, and when I meet people like Gary, who do believe, I feel closer to it, but I am much more interested in proof.
How did you start to really identify these energies as her? I actually have evidence that shows her entering into my consciousness while I'm dreaming, and you can see the actual energy ball going into my forehead.
You're gonna see it with your eyes.
[Quinto.]
After her death in 2004, Gary set up a home video experiment to prove that his daughter was communicating with him from beyond the grave.
And did you feel something in that room? Oh, absolutely.
Am I about to see evidence that life after death is possible? Is this an infrared camera? [Galka.]
This is just a security camera.
I felt something in the room.
So what I did was I asked her to come and give me a kiss on the forehead.
And here's what happens.
[Quinto.]
Whoa.
Did you see that? Yes.
That was the most remarkable feeling ever.
Wow.
What you're about to see you've never seen before.
So basically I'm going to go in, and I'm gonna call angels.
I'm gonna talk to Melissa, I'm gonna go into my meditative state.
You see the room is normal, right? Mm-hmm.
There's nothing there.
So what I'm doing is, I'm connecting with her.
Watch.
See that? Yeah.
Now watch what happens.
That's all energy, Zach.
[Quinto.]
I mean, it looks like it's snowing.
It looks like it's snowing.
It's basically a portal.
That's so crazy.
Is that something? The videos were completely inexplicable.
Those are all souls.
Those are all individual souls.
And I've never seen anything like that before.
I was unsure how he was able to capture that energy on just a regular home security camera.
However, this isn't Gary's only proof of spectral encounters with his daughter.
He used his professional talent as an engineer to create a device that he claims allows him to actually speak with her.
This device right here this is a digital record that deals with electronic voice phenomena.
And EVPs are basically sounds that can't really be distinguished with our senses.
[Quinto.]
His EVP device purports to capture sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear and after processing, converts them to files that we can hear.
I've been able to capture some pretty remarkable things.
[Quinto.]
Though many people have challenged the validity of these ghost recorders, I'm anxious to see for myself what new proof Gary can offer.
Is there an example that you can let me hear of something that you've captured from your daughter? Yeah.
Sure.
I want you to listen very carefully.
[Quinto.]
Coming up, I attempt to make contact with the oth[woman's voice mutters.]
[Gary.]
Hello.
[woman's voice mutters.]
[distorted voice.]
That's great.
"That's great.
" [rewinding.]
That's great.
Okay, that's her voice.
That's great.
Okay, now, what what This part right here, Zach.
Uh-huh.
I want you to try real hard to hear that.
You tell me what she's saying.
[replays recording.]
"Tell them that's great.
" "Tell Mommy""Tell Mommy" "Tell Mommy that's great.
" Let me hear it again.
Tell Mommy that's great.
"Tell Mommy it's great.
" Yeah.
Wow.
So the news that I was sharing with her I had that running and, um, she was just giving me her opinion on it.
She thought it was great news, and she says, "Tell Mommy that's great.
" It was that simple.
I mean, yeah, that's kind of So I have communication with my daughter.
Isn't that amazing? That is amazing.
That certainly sounded like she was saying, "Tell Mommy that's great.
" And And And so I want to believe it, but I'm still left with a healthy skepticism, and I think that's just who I am.
Gary has agreed to put his EVP technology to the test with an experiment to communicate with spirits rumored to be in this very hotel.
The Omni Parker House is considered by paranormal experts to be one of the most haunted hotels in America.
Built in 1855 hundreds of workers and guests have reported ghostly sights, sounds, and smells that hearken back to the people who have walked these halls.
You're gonna hold it till it initializes.
Mm-hm.
And then you're not gonna move your fingers, your hands at all Just hold itbecause it has dual microphones.
Okay.
Okay.
Very sensitive.
[Quinto.]
I wanna know if Gary's technology could actually give us a direct line of communication to the deceased in this strange location.
And if so, what secrets could they reveal about the afterlife? You ask some questions, and we'll see what kind of results we get.
Okay.
You up for that? I absolutely am.
Let's do it.
I'm a little skeptical, but we're about to put Gary's device to the test so I can see for myself.
Light's blinking.
You're good.
Okay.
Good to go.
I'm going to be asking the spirits questions and hope the EVP device records a response.
What is my name? What day is it? When did you die? Do you live in the hotel? We won't know the results for a few weeks while Gary processes the recordings through his EVP software.
[Galka.]
I'll review these in more detail.
Yeah.
That would be great.
If you find anything, I would certainly love to hear that.
Beyond making contacted with the dead, I'm interested to learn what it's actually like to die and if there's anything in that experience that can teach us more about the possibility of life after death.
Could the visions experienced by Pat Johnson There were people walking back and forth in front of the light.
All I could see was a silhouette.
[Quinto.]
and so many others throughout history tell us more about what lies beyond the great void? I'm meeting with one of the world's leading experts on death and dying, Dr.
Jeffrey Long.
An oncologist by trade, Dr.
Long has interviewed over 4,000 people who have had near-death experiences, and he's compiled the most comprehensive report on the subject in the U.
S.
[Dr.
Long.]
They're unconscious.
They're at the brink of death, literally.
Suddenly there's an unearthly, often described as mystical, light, not like any light that we know on this earth.
It is amazing, the common threads that occur no matter where on the earth or whatever age you are or what your prior beliefs are.
The two most common words used for people that have near-death experiences are peace and love.
It seems to make no difference whether you're, say, a Muslim in Egypt or a Hindu in India or a Christian in the United States.
Wherever you are on the planet, By the scores, people have shared a profound sense of an all-encompassing love, connection, peace far beyond what they knew on earth.
Wow.
So then my question is, from your vantage point, what is happening after death? That is a great question, Zach.
My take, based on that huge amount of research and that investigation now coming up on close to 20 years, I believe that we are much more than our physical body.
We have that consciousness.
Some people have called it a soul that can exist separately from our physical body when we die.
That's based in real near-death experience observations.
That's medically inexplicable.
Uh-huh.
You know, this journey for me has been particularly interesting.
I've experienced death from a young age.
I lost a parent when I was really young, and so I feel like death has always had a place in my life that I wished it hadn't on some deep level, but I have an appreciation for it as well.
[Dr.
Long.]
