A real-life story · Bogotá (Colombia), 1995
Gloria Polo’s near-death experience
On May 5, 1995, Gloria Polo, a Colombian dentist, was struck by lightning at the National University in Bogotá. Her nephew, who was walking beside her, was killed instantly. Her heart stopped, and doctors resuscitated her. She later said that she left her body and went toward a light. She says that, while out of her body, she hugged her 9-year-old daughter, who was somewhere else in the city. She also said that, in the hospital, she had a second experience in a dark place and saw her whole life there.
Gloria Polo has told her story to thousands of people in many countries, and her talks have been translated into several languages. The accident was in the newspaper the next day, before she had told anyone anything. We tell it step by step and then look at what could be checked. If you only want the evidence, skip straight to what can be checked.
Step 1
Before 1995 · Bogotá · Gloria’s account
A 36-year-old dentist who had drifted away from her faith
Gloria Polo was a dentist in Bogotá. She was married to Fernando, and they had two young children. The older one was a 9-year-old girl.
She had been raised Catholic, but she says she had stopped believing. She practiced yoga and meditation and followed New Age ideas. She says that at the time she believed she had powers, such as sending messages with her mind or leaving her body and passing through walls.
Gloria says that, back then, she no longer believed in God or in the devil.
Step 2
Friday, May 5, 1995, in the afternoon · National University, Bogotá
In a downpour, Gloria crosses the campus with her nephew and her husband
That afternoon, Gloria went to the National University to pick up some books. Her husband and her nephew Eduardo went with her. Eduardo was a 23-year-old dentist doing a graduate program in orthodontics.
It was pouring rain. Gloria and Eduardo were sharing a small umbrella. Fernando wore a raincoat and walked along the wall of the library. To keep from getting wet, Gloria and Eduardo jumped over the puddles toward some trees.
At that moment, lightning struck.
Step 3
After 4 p.m. · On the ground, with no pulse · As reported by the press and a doctor
The lightning kills her nephew, and Gloria’s heart stops
The lightning struck a tree next to the group. Eduardo was killed instantly. Fernando was unconscious for a few minutes. Gloria lay on the ground with very severe burns.
The Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo reported it the next morning. It said the lightning had struck after 4 p.m. and had killed a dentist who had not yet been identified. According to witnesses at the university, the injured woman went into cardiac arrest and was resuscitated. She was then taken to Simón Bolívar Hospital. At the hospital, they gave her name: Gloria Constanza Polo.
Fourteen years later, Nairo Cano, a doctor of internal medicine, said on television that he treated her at the university’s infirmary. He said she wasn’t breathing, had no pulse, and didn’t respond to anything. According to him, she stayed that way for about three or four minutes from the time she was brought to him.
Gloria tells what she went through during that time.
Step 4
While she had no pulse · Gloria’s account
Gloria says she enters a tunnel of light and hugs everyone she loves
Gloria says that suddenly she was in a white tunnel, full of joy and peace. At the end there was a light like a sun, whiter than any color. She thought, “I’ve died” (translated from Spanish). And she thought of her children.
She says she could see all the people at once, the living and the dead. She hugged her great-grandparents and her parents, who had died. She says she could also see inside the people who were alive, and what they were thinking.
Her daughter was among those people.
Step 5
At that same time · Somewhere else in Bogotá · Gloria’s account
Gloria says she hugs her 9-year-old daughter, who was somewhere else in the city
Gloria says she wanted everyone to feel the love she was feeling, but no one noticed her. No one except her older daughter, who was 9 and far from the university.
Gloria doesn’t always say where the girl was. In a 2023 interview, she said her daughter had just come out of an English class and was taking shelter from the rain. In her 2026 book, she says the girl was at home.
Gloria says she hugged her, and that the girl felt the hug without seeing anyone and got scared. According to the 2026 book, the girl confirmed it later. We have not found any statement from the daughter herself.
Then Gloria heard a voice she knew.
Step 6
While they were resuscitating her · In the university’s infirmary · Gloria’s account
She hears her husband begging her to come back and slams back into her body
Gloria says she kept rising toward a beautiful lake. Then she heard Fernando crying. He was shouting at her to come back, to think of the children. She says she saw him from above and that God let her go back.
