A real-life story · Bogotá, Colombia, 2020
Israel Vargas’ near-death experience
In 2020, Colombian journalist Israel Vargas came down with COVID and had to be intubated in intensive care. He later said he saw his own burial, passed twice through nightmarish places, and reached a white valley where he no longer felt any pain. He also said that on his way back he saw, on some screens, who was going to win the US presidential election and Colombia’s soccer league.
Both things he says he saw on those screens came true: Joe Biden won the November 2020 election, and América de Cali won the league that December. What we need to know is whether he saw them before they happened.
Step 1
Before · 2020 · In good health · Israel’s account
A journalist who lives to travel
Israel Vargas is a journalist in Bogotá. He hosts a travel channel, Bogotanos por el Mundo [Bogotanos Around the World], and has filmed stories in 14 countries.
He says his world was going out with friends, driving a nice SUV, wearing good jewelry, and eating well.
He is a believer, and he prays. When COVID reaches Colombia, he doesn’t take it very seriously. He thinks there is some business behind it. He lets his guard down a little.
Step 2
2020 · Sick with COVID · Israel’s account
He catches COVID while filming a story
He is filming a story about a performer who is very well known in Colombia. The performer’s manager has COVID, but Israel doesn’t know it.
On the third day, he has chills, vomiting, and a fever, and he is struggling to breathe. He is taken to the emergency room. He says goodbye to his family at the door, because under pandemic rules no one can go in with him.
He is sent to a bigger hospital. Both tests come back positive. He is given a device to exercise his lungs. You blow into it to make some little balls rise. At first they rise. By the end they no longer move.
Step 3
In intensive care · Critically ill · Israel’s account
He is given one minute to say goodbye
Dr. Bernal, the head of intensive care, comes in. He tells Israel they have to intubate him. To intubate means to put a tube down into the lungs so a machine can breathe for the patient. Israel is afraid. He has heard that out of every ten people who are intubated, almost all of them die.
“Promise me, doctor, that you’ll bring me back,” he begs (translated from Spanish). The doctor answers that he can’t promise him anything, because he isn’t God. The oxygen level in Israel’s blood is at 48%. Normal is above 95.
They give him a tablet and one minute. His wife and children are on the screen. He can barely speak. He tells them he loves them and asks them to forgive him. The call cuts out.
The doctor asks him to pray, and not to stop praying, whatever he sees. Israel begins the Lord’s Prayer and slowly fades out. Then a very deep peace comes over him. There is nothing to see and nothing to hear. Until a voice breaks the silence.
Step 4
Intubated and unconscious · Israel’s account
Israel says a man in white welcomes him and sends him on “with the dead”
“My son, you can do it,” the voice says. It sounds the way things sound when you put your head under water in a pool. He sees a hand reaching toward him and grabs it, because he is drowning.
He closes his eyes and opens them somewhere else. Israel says that from here on everything goes like this: he closes his eyes, opens them, and he is in another scene. Colors are more intense, and sounds are sharper.
Now he walks into a dark hospital. It is night, and it is raining hard. A very tall man greets him. He is dressed in white and wears an oxygen mask. He says: “Welcome. Go on in, with the dead.” Israel answers that he isn’t dead. The man points him down a hallway.
Then he sees his own wake. He sees his wife and children, and he hears the family arguing. Then he sees his burial: the coffin being lowered, his children screaming, the earth falling on top. And he keeps going down.
Step 5
Intubated and unconscious · Israel’s account
Israel says he reaches a red valley
He arrives in a reddish valley with caves. A man tattooed all over his body greets him. The man mocks him: “So you’re the one who does whatever he pleases back there on earth.” In the distance, many silhouettes are worshiping a giant figure.
Two huge women appear, more than two meters tall. They tell him he can have anything he wants there. They try to touch him, but they can’t. Israel says there was always a light above him.
He remembers what the doctor told him, and he prays. He asks for forgiveness. He closes his eyes.