What we don't know about death, dying and what lies beyond far exceeds what we do know.
All of us are on a journey of discovery No two are the same.
It's a wonderful experience that awaits us all.
[Quinto.]
Dr.
Long comes from a medical background.
He comes from a world that is designed to look for proof, to look for data, and yet he's saying that we could cross over into some realm beyond.
It just makes me wonder.
If death is as wonderful as Dr.
Long describes, why are so many of us afraid of it? There are people that say, "I'm not done yet.
" Yeah.
They want to somehow avoid death.
I can certainly understand the desire of some people to really hang on to that earthly life.
They value it, they love it, and maybe they can extend it beyond the boundaries of what we're aware of today as being scientifically possible.
[Quinto.]
But is there a viable option for people who aren't ready to cross over, those who want a second chance at life? This is a container that has actual h [Quinto.]
Death All of us will experience it one day, but no one can say for sure what, if anything, lies beyond.
Despite the harrowing near-death tails of people like Pat Johnson There was this bright, bright white light.
and so many others like him throughout history, we still have yet to find definitive proof about what happens when we die.
However, recent advances in the controversial field of cryonics may ultimately give us the power to control that destiny ourselves.
Cryonics is the freezing of human corpses at extremely low temperatures with the promise of being able to revive or reanimate them at a later date.
The idea of cryopreserving humans sprang from the pages of science fiction in the 1960s with rumors about Walt Dy and even Hitler's brain being cryogenically frozen.
In the 21st century, Michael Jackson made headlines when he declared his interest in being frozen.
And the late baseball legend Ted Williams actually went through with the procedure upon his death in 2002.
How does this work? Is it possible we could freeze ourselves after death and one day have new life? To get some answers, I'm going to Arizona to visit the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Alcor is one of the leaders in cryonics, with 156 clients who have been cryogenically preserved, and over a thousand members who have signed up for the procedure upon their deaths.
Welcome to Alcor's Patient Care Bay.
So nice to meet you.
Thank you for having me.
Max More is one of the world's leading experts in the field of cryonics.
You have been a pioneer of this technology for 30 years.
Yeah.
But, actually, I started thinking about life extension when I was about 16 or 17.
Even then, it occurred to me that aging and death is a problem, and is a problem we should try and fix.
What's the cost for something like this? For a whole-body patient, is a minimum of $200,000.
For brain only, $80,000.
So it's a state of hibernation? Not dead but not alive? Right.
How does it work? Yeah, it's hard for people to get their heads around it, because they're not dead if by "dead," you mean irretrievably gone forever.
There is the potential that we can revive them in the future.
So they're just kind of in between, a twilight state, if you like.
But capturing someone during that in-between state is a complex process.
To do this successfully, the body is prepared for the freeze as soon as the patient dies.
As soon as the doctor give us the go, the legal death, we begin the process by moving the patient into the ice bath.
We have to give medications to protect the patient's cells, and so we need circulation to distribute those drugs around the body, so we use this device.
It has the side effect that even though the person's been declared dead, they could still come to some level of awareness.
The next stop is the surgery room, where doctors perform a very delicate and potentially dangerous procedure that transforms the client's internal organs into a glass-like state.
We're gonna connect the patient's vascular system to a pump to remove as much blood as we can, and we're gonna gradually pump in a cryoprotectant, a medical-grade antifreeze, if you like.
So, what we do then, really, we're not freezing people.
We're actually vitrifying.
From the Latin, meaning glass.
But then we have to slow down a bit because if you keep going down very fast, they'll actually fracture into different pieces.
[Quinto.]
As delicate as the process is to prepare the patient's body the brain tissue is the most important thing to preserve.
The brain is where the personality and memories are stored.
Because of this, many clients choose only to preserve their brain.
Their hope is that in the future, it can be implanted into a new body, and the two will be revived together.
Is it just the brain, or it's the whole head? [More.]
The brain's what we're interested in.
But it's actually quite hard to extract it from the skull, so we leave it in the skull as a kind of protective mechanism.
For those clients who choose to just preserve their brains, the next part of the process involves removing the patient's head from their body.
We place the head upside down in the ring here.
We'll do a separation a couple of vertebrae down.
The brain is then dehydrated until it shrinks to half its normal size.
What's the blue around it? That's empty space from the contraction of the brain.
The brain is actually shrunk Mm-hmminside the skull.
It really is shocking to me.
You're desanguinated, you have medical-grade antifreeze in you.
I mean, you may be just a head.
Like, I It's just like, "Uhh" The whole thing is really difficult for me to wrap my mind around.
Once the body or just the head and brain is fully prepared, it is ready to go into the tanks.
Each ten-foot-high steel tank contains four whole-body patients in protective pods.
In the very center column, there is a chamber that holds up to five severed heads.
So is there a way for us to see what these tanks look like on the inside? We can actually take a look down in the top and give you an idea.
I'll be bringing my technical genius, Steve Graber.
Great.
So, minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit in there.
[Graber.]
That's right.
You do not want to fall in.
You want to take a look? Here you go.
Thank you.
I'm about to get a close-up view of the chamber that holds decapitated and cryogenically preserved heads waiting to be reanimated.
[Quinto.]
This is a container that has actual human heads in it.
So crazy.
So this is a container that would house human heads, the brain-only patients.
That's right.
And how many heads would fit in this column? Um, you can fit up to five, but normally we'll just do four.
This one is empty at the moment.
Are there actual bodies in here, though? There are.
There are.
So there are full-body patients in here.
That's right.
And then this is waiting for the next donors to come and That's right.
You're building it out.
That's amazing.
I don't think I would ever cryogenically preserve myself.
I definitely feel like when I'm done, I'm done.
You know, all these 156 people and the 1,150 people who are waiting to come here are people that say, like, "I'm not giving up.
I believe that there will be life again in the future.
" People that undertake this path for themselves obviously loved life, right? Yes, our members do tend to be a bit more adventurous and optimistic.
They're willing to say, "The future could be very different, it could be very weird, but that's better than being dead.
" [Quinto.]
While cryonics may rest on a hope of reanimation, it is only one small part of mankind's perpetual quest to defy death and escape the afterlife altogether.
Throughout history, explorers have gone to extraordinary lengths, risking life and limb, in search of the Fountain of Youth.