Then she saw her body on a stretcher in the infirmary. The doctors were giving her heart electric shocks. She says a spark pushed her back inside all at once, with terrible pain, and that smoke was coming out of her body.
Then they took her to the hospital.
Step 7
May 5, 1995, at night · San Pedro Claver Clinic, Bogotá
At the clinic, she has emergency surgery: burns all over her body and almost no blood reaching her legs
From Simón Bolívar Hospital she was moved to the San Pedro Claver Clinic. It was the clinic of Colombia’s Social Security health system, and she was admitted there that same day. This is stated in a medical certificate from that month, signed by the surgeon Mario Daniels. Gloria has published it on her website.
The certificate says she had electrical burns from the lightning and injuries all over her body. She had surgery under general anesthesia. The doctors cleaned her burns and removed the dead skin and tissue. The next day, very little blood was reaching her legs, and they made long cuts in them to keep the blood flowing.
Several of her organs stopped working properly at the same time. She was hardly passing any urine, and her lungs weren’t responding. So she was taken to the ICU of another clinic, where a machine helped her breathe. She went back to San Pedro Claver on May 9.
Gloria says that, during the first operation, she left her body again.
Step 8
May 5, 1995, in the operating room, under anesthesia · Gloria’s account
Gloria says she leaves her body again and falls into a dark place
Gloria says she was under anesthesia and was watching from outside what the doctors were doing to her body. She says people with a look of hatred began to come out of the operating room wall. She tried to go back into her body, but she kept bouncing off.
She fled through the wall and fell into a void. She went down some tunnels, first with light and then in darkness. The darkness hurt, and it smelled bad. She reached a plain, and there a huge hole opened in the ground, like a mouth, and it was swallowing her. She says someone held her by the feet and didn’t let her fall. She heard the screams of thousands of people, many of them young. And she felt that there was nothing of God there.
Gloria shouted that she was Catholic.
Step 9
In that place · Gloria’s account
Gloria says she sees her whole life like a movie and asks for another chance
Gloria says she saw a light and some stairs. Farther down was her father, almost at the edge of the hole, and her mother a little higher up, praying. A gentle voice asked her about the Ten Commandments. She didn’t know them.
Then she saw her whole life, like a movie. She saw what she had done, and also what she had thought and felt, and the effect it had had on other people. She says she saw herself on the way to a hole. She asked all the saints for help, and then she asked Jesus Christ for a second chance.
She says Jesus came down, pulled her out of the hole, and told her she was going back thanks to the prayers of people who didn’t know her. He gave her the task of telling what she had been through.
Gloria woke up in the ICU.
Step 10
May 1995 to 1997 · Bogotá
Her legs were going to be amputated, she walks out of the clinic, and two years later she has a daughter
Gloria says she spent about three days in a coma. According to her sister, the family buried Eduardo while she was still seriously ill.
According to the certificate, she was discharged from surgery on May 25 and stayed in the clinic for rehabilitation. A report from June 8 says the lightning had damaged the nerves in both her legs. She needed leg braces to walk.
One of the doctors who treated her spoke in a television report in 2000. He said that an amputation of her legs had been scheduled and that Gloria got the feeling back in them a few days before the operation. The certificate doesn’t mention an amputation. Gloria has walked with difficulty ever since.
Gloria says the lightning burned her ovaries and that the doctors told her she couldn’t have children. On September 3, 1997, her daughter María José was born.
Gloria began to tell what she had been through.
Step 11
1995 to today · From her talks, her books, and the press
Gloria tells her experience in talks around the world
Gloria soon went back to her dental practice. At the same time, she began telling her experience in churches, on radio stations, and in stadiums in many countries. Fernando died in 2006.
She has not written a book herself. The books with her name on them are transcriptions of her talks, made by other people and translated into several languages. Her website only endorses the edition by Flaviano Patrizi, an Italian. It first came out in 2011. Patrizi writes that he put together several talks and conversations and filled in what was missing from the account. In 2021 he rewrote it completely and added stories that, he says, Gloria had not told him before. It came out in Spanish in 2026.
