Gary Wimmer’s near-death experience

Step 1

January 31 to February 7, 1977 · Austin, Texas · Told by Gary

Gary spends a week without sleep, feeling he can tell what is about to happen

Gary Wimmer was 29 and lived in Austin, Texas. He had studied electrical engineering, but he made his living as a musician. He says that winter he was depressed and couldn’t get good gigs.

On January 31, 1977, he moved into a new place. That night he stopped sleeping. He says he was “thinking, thinking, thinking, abnormally intense,” and that he heard what people were going to say before they said it. He began to feel some protectors close by, whom he called “the Monitors.”

In his book he says that, that week, he made a prediction in a bar in front of strangers. He said Ronald Reagan would win the 1980 election and would be shot, but would survive. Only he tells this, in his 2012 book, when it was already known that Reagan had won and had been shot.

That week a friend told him he might be in a “manic” phase. Gary couldn’t stop.

Step 5

That night, 9:01 p.m. · Told by the police papers

The police take him to the emergency room and then to jail

Gary says he pushed away the driver, who was shaking him. An ambulance and three police cars arrived. Gary published that night’s police papers in his book, after requesting them in 2011. The papers say this:

• At 8:38 p.m. there was a collision in the 3000 block of Guadalupe Street. Afterward, according to the police, Gary hit the driver on the head.
• At 9:01 p.m. the ambulance brought him to the emergency room at Brackenridge Hospital. There he was treated and released.
• The officer wrote that he “seemed to be high on some type of narcotics.” And he suggested that Gary be examined for mental illness.

Gary says he told the police he had taken a lot of drugs in his life, but that no drug had ever made him go through something like this. Neither Gary nor the papers say what he had taken or when.

From the emergency room he was taken to jail, arrested for assault.

Step 6

February and April 1977 · Told by Gary and the court papers

A judge orders him admitted to a psychiatric hospital

On February 9, a judge ordered him admitted to Shoal Creek Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Austin. He stayed ten days. The doctor told him he was in the manic phase of manic-depressive disorder and prescribed lithium. The assault complaint was dropped.

In April he had another similar episode and was admitted for another ten days to Austin State Hospital.

Today Gary says he is bipolar. He believes his bipolar nature and his sensitivity are related to what he calls his psychic ability, the ability to sense things. He says the doctors were right about his illness, and that this doesn’t make what he went through any less real.

The 1977 papers say nothing about what Gary saw of the future.

Step 7

February 7, 1997 · Copenhagen, Denmark · Told by Gary

Twenty years later, Gary starts writing his story

In the 1990s, Gary lived in Copenhagen and played in bars around Europe. On February 7, 1997, exactly twenty years after the collision, he told his experience to some staff at the club where he was about to play. The next day he began writing his story.

In 2010 he rewrote it, and in 2012 he published it under the title A Second in Eternity. The 1997 text has not been published.

When September 11, 2001, came, Gary had already started writing, but he hadn’t yet published the book.

Step 8

September 11, 2001 · A cruise ship in the North Sea · Told by Gary

Gary sees the planes hit the Twin Towers and feels he had seen it before

That day, Gary was playing on a Norwegian cruise ship that sailed back and forth between Sweden, Norway, and England. Before his last set, a Swedish man told him a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York.

Gary rushed to the crew room. There, surrounded by ship staff in their uniforms, he watched live as the second plane hit the other tower. In his book he puts it like this:

“I realized that in 1977, I had seen those same images on that same TV, in that crew room, with those same people around me, dressed in their respective uniforms.”

On the same page, Gary writes that in 1977 he didn’t know the specifics, and that he couldn’t put the pieces together until it happened. In a 2022 interview he said that in 1977 he couldn’t make any sense of that image.

The question remains: did Gary see that scene in 1977, or did a general image become specific when he saw the news?