Ancient voyagers like Ponce de León ventured into distant, unknown territories, chasing the promise of immortality.
And today science may be far closer to the fountain of youth than we realize.
At Harvard Medical School, Dr.
David Sinclair and his team are developing a groundbreaking pill that could stop and even reverse aging.
Tell me a little bit about what you're doing here.
You're doing research into actually anti-aging, right? Yes.
It's actually much harder to cure cancer than to cure aging Huh.
it turns out.
Right.
And we're now making little pills that you could take after the age of 45, 50, that would prevent you from getting many of the diseases of old age.
[Quinto.]
Dr.
Sinclair and his team believe they have isolated the cells that control how we age, and they are conducting a variety of experiments in an effort to extend life as long as possible, and perhaps one day forever.
Currently they're trying to modify these cells in mice with the eventual goal of controlling the aging process altogether.
[Dr.
Sinclair.]
All right, come this way.
And the results of their most recent experiment might surprise you.
So these mice are all siblings from the same litter.
They're the same age.
[Quinto.]
When this litter of mice were young, scientists introduced a hormone into the test mouse's diet.
This turned on a crucial gene that instructs the mouse's cells to age.
So you take a young mouse, and then you age it rapidly? About twice as fast as normal.
What we're looking at there is cellular amnesia.
The cells in that mouse are forgetting what type of cells they are.
You'll see they have wrinkled skin, they have arthritis, cataracts.
[man.]
It's gray.
It's losing hair.
[Quinto.]
Right.
It's got a little bit of curvature of the spine.
It's lost weight.
Internally, their organs look old.
And even down to the cellular level, they look old.
Whereas these guys are the same age.
They're genetically identical except for the one gene that we've modified to cut the DNA.
And these guys are nice and healthy and shiny and plump.
[Quinto.]
Wow.
That's amazing.
I mean, it's so obvious.
This one is younger-looking and shinier.
Yeah, this was one of those Hail Mary experiments that actually worked once in a career.
Wow.
It's easy to forget that they're brother and sister, isn't it? So now the question is, can you teach those cells in that animal, and in our bodies, to be young again? We believe you can.
And that would truly be the fountain of youth.
We wouldn't get diseases of old age.
Wow.
He's talking about people living to be 125, 135 years old, and still feeling capable of engaging in physical activity the way someone in their 40s or 50s might be able to.
That just changes the game altogether for humanity.
Does death then become less of a specter? That world is coming.
If you look at what the world looks like a century from now, there may be a time when living for hundreds of years is normal, where you can expect to meet your distant descendants Right.
and teach them everything that went on last century and the previous century.
It is hard to wrap your mind around it.
I think it's dangerous to think that just because we live to 130 years old that that life is gonna be any easier.
I don't know.
But certainly, it seems like we're gonna find out one way or another.
As promising as these advancements seem, some experts warn that we may be risking more than we realize when we try to extend life on earth and avoid what comes next.
We might wonder whether we should try to live longer even if we can.
If we can live forever, there's a worry that a lot of human projects might lose their meaning things like the pyramid.
The pyramid was built because people wanted to continue to live longer.
Or Mozart's Requiem was written because there was death.
Right? And so, a lot of human achievements might not exist if death wasn't inevitable.
[Quinto.]
For now, death remains one of the most terrifying mysteries and motivators of our human existence.
And while we can't live to be 130 years old just yet, could a part of our physical bodies provide life even when we die? I'm about to find out.
I'm on a journey to understand what happens after we die, but right now I wanna know if we pass on to an afterlife, what happens to our physical body? Throughout history many cultures have sought strange ways to preserve the human body after death.
From the ancient Egyptians, who invented mummification to prepare their bodies for the next life to the Soviets, whose uses of advanced embalming techniques has allowed the remains of their former dictator Vladimir Lenin to lie on display since 1924.
But today modern technology not only allows us to preserve the physical body but also to utilize it in unprecedented and often controversial ways To find out how our bodies may be able to provide life even after our death, I'm visiting a state-of-the-art facility in Phoenix, Arizona that specializes in repurposing human bodies.
John Cover is the chief operation officer of Research for Life, a body donor organization.
So tell me just a little bit about what you do here.
[Cover.]
Primarily we're a tissue bank.
So what we'll do is, we'll intake the donors here, and then we'll hold the different tissues until they're needed by researchers.
For instance, if a neurosurgeon wants to practice removing an incurable brain tumor, they're not gonna want the entire body.
So we're gonna go ahead and remove the tissues needed for each specialty.
There's your life after death.
The life of these dead bodies continues.
It goes on and gets spread out all over the world.
And that's pretty incredible.
While many view body donation as a noble final act by the deceased, some others still have grave concerns about abuse and profiteering.
And in some cultures body donation is forbidden entirely.
In other countries, it is absolutely a no-no.
Right.
For instance, in Muslim communities, where you have to bury the body before sunset, within 24 hours.
Right.
Uh-huh.
Some cultures, um, it's a matter of shame.
Mm-hmm.
With so much controversy surrounding this field, I want to find out if body donation is truly a helpful way to provide life to others, or a morbid practice.
So this is the way to our laboratory.
Uh-huh.
Come on in.
So that is our removal service, one of them.
They will pick up the donors at the place of death and bring them to our facility.
We were just standing there talking, and a body rolled through, and that's when it kind of got real, in the sense of like, oh, like, death waits for no one.
So, generally, how long after a person passes does the body arrive here? Usually hours.
We try to get to our donors within hours, if we can, to make the best use of the donor.
Right.
So we'll gown up.
Okay.
That way, you're protected when we go into this environment.
Yeah.
For corpses like this, the next stop is the operating table where they're divided into segments and sorted.
These are part of bodies that have already been processed.
[Cover.]
Correct.
And ultimately taken to the donor cooler, which is where John is taking me.
So in terms of protecting ourselves, is it just a matter of the biohazard of being around dead tissue? Any time you're around human tissue, you always assume that it'll transmit infection.
There's no such thing as safe human tissue.
So that goes like this? Correct.
This is our donor cooler.
Let me know when you're ready to go.
[Quinto.]
Ready.
So this is where the donors first come in.
They will enter in here, and then we will store them until such a time as we can get them assessed and verify that they are suitable for medical research and education.
This particular room can hold about 30 donors.
All donors are put into body bags to make sure that they don't contaminate another donor, in case we do find that they have an infectious disease.
Being in that cooler with dozens of recently deceased bodies around me was definitely the weirdest.
It was like going to a morgue.
That experience got progressively more intense, like nothing I've ever seen before.
[Cover.]
This is a working surgical suite.
But I want to know how exactly are these bodies being used for medical research? [Quinto.]
What's this? [Cover.]
These are eyes Wow.
that we have recovered for anatomical study.
Yeah, they look creepy.
And this is a human brain that is made available to a neurological institute.
They're going to practice surgical approaches.
So these guys are looking for new, innovative techniques for incurable brain tumors, strokes, uh, hemorrhages.
This donor is gonna help future donors that way.
Research for life was really a powerful experience.
There are hundreds if not thousands of people benefitting from the work that's being done, and I think that's a pretty noble thing for the person who decides to donate their body to science.
And has this given you any deeper insight into what happens when we die? Yes, as a Christian, I believe in an afterlife, but I also believe that I have an obligation.
The death precedes what I do.
What I do is I try to give life, a renewed life, a renewed sense of purpose for that donor and their family.
Right.
Why there are real ways for our physical bodies to have a purpose even after we pass on I still wonder if perhaps there is life on the other side.
I'm ready to face this question head on and find out the results of my experiment in the Boston hotel with Gary Galka [Galka.]
You ask some questions.
What day is it? When did you die? And we'll see what kind of results we get.
Okay.
and whether it can deliver proof about what happens when we die.
Hey, Gary, how are you? Hey, Zach.
So I understand that you have some discoveries from our time together at the Omni Hotel.
Yeah, I do.
I wanted you to listen to those yourself.
I'm gonna listen to them and see what I can hear.
[Quinto on recording.]
When did you die? [electronic whoosh.]
Let me hear it again.
When did you die? What day is it? [distorted speech.]
What day is it? It was Wednesday that we were there, right? Yeah.
Yeah, it was Wednesday.
So crazy.
Wow.
I heard things that certainly sounded otherworldly.
That was weird and kind of unexpected.
The clearest thing I heard was the answer to "What day is it?" That's considered a classic EVP.
A majority of the people would agree that that would be the answer.
Yeah.
Gary really went a long way to helping me understand how this is possible.
But I didn't find it conclusive.
There's nothing completely definitive here that makes me say like, "That is a spirit.
" I don't know what that is.
I would certainly be curious to find out more about it.
At least it opened up your mind to other opportunities and other thought processes that you're not accustomed to.
You agree to that right? Yeah.
I don't wanna dismiss what Gary is telling me in terms of his relationship with his daughter, but that is his experience of it.
I still think that there are a lot of unanswered questions, and it's quite possible that I won't know until that moment when I leave this world myself.
Death remains the ultimate destination on our long journey through life and one of the only certainties that we all must face.
As we marvel at the mysteries of the great unknown that await us beyond the grave, stories of bright lights, spirits, and the potential for an afterlife continue to inspire and haunt our imaginations.
I, for one, remain hopeful that a part of us has the real potential to live on, whether on this planet or in some distant, unimaginable place.
Death one of the only certainties of our human experience.
Throughout history fears about the great unknown of the afterlife have terrified mankind.
From ancient cave drawings about being reunited with the gods, to Medieval manuscripts depicting the dark reaches of hell, the question of mortality and what happens after death is something that haunts us all.
But is there any way to truly understand what happens when we die? And what can we learn from the Texas man who actually touched death and lived to tell about it? I was on a kayaking trip with a good buddy of mine and got sucked into a pipe underneath the bridge.
I was under water for four or five minutes till I lost consciousness.
I went to this place I felt connected to many, many billions of souls.
I would say yeah, I was dead.
[Quinto.]
If accounts like are true, then what really happens when we die? Will we live on in some other place or dimension? And is it possible to find evidence of life after death? My search begins now.
My Name is Zachary Quinto.
As an actor, I've played many supernatural characters that blurred the line between science and fiction.
I'm drawn to the unknown, the otherworldly, and those experiences so beyond belief, they call everything into question.
I'm exploring some of the most enduring mysteries that continue to haunt mankind in search of the truth wherever it leads me.
Death is the inescapable end we all meet.
For centuries, mankind's quest to understand this phenomenon has led us to wonder and fear the potential for an afterlife that lies just beyond our world, from the ancient Egyptians Book of the Dead, thought to contain a guide to the afterlife, to the Greeks, who believed that the fate of the dead was a shadowy half life in Hades.
Our worldwide fascination with life after death has been depicted in movies likeThe Sixth Sense andWhat Dreams May Come, as well as TV shows likeThe Walking Dead.
In more recent times, technological breakthroughs have given way to the possibility of escaping death with advancements in anti-aging drugs and even cryogenics, leaving many to wonder if one day we may actually be able to bring ourselves back to life.
So where do we go when we die, what will we experience, and is it possible to come back from the dead? Today I'm meeting with Pat Johnson How are you? Nice to meet you.
a Texas business owner who cheated death during a horrifying kayaking incident in 2010.
So tell me a little bit about your story.
[Johnson.]
Well, it was September 10th, 2010.
I was on a kayaking trip.
Were you with somebody? Yeah, I was with my friend Bobby.
That particular day the river was up a couple of feet.
because we'd had a flood a few days earlier.
As we were coming up on the bridge, I hit one of the blocks and the current turned my kayak sideways and I slid out of the kayak.
I was just jerked under the water.
I knew I was getting sucked into a hole.
I would reach up and feel these bumps on the tops of my hands and I recognized immediately that I was in a corrugated pipe.
Since the water was so high, there was no air gap.
What kind of things were going through your head? Just thinking about how to survive.
That's it.
There's no tomorrow.
Physically you also must be incredibly strained.
Right? Yes.
I'd been under water for a long time.
I don't know how much longer I can hold my breath.
So I pushed myself forward.
I made it about two feet.
And at that point, it just felt like a bubble came over me.
I mean, I was just enveloped in this almost like an egg shell.
And just as soon as I felt that, just immediately it was like turning off a light switch, I lost consciousness.
I felt like I was in this hallway, like 75 yards long.
At the end of this hallway there was this blue stained glass, and there was this hole in the glass and there was this bright, bright white light coming through the hole.
I wanted to get to the light.
I was drawn to the light.
As I got closer to the light, there were people walking back and forth in front of the light I wanted to see who they were, but all I could see was the silhouettes.
I was almost close enough to tell who the people were.
The next thing I know I'd regained consciousness.
I was pushed down in the pipe.
And my friend Bobby was able to catch up to my body and resuscitate me.
Wow.
I told him, I said, "Man, Bobby, you're gonna think this is weird I know you're gonna think this is weird, but I'm really glad this happened to me.
" I knew in that moment that my life would never be the same.
Did you feel, when you were in that place, like this is what death is? It's hard to say You know, it's different.
It's different over there.
It's unexplainable.
Right.
But I'm definitely confirmed my belief in the afterlife.
Uh-huh.
[Quinto.]
He transcended something.
I mean, he's been through something that 99% of the rest of the planet will never understand until the movement when they come back anymore.
Whether or not there's something beyond that light at the end of the tunnel, I don't know, but I'm interested to see what we find out.
Pat is certainly not the first person to have such a vivid and terrifying brush with the afterlife.
The earliest known description of a near-death experience was recounted by Plato in his Myth of Er, which was written circa 400 B.
C.
And each year over 200,000 Americans report similar near-death visions of bright lights, tunnels, and a powerful feeling of being transported to another world.
But if these transcendent visions are true, then what really happens when we die? Will we live on in this place that Pat and so many have described, and could there be a way for us to get answers to these questions directly from the other side? To find out, I'm meeting with a man who claims to have tangible proof of direct communication with the deceased, including his own daughter renowned paranormal expert and inventor Gary Galka.
Going back 13, 14 years ago, I actually lost my daughter.
She was 17 years old.
What was her name? Melissa.
Melissa.
Before his teenage daughter's tragic death from a car accident in 2004, Gary was an engineer with no interest in the spirit world.
The day we came back from the hospital, we smelled her scent, her perfume.
We no sooner got into the house, and the doorbell started ringing.
From there it evolved to the TV changing channels.
There was one evening, my wife and I were going to bed.
We heard music just swirling within our room.
We're walking incrementally, just following the sound and went down the hallway, and then the stereo came on.
Nothing like this had happened before your daughter passed? Not at all, ever.
Ever.
If you don't have experiences, and then all of a sudden, suddenly, these weird things start happening, Now, you're given a choice.
Do you ignore it or do you become a believer? [Quinto.]
Melissa's death and the bizarre incidents that followed inspired Gary to invent a line of paranormal investigation equipment in her honor, including the Mel Meter, a dual sensor that tracks both temperature and electromagnetic fields to detect signs of paranormal activity.
He felt compelled to create these products because he couldn't ignore the signs that Melissa was reaching out from the great beyond.
I wanna believe in this stuff so much, and when I meet people like Gary, who do believe, I feel closer to it, but I am much more interested in proof.
How did you start to really identify these energies as her? I actually have evidence that shows her entering into my consciousness while I'm dreaming, and you can see the actual energy ball going into my forehead.
You're gonna see it with your eyes.
[Quinto.]
After her death in 2004, Gary set up a home video experiment to prove that his daughter was communicating with him from beyond the grave.
And did you feel something in that room? Oh, absolutely.
Am I about to see evidence that life after death is possible? Is this an infrared camera? [Galka.]
This is just a security camera.
I felt something in the room.
So what I did was I asked her to come and give me a kiss on the forehead.
And here's what happens.
[Quinto.]
Whoa.
Did you see that? Yes.
That was the most remarkable feeling ever.
Wow.
What you're about to see you've never seen before.
So basically I'm going to go in, and I'm gonna call angels.
I'm gonna talk to Melissa, I'm gonna go into my meditative state.
You see the room is normal, right? Mm-hmm.
There's nothing there.
So what I'm doing is, I'm connecting with her.
Watch.
See that? Yeah.
Now watch what happens.
That's all energy, Zach.
[Quinto.]
I mean, it looks like it's snowing.
It looks like it's snowing.
It's basically a portal.
That's so crazy.
Is that something? The videos were completely inexplicable.
Those are all souls.
Those are all individual souls.
And I've never seen anything like that before.
I was unsure how he was able to capture that energy on just a regular home security camera.
However, this isn't Gary's only proof of spectral encounters with his daughter.
He used his professional talent as an engineer to create a device that he claims allows him to actually speak with her.
This device right here this is a digital record that deals with electronic voice phenomena.
And EVPs are basically sounds that can't really be distinguished with our senses.
[Quinto.]
His EVP device purports to capture sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear and after processing, converts them to files that we can hear.
I've been able to capture some pretty remarkable things.
[Quinto.]
Though many people have challenged the validity of these ghost recorders, I'm anxious to see for myself what new proof Gary can offer.
Is there an example that you can let me hear of something that you've captured from your daughter? Yeah.
Sure.
I want you to listen very carefully.
[Quinto.]
Coming up, I attempt to make contact with the oth[woman's voice mutters.]
[Gary.]
Hello.
[woman's voice mutters.]
[distorted voice.]
That's great.
"That's great.
" [rewinding.]
That's great.
Okay, that's her voice.
That's great.
Okay, now, what what This part right here, Zach.
Uh-huh.
I want you to try real hard to hear that.
You tell me what she's saying.
[replays recording.]
"Tell them that's great.
" "Tell Mommy""Tell Mommy" "Tell Mommy that's great.
" Let me hear it again.
Tell Mommy that's great.
"Tell Mommy it's great.
" Yeah.
Wow.
So the news that I was sharing with her I had that running and, um, she was just giving me her opinion on it.
She thought it was great news, and she says, "Tell Mommy that's great.
" It was that simple.
I mean, yeah, that's kind of So I have communication with my daughter.
Isn't that amazing? That is amazing.
That certainly sounded like she was saying, "Tell Mommy that's great.
" And And And so I want to believe it, but I'm still left with a healthy skepticism, and I think that's just who I am.