Some details change from one version to another. In her early talks, the second experience happens in a dark place without God. In the 2011 book she calls it purgatory and adds scenes that weren’t in the talk. In the 2026 book, she says she never saw hell.
Let’s look at what can be checked about the hug she gave her daughter.
How many near-death experiences are distressing?
Gloria is not a unique case. Most people who report a near-death experience remember it as something good. But not all of them.
Imagine 100 people who have had one:
Each dot is a person. The 11 filled-in dots are the people who went through it with fear or anguish. That is what the University of Virginia found when it reviewed 546 accounts in its archive, in 2023.
The other 89 experienced it as pleasant or neutral.
| Who and when | People | Distressing experiences |
|---|---|---|
| University of Virginia archive, 2023 | 546 | 11% |
| Intensive care patients who remembered something, United States, 1979 | 36 | 22% |
| Review of thirty years of studies, 2014 | — | up to 20% |
What these figures don’t tell you
- They are underreported. People who have a distressing experience tend to keep it to themselves. Two researchers wrote about this in 2014. One is Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia. The other is Nancy Evans Bush of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). According to them, many of these people hide or disappear when they are asked about it.
- Almost all are accounts people sent in. The figures come from people who decide to share their experience. Studies done in hospitals offer hardly any figures.
That is why no one knows the real figure. Most estimates put it between 11 and 22 out of 100. There is more about this in What if a near-death experience is frightening? Gloria’s case mixes both. It begins with an immense light and peace, and continues in a dark place she begs to get out of.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Gloria Polo?
Gloria Polo is a Colombian dentist who was struck by lightning on May 5, 1995, at the National University in Bogotá. Her nephew was killed, and her heart stopped. Since then she has told the story of her near-death experience in talks around the world.
Is Gloria Polo’s story real?
The accident is real. The newspaper El Tiempo reported it on May 6, 1995. There is also a medical certificate from that month with her lightning burns. The experience is her own account, and no one can check what she went through inside. What can be checked.
How long was Gloria Polo without a pulse?
Nairo Cano is the doctor who treated her at the university. In 2009 he said on television that Gloria went about three or four minutes without breathing and without a pulse from the time she was brought to him. It is not known how much time passed in all since the lightning, and no published medical document gives those figures.
Did Gloria Polo write a book?
No. The books with her name on them are transcriptions of her talks made by other people. Her website only endorses the edition by Flaviano Patrizi, an Italian. It came out in 2011, Patrizi rewrote it in 2021, and it came out in Spanish in 2026.
Where this story comes from
Press
- El Tiempo, “Un rayo mató a una persona en la U. Nacional,” May 6, 1995, in SpanishRead
- El Tiempo, “Gloria Constanza Polo, la mujer que sobrevivió a un rayo,” October 11, 2014, in SpanishRead
- El Tiempo, “Gloria Polo, la mujer que se ‘enfrentó’ a un rayo y vive para contarlo,” October 31, 2014, in SpanishRead
Medical documents
- Medical certificate for the insurance company, May 20, 1995, and rehabilitation report, June 8, 1995, published on Gloria Polo’s website, in SpanishView
Television
- Esta es la historia, “Electrizada (II),” Canal Uno, 2000, in Spanish
- Séptimo Día, Caracol Televisión, September 28, 2009, with the doctor Nairo Cano and the surgeon Mario Daniels, in Spanish
Her talks and her website
- Transcription of a talk by Gloria Polo on Radio María (Colombia), around 2005 or later
- Gloria Polo with Flaviano Patrizi, Estuve a las puertas del cielo y del infierno. Nuevo testimonio de la Dra. Gloria Polo (Himmel, 2026), in Spanish. It is the edition her website endorsesBuy the book
- Flaviano Patrizi (ed.), Estuve a las puertas del cielo y del infierno [I was at the gates of heaven and hell], 1st edition, 2011
- Gloria Polo’s official websiteVisit
Learn more
- What is a near-death experience?Read
- What if a near-death experience is frightening?Read
- How we check each storyRead
Our archive
- The full reading of her two written accounts, the comparison with the certificate and the press, and the scoring of the case against our five criteria, as of October 28, 2026
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