Step 6
According to the doctor, his heart stops · Israel’s account
Israel says he starts rising toward a light and the doctor’s hands hold him back
He opens his eyes in a white room, on a stretcher. A soul comes up to him. It leads a little girl and two other souls in chains. “Who is this Israel, that they’re shouting so much?” it asks. He believes the sound is many people praying.
A small cloud appears on the ceiling, rumbling like thunder. It grows, and a beam of light comes out of it. Israel starts rising toward that light.
Then he feels the doctor’s hands on his chest and hears his voice: “Israel, fight. You can do it.”
He sees his father-in-law, who had died a couple of years earlier, pass by, made of flashes of light. They look at each other, but they don’t speak.
He says the doctor explained to him years later what was happening in the room at that moment. Israel’s heart and breathing had stopped for six and a half minutes. The doctor climbed on top of him and pounded on his chest until he came back. His family was called and told he had died. Israel says the cardiac arrest is in his medical records. Those records have not been published.
Step 7
Intubated and unconscious · Israel’s account
Israel says he sees on a screen what he had said a few days earlier
Up above, he sees a figure seated on something like a stone throne. It seems to him like the figure of a father. He tries to say “Jesus” and loses consciousness.
He comes to in another room. Beside him is someone with a voice of great authority: “Israel, why do you judge us?” Israel says no one there speaks with their mouth. Everything happens through the mind.
On a screen he sees himself a few days earlier, with his wife. The two of them are criticizing priests and pastors for not helping people during the pandemic. Then he sees his daughter talking about him with her mother. They talk about things only the two of them knew.
They show him his whole life, from when he was a baby. They tell him that each good thing counts as one, and each bad thing counts as three. He loses consciousness again.
Step 8
Intubated and unconscious · Israel’s account
Israel says he goes back to the valley and wakes up in a morgue
He is back in the valley. Now there are drums and songs full of insults. One of those women shows him bars, drugs, and robberies: “Look at what you people do back there.” There are things he saw that he would rather not talk about.
He closes his eyes and finds himself in a morgue, inside a tin box. He can smell his own body. They are getting him ready so his family can see him one last time.
A very beautiful being comes up to him. Israel can’t tell whether it is a man or a woman. It promises to get him out of there that same day if he gives himself to it forever. From what the being tells him, Israel understands who it is. He prays, and the being goes away. When he opens his eyes again, everything has changed.
Step 9
Intubated and unconscious · Israel’s account
Israel says he reaches a white valley and doesn’t want to come back
He walks down the hallways of a hospital and into a ward full of beds. He understands they are for those who are ready to go. Only one has its curtain open. “This one is mine,” he thinks.
When he sits down, he looks into the distance and sees a valley where everything is white and shining. He hears singing in a language he doesn’t know.
He takes two steps toward it. He no longer feels pain, or fever, or anything. Only peace.
Two women take him by the arms. One is dressed in white, and the other is dressed in black. They tell him he has to go back and carry a message. He gets angry and begs them to let him stay. They send him back down a very long hallway.
Step 10
On the way back · Israel’s account
Israel says he sees screens showing what is going to happen
In the hallway on the way back, he looks to one side and sees some screens. Israel says that on them you could see “the reality of what was happening and of what is going to happen.”
On one screen he sees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump. On another, he sees people celebrating América de Cali as Colombia’s soccer champion.
In his earliest version, from 2024, he says that América “wasn’t doing very well” at the time. In 2026 he adds that he saw “many, many more things” about his family, his friends, and his country. He does not say what they are.
The two things he does describe really happened. Did he see them before they happened?
Step 11
Days later · Awake · Israel’s account
He wakes up not knowing where he is
By his 2024 account, he spends 27 days in the hospital, and 17 of them in intensive care. After he wakes up, it takes him days to recognize anyone. He is caught between two worlds. He keeps seeing things “from