Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, May 2026
Aliens and the Near-Death Experience
By P.M.H. Atwater, LHD
Foreword by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
www.BearandCompanyBooks.com
Bear & Company is a division of Inner Traditions International
2026, 207 pages, Paperback, U.S. $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-59143-550-1
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Back in early December of 2005, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), the Edgar Cayce organization, located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, sponsored a UFO conference one weekend that filled their conference center. The speakers included notables like Jacques Vallee, Stanton Friedman, Greg Little, Loren Coleman, Betty Andreasson Luca, John Van Auken, and myself, not as well-known as the others but I’ve been in the UFO field since 1967 and was honored to participate and contribute my own input.
It was during that weekend in 2005 that I met the author of this book, as well as Stanley Krippner who wrote its Foreword. Though Krippner was not part of the UFO conference, he was that same weekend delivering a talk on shamanism and afterwards during Q&A someone inquired whether those cultures ever talked about UFOs. He admitted that while it wasn’t something the anthropological community tended to address, he personally was aware of such instances.
As a result of that weekend, I soon afterwards separately interviewed both Atwater and Krippner for this magazine. Both of them had much to share that was of interest. Atwater, with a distinguished reputation as a dedicated researcher of near-death experiencers, someone who herself had experienced the phenomenon firsthand, wrote an incredible book on the subject that I later found both fascinating and very thoroughly presented. It was entitled The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (2007). 496 pages. Today, I learned, she now has 27 books under her belt, with such titles as The New Children and Near-Death Experiences, Future Memory, Coming Back to Life, We Live Forever. to name but a few.
During that first interview years ago, we were focused entirely on the Near-Death Experience. Of course, now the very title of her latest volume, Aliens and the Near-Death Experience, makes obvious that the NDE shares some kind of potential interconnections with ufology’s “Aliens.” As it turns out, and is revealed in this book, Atawater has delved quite deeply into this extended issue. In fact, as it turns out, it was after the third of her three NDEs in 1977, that she came to learn of her “past lives.” It was the final one that really shocked her. That’s when she writes how she discovered that she had once been an ET alien life form named Arrakkus. Years later, she and others were quite startled when Arrakkus began speaking through her. In 2023 what she has come to call “The Voice Like None Other” gave her new marching orders. She states how she resisted, she gave what she thought would be a firm “NO.” However, that just didn’t work. “My assignment this time was to reveal the rest of the story,” she wrote.
Atwater includes in her book the accounts of 38 people who have shared with her their personal alien encounters and NDEs. She came to engage with other researchers and experiencers who helped her to further document and comprehend the scope of these anomalous experiences. It was one Kenneth Ring’s book The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large that helped many to bring this enigmatic syndrome out of the proverbial closet.
Atwater wrote: “…Ken conducted extensive questionnaire samplings of near-death survivors and those who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and he came up with a provocative conclusion: People who have these kinds of experiences possess an ‘encounter-prone’ personality, a special spiritual, visionary psyche, that may represent a new stage in the evolution of the human mind.” She details her own long journey in all of this, of growing up in Idaho and the early beginnings of the “modern flying saucer era” that began with fellow Idahoan Kenneth Arnold, taking us through the many events of her life up to the revelations in this book of Arrakkus.