Gary has agreed to put his EVP technology to the test with an experiment to communicate with spirits rumored to be in this very hotel.
The Omni Parker House is considered by paranormal experts to be one of the most haunted hotels in America.
Built in 1855 hundreds of workers and guests have reported ghostly sights, sounds, and smells that hearken back to the people who have walked these halls.
You're gonna hold it till it initializes.
Mm-hm.
And then you're not gonna move your fingers, your hands at all Just hold itbecause it has dual microphones.
Okay.
Okay.
Very sensitive.
[Quinto.]
I wanna know if Gary's technology could actually give us a direct line of communication to the deceased in this strange location.
And if so, what secrets could they reveal about the afterlife? You ask some questions, and we'll see what kind of results we get.
Okay.
You up for that? I absolutely am.
Let's do it.
I'm a little skeptical, but we're about to put Gary's device to the test so I can see for myself.
Light's blinking.
You're good.
Okay.
Good to go.
I'm going to be asking the spirits questions and hope the EVP device records a response.
What is my name? What day is it? When did you die? Do you live in the hotel? We won't know the results for a few weeks while Gary processes the recordings through his EVP software.
[Galka.]
I'll review these in more detail.
Yeah.
That would be great.
If you find anything, I would certainly love to hear that.
Beyond making contacted with the dead, I'm interested to learn what it's actually like to die and if there's anything in that experience that can teach us more about the possibility of life after death.
Could the visions experienced by Pat Johnson There were people walking back and forth in front of the light.
All I could see was a silhouette.
[Quinto.]
and so many others throughout history tell us more about what lies beyond the great void? I'm meeting with one of the world's leading experts on death and dying, Dr.
Jeffrey Long.
An oncologist by trade, Dr.
Long has interviewed over 4,000 people who have had near-death experiences, and he's compiled the most comprehensive report on the subject in the U.
S.
[Dr.
Long.]
They're unconscious.
They're at the brink of death, literally.
Suddenly there's an unearthly, often described as mystical, light, not like any light that we know on this earth.
It is amazing, the common threads that occur no matter where on the earth or whatever age you are or what your prior beliefs are.
The two most common words used for people that have near-death experiences are peace and love.
It seems to make no difference whether you're, say, a Muslim in Egypt or a Hindu in India or a Christian in the United States.
Wherever you are on the planet, By the scores, people have shared a profound sense of an all-encompassing love, connection, peace far beyond what they knew on earth.
Wow.
So then my question is, from your vantage point, what is happening after death? That is a great question, Zach.
My take, based on that huge amount of research and that investigation now coming up on close to 20 years, I believe that we are much more than our physical body.
We have that consciousness.
Some people have called it a soul that can exist separately from our physical body when we die.
That's based in real near-death experience observations.
That's medically inexplicable.
Uh-huh.
You know, this journey for me has been particularly interesting.
I've experienced death from a young age.
I lost a parent when I was really young, and so I feel like death has always had a place in my life that I wished it hadn't on some deep level, but I have an appreciation for it as well.
[Dr.
Long.]
What we don't know about death, dying and what lies beyond far exceeds what we do know.
All of us are on a journey of discovery No two are the same.
It's a wonderful experience that awaits us all.
[Quinto.]
Dr.
Long comes from a medical background.
He comes from a world that is designed to look for proof, to look for data, and yet he's saying that we could cross over into some realm beyond.
It just makes me wonder.
If death is as wonderful as Dr.
Long describes, why are so many of us afraid of it? There are people that say, "I'm not done yet.
" Yeah.
They want to somehow avoid death.
I can certainly understand the desire of some people to really hang on to that earthly life.
They value it, they love it, and maybe they can extend it beyond the boundaries of what we're aware of today as being scientifically possible.
[Quinto.]
But is there a viable option for people who aren't ready to cross over, those who want a second chance at life? This is a container that has actual h [Quinto.]
Death All of us will experience it one day, but no one can say for sure what, if anything, lies beyond.
Despite the harrowing near-death tails of people like Pat Johnson There was this bright, bright white light.
and so many others like him throughout history, we still have yet to find definitive proof about what happens when we die.
However, recent advances in the controversial field of cryonics may ultimately give us the power to control that destiny ourselves.
Cryonics is the freezing of human corpses at extremely low temperatures with the promise of being able to revive or reanimate them at a later date.
The idea of cryopreserving humans sprang from the pages of science fiction in the 1960s with rumors about Walt Dy and even Hitler's brain being cryogenically frozen.
In the 21st century, Michael Jackson made headlines when he declared his interest in being frozen.
And the late baseball legend Ted Williams actually went through with the procedure upon his death in 2002.
How does this work? Is it possible we could freeze ourselves after death and one day have new life? To get some answers, I'm going to Arizona to visit the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Alcor is one of the leaders in cryonics, with 156 clients who have been cryogenically preserved, and over a thousand members who have signed up for the procedure upon their deaths.
Welcome to Alcor's Patient Care Bay.
So nice to meet you.
Thank you for having me.
Max More is one of the world's leading experts in the field of cryonics.
You have been a pioneer of this technology for 30 years.
Yeah.
But, actually, I started thinking about life extension when I was about 16 or 17.
Even then, it occurred to me that aging and death is a problem, and is a problem we should try and fix.
What's the cost for something like this? For a whole-body patient, is a minimum of $200,000.
For brain only, $80,000.
So it's a state of hibernation? Not dead but not alive? Right.
How does it work? Yeah, it's hard for people to get their heads around it, because they're not dead if by "dead," you mean irretrievably gone forever.
There is the potential that we can revive them in the future.
So they're just kind of in between, a twilight state, if you like.
But capturing someone during that in-between state is a complex process.
To do this successfully, the body is prepared for the freeze as soon as the patient dies.
As soon as the doctor give us the go, the legal death, we begin the process by moving the patient into the ice bath.
We have to give medications to protect the patient's cells, and so we need circulation to distribute those drugs around the body, so we use this device.
It has the side effect that even though the person's been declared dead, they could still come to some level of awareness.
The next stop is the surgery room, where doctors perform a very delicate and potentially dangerous procedure that transforms the client's internal organs into a glass-like state.
We're gonna connect the patient's vascular system to a pump to remove as much blood as we can, and we're gonna gradually pump in a cryoprotectant, a medical-grade antifreeze, if you like.
So, what we do then, really, we're not freezing people.
We're actually vitrifying.
From the Latin, meaning glass.
But then we have to slow down a bit because if you keep going down very fast, they'll actually fracture into different pieces.
[Quinto.]
As delicate as the process is to prepare the patient's body the brain tissue is the most important thing to preserve.
The brain is where the personality and memories are stored.
Because of this, many clients choose only to preserve their brain.
Their hope is that in the future, it can be implanted into a new body, and the two will be revived together.
Is it just the brain, or it's the whole head? [More.]
The brain's what we're interested in.
But it's actually quite hard to extract it from the skull, so we leave it in the skull as a kind of protective mechanism.
For those clients who choose to just preserve their brains, the next part of the process involves removing the patient's head from their body.
We place the head upside down in the ring here.
We'll do a separation a couple of vertebrae down.
The brain is then dehydrated until it shrinks to half its normal size.
What's the blue around it? That's empty space from the contraction of the brain.
The brain is actually shrunk Mm-hmminside the skull.
It really is shocking to me.
You're desanguinated, you have medical-grade antifreeze in you.
I mean, you may be just a head.
Like, I It's just like, "Uhh" The whole thing is really difficult for me to wrap my mind around.
Once the body or just the head and brain is fully prepared, it is ready to go into the tanks.
Each ten-foot-high steel tank contains four whole-body patients in protective pods.
In the very center column, there is a chamber that holds up to five severed heads.
So is there a way for us to see what these tanks look like on the inside? We can actually take a look down in the top and give you an idea.
I'll be bringing my technical genius, Steve Graber.
Great.
So, minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit in there.
[Graber.]
That's right.
You do not want to fall in.
You want to take a look? Here you go.
Thank you.
I'm about to get a close-up view of the chamber that holds decapitated and cryogenically preserved heads waiting to be reanimated.
[Quinto.]
This is a container that has actual human heads in it.
So crazy.
So this is a container that would house human heads, the brain-only patients.
That's right.
And how many heads would fit in this column? Um, you can fit up to five, but normally we'll just do four.
This one is empty at the moment.
Are there actual bodies in here, though? There are.
There are.
So there are full-body patients in here.
That's right.
And then this is waiting for the next donors to come and That's right.
You're building it out.
That's amazing.
I don't think I would ever cryogenically preserve myself.
I definitely feel like when I'm done, I'm done.
You know, all these 156 people and the 1,150 people who are waiting to come here are people that say, like, "I'm not giving up.
I believe that there will be life again in the future.
" People that undertake this path for themselves obviously loved life, right? Yes, our members do tend to be a bit more adventurous and optimistic.
They're willing to say, "The future could be very different, it could be very weird, but that's better than being dead.
" [Quinto.]
While cryonics may rest on a hope of reanimation, it is only one small part of mankind's perpetual quest to defy death and escape the afterlife altogether.
Throughout history, explorers have gone to extraordinary lengths, risking life and limb, in search of the Fountain of Youth.
Ancient voyagers like Ponce de León ventured into distant, unknown territories, chasing the promise of immortality.
And today science may be far closer to the fountain of youth than we realize.
At Harvard Medical School, Dr.
David Sinclair and his team are developing a groundbreaking pill that could stop and even reverse aging.
Tell me a little bit about what you're doing here.
You're doing research into actually anti-aging, right? Yes.
It's actually much harder to cure cancer than to cure aging Huh.
it turns out.
Right.
And we're now making little pills that you could take after the age of 45, 50, that would prevent you from getting many of the diseases of old age.
[Quinto.]
Dr.
Sinclair and his team believe they have isolated the cells that control how we age, and they are conducting a variety of experiments in an effort to extend life as long as possible, and perhaps one day forever.
Currently they're trying to modify these cells in mice with the eventual goal of controlling the aging process altogether.
[Dr.
Sinclair.]
All right, come this way.
And the results of their most recent experiment might surprise you.
So these mice are all siblings from the same litter.
They're the same age.
[Quinto.]
When this litter of mice were young, scientists introduced a hormone into the test mouse's diet.
This turned on a crucial gene that instructs the mouse's cells to age.
So you take a young mouse, and then you age it rapidly? About twice as fast as normal.
What we're looking at there is cellular amnesia.
The cells in that mouse are forgetting what type of cells they are.
You'll see they have wrinkled skin, they have arthritis, cataracts.
[man.]
It's gray.
It's losing hair.
[Quinto.]
Right.
It's got a little bit of curvature of the spine.
It's lost weight.
Internally, their organs look old.
And even down to the cellular level, they look old.
Whereas these guys are the same age.
They're genetically identical except for the one gene that we've modified to cut the DNA.
And these guys are nice and healthy and shiny and plump.
[Quinto.]
Wow.
That's amazing.
I mean, it's so obvious.
This one is younger-looking and shinier.
Yeah, this was one of those Hail Mary experiments that actually worked once in a career.
Wow.
It's easy to forget that they're brother and sister, isn't it? So now the question is, can you teach those cells in that animal, and in our bodies, to be young again? We believe you can.
And that would truly be the fountain of youth.
We wouldn't get diseases of old age.
Wow.
He's talking about people living to be 125, 135 years old, and still feeling capable of engaging in physical activity the way someone in their 40s or 50s might be able to.
That just changes the game altogether for humanity.
Does death then become less of a specter? That world is coming.
If you look at what the world looks like a century from now, there may be a time when living for hundreds of years is normal, where you can expect to meet your distant descendants Right.
and teach them everything that went on last century and the previous century.
It is hard to wrap your mind around it.
I think it's dangerous to think that just because we live to 130 years old that that life is gonna be any easier.
I don't know.
But certainly, it seems like we're gonna find out one way or another.
As promising as these advancements seem, some experts warn that we may be risking more than we realize when we try to extend life on earth and avoid what comes next.
We might wonder whether we should try to live longer even if we can.
If we can live forever, there's a worry that a lot of human projects might lose their meaning things like the pyramid.
The pyramid was built because people wanted to continue to live longer.
Or Mozart's Requiem was written because there was death.
Right? And so, a lot of human achievements might not exist if death wasn't inevitable.
[Quinto.]
For now, death remains one of the most terrifying mysteries and motivators of our human existence.
And while we can't live to be 130 years old just yet, could a part of our physical bodies provide life even when we die? I'm about to find out.
I'm on a journey to understand what happens after we die, but right now I wanna know if we pass on to an afterlife, what happens to our physical body? Throughout history many cultures have sought strange ways to preserve the human body after death.
From the ancient Egyptians, who invented mummification to prepare their bodies for the next life to the Soviets, whose uses of advanced embalming techniques has allowed the remains of their former dictator Vladimir Lenin to lie on display since 1924.
But today modern technology not only allows us to preserve the physical body but also to utilize it in unprecedented and often controversial ways To find out how our bodies may be able to provide life even after our death, I'm visiting a state-of-the-art facility in Phoenix, Arizona that specializes in repurposing human bodies.
John Cover is the chief operation officer of Research for Life, a body donor organization.
So tell me just a little bit about what you do here.
[Cover.]
Primarily we're a tissue bank.
So what we'll do is, we'll intake the donors here, and then we'll hold the different tissues until they're needed by researchers.
For instance, if a neurosurgeon wants to practice removing an incurable brain tumor, they're not gonna want the entire body.
So we're gonna go ahead and remove the tissues needed for each specialty.
There's your life after death.
The life of these dead bodies continues.
It goes on and gets spread out all over the world.
And that's pretty incredible.
While many view body donation as a noble final act by the deceased, some others still have grave concerns about abuse and profiteering.
And in some cultures body donation is forbidden entirely.
In other countries, it is absolutely a no-no.
Right.
For instance, in Muslim communities, where you have to bury the body before sunset, within 24 hours.
Right.
Uh-huh.
Some cultures, um, it's a matter of shame.
Mm-hmm.
With so much controversy surrounding this field, I want to find out if body donation is truly a helpful way to provide life to others, or a morbid practice.
So this is the way to our laboratory.
Uh-huh.
Come on in.
So that is our removal service, one of them.
They will pick up the donors at the place of death and bring them to our facility.
We were just standing there talking, and a body rolled through, and that's when it kind of got real, in the sense of like, oh, like, death waits for no one.
So, generally, how long after a person passes does the body arrive here? Usually hours.
We try to get to our donors within hours, if we can, to make the best use of the donor.
Right.
So we'll gown up.
Okay.
That way, you're protected when we go into this environment.
Yeah.
For corpses like this, the next stop is the operating table where they're divided into segments and sorted.
These are part of bodies that have already been processed.
[Cover.]
Correct.
And ultimately taken to the donor cooler, which is where John is taking me.
So in terms of protecting ourselves, is it just a matter of the biohazard of being around dead tissue? Any time you're around human tissue, you always assume that it'll transmit infection.
There's no such thing as safe human tissue.
So that goes like this? Correct.
This is our donor cooler.
Let me know when you're ready to go.
[Quinto.]
Ready.
So this is where the donors first come in.
They will enter in here, and then we will store them until such a time as we can get them assessed and verify that they are suitable for medical research and education.
This particular room can hold about 30 donors.
All donors are put into body bags to make sure that they don't contaminate another donor, in case we do find that they have an infectious disease.
Being in that cooler with dozens of recently deceased bodies around me was definitely the weirdest.
It was like going to a morgue.
That experience got progressively more intense, like nothing I've ever seen before.
[Cover.]
This is a working surgical suite.
But I want to know how exactly are these bodies being used for medical research? [Quinto.]
What's this? [Cover.]
These are eyes Wow.
that we have recovered for anatomical study.
Yeah, they look creepy.
And this is a human brain that is made available to a neurological institute.
They're going to practice surgical approaches.
So these guys are looking for new, innovative techniques for incurable brain tumors, strokes, uh, hemorrhages.
This donor is gonna help future donors that way.
Research for life was really a powerful experience.
There are hundreds if not thousands of people benefitting from the work that's being done, and I think that's a pretty noble thing for the person who decides to donate their body to science.
And has this given you any deeper insight into what happens when we die? Yes, as a Christian, I believe in an afterlife, but I also believe that I have an obligation.
The death precedes what I do.
What I do is I try to give life, a renewed life, a renewed sense of purpose for that donor and their family.
Right.
Why there are real ways for our physical bodies to have a purpose even after we pass on I still wonder if perhaps there is life on the other side.
I'm ready to face this question head on and find out the results of my experiment in the Boston hotel with Gary Galka [Galka.]
You ask some questions.
What day is it? When did you die? And we'll see what kind of results we get.
Okay.
and whether it can deliver proof about what happens when we die.
Hey, Gary, how are you? Hey, Zach.
So I understand that you have some discoveries from our time together at the Omni Hotel.
Yeah, I do.
I wanted you to listen to those yourself.
I'm gonna listen to them and see what I can hear.
[Quinto on recording.]
When did you die? [electronic whoosh.]
Let me hear it again.
When did you die? What day is it? [distorted speech.]
What day is it? It was Wednesday that we were there, right? Yeah.
Yeah, it was Wednesday.
So crazy.
Wow.
I heard things that certainly sounded otherworldly.
That was weird and kind of unexpected.
The clearest thing I heard was the answer to "What day is it?" That's considered a classic EVP.
A majority of the people would agree that that would be the answer.
Yeah.
Gary really went a long way to helping me understand how this is possible.
But I didn't find it conclusive.
There's nothing completely definitive here that makes me say like, "That is a spirit.
" I don't know what that is.
I would certainly be curious to find out more about it.
At least it opened up your mind to other opportunities and other thought processes that you're not accustomed to.
You agree to that right? Yeah.
I don't wanna dismiss what Gary is telling me in terms of his relationship with his daughter, but that is his experience of it.
I still think that there are a lot of unanswered questions, and it's quite possible that I won't know until that moment when I leave this world myself.
Death remains the ultimate destination on our long journey through life and one of the only certainties that we all must face.
As we marvel at the mysteries of the great unknown that await us beyond the grave, stories of bright lights, spirits, and the potential for an afterlife continue to inspire and haunt our imaginations.
I, for one, remain hopeful that a part of us has the real potential to live on, whether on this planet or in some distant, unimaginable place.