I have done landings like this thousands of times without any injury. But the sun apparently hid the wires, or at least I had no idea the wires were there. Had I been flying ten inches higher, this would have been a typical landing. I didn’t see the wires and never felt the crash. My last memory was that I kept flying although my airplane had crashed. It rounded out and I knew it would be a perfect landing since I could hear the tops of the grass brushing against the bottom of the wheels.
Then everything went black. I thought, ‘Oh. I thought I was flying, but I guess I must be dreaming.’ I patiently waited for the blackness to change. It seemed to take a long time for that to happen, but finally I was flying again. This time I was not in my own airplane but in a strange sort of vehicle that I had never seen before. I thought for a while that it was a dirigible, but I couldn’t see the lifting body. I was alone in what seemed to be a passenger area. There were no controls, no instruments, and no copilot; just a seat for me. There were lots of windows, left and right and forward. The machine was perhaps a little over 1,000 feet high flying over a beautiful, gently hilly countryside. Beneath and ahead of me was a very small town. Beyond the town was a river and a road that went over the river. Directly beneath me was a field, with perhaps 20 children playing ‘ring-around-the-rosie’, or it seemed like that. The children were holding hands in a circle and one child was running round the ring. There may have been an adult of two, but I’m not sure of that. There may have been something like a city on the horizon with glass spires rising up. But it must have been 40 miles away. I felt no connection with the children or the town. I have spend many hours in this lifetime looking down at little towns, but this was different from those towns. Maybe it was different because this town had many trees in the countryside, and my experience has been over towns that had level fields all around.
While I was thinking that this is a nice dream, I heard a male voice asking me, ‘Would you like to return to your life on Earth?’ It took we a while to figure out this was not a dream. I was on the edge of dying, or perhaps I had died, but this was a chance to go back. The voice repeated the same question. I had just seen my wife before I took off on my flight, and I didn’t want to just disappear, or die when I hadn’t said goodbye. That was very important to me, to have said goodbye to her. The third time the voice asked the same question, I said ‘Yes!’ Then almost instantly the vehicle disappeared. For perhaps a quarter of a second, I saw some sort of boundary. It was as if there were thousands of file-folders there, and I knew that those were subtly different choices of my experience concerning my returning.
Then I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital. I had no sense of pain or distress. My wife was there by the bed. As puzzled as I could be, I asked where we were. I knew it was a hospital, but I couldn’t believe I was in a hospital. There were tubes in my body. The hospital was not a pleasant place to be at all. I asked, ‘Do you have a car?’ She said, ‘Yes, I do.’ I asked, ‘Can we leave now?’ She said told me that it probably wasn’t good to leave right now. She said I had been a coma for the last seven days.
Later she sold me that the doctors said that I might die. They told her that if I didn’t die, I may never walk again, may never talk, may have even a sort of vegetable, and not for her to expect much of me. She refused to believe that.
From that point there was no question for either of us, that I would be well again. She taught me how to read a clock, and for the next month in the hospital I improved so quickly that the doctors thought it was a miracle. I had never smoked or drank any alcohol, which they said was good for my recovery. At last I came home again, and finished learning how to walk. I had lost some 60 pounds in the recovery, and slowly got better. In a few months, I was fine again. I rebuilt the airplane and flew it across the country a while later. In the last several months I’ve had an obsession to read books about death and dying. I just counted that I’ve read 75 books in that time. I’ve had this homesick feeling, ever since this experience. I am very happy to be with my wife again, but felt a kind of depression for still being on earth these days. I was startled to find that it may take years to recover from this experience. As you know, I’m not for one instant scared of dying; part of me wants to go back right now. I know I have something here to finish before I go, but I hope that won’t take forever.