About the series
In Search of the Dead is a documentary series about the evidence for life after death, produced in 1992 by Jeffrey Iverson for BBC Wales in cooperation with the American public broadcaster PBS (through WXXI Rochester). Iverson, who had earlier made the 1976 BBC documentary The Bloxham Tapes on past-life regression, also wrote a companion book of the same title, published by BBC Books.236
The series moves from experimental parapsychology (‘Powers of the Mind’) through near-death experiences, apparitions and mediumship (‘Visions and Voices’) to reincarnation in its third episode, ‘Remembered Lives’.34
'Remembered Lives'
The reincarnation episode assesses the evidence from children who speak of previous lives, filming in several cultures: Tibetan Buddhists in India, Hindus in India, Theravada Buddhists in Sri Lanka and First Nations communities in Canada. It interviews Ian Stevenson and the researchers who had independently repeated his fieldwork: Antonia Mills, Satwant Pasricha and Erlendur Haraldsson, the last shown in Sri Lanka with his colleague Godwin Samararatne. The researchers explain how they check whether a child could have learned about the previous person by normal means.45
Among its most striking footage is Mills at work in British Columbia, with witnesses recounting cases and close-up shots of birthmarks said to correspond to wounds or marks on the previous person.1
The companion book devotes its reincarnation section largely to Stevenson’s work, including a chapter calling him ‘the Galileo of the twentieth century’, and also covers children born with birthmarks matching verified events in another life. Reviewing it in 2017, Tom Ruffles found it a brisk and readable survey but sympathetic to its subjects and short on sceptical voices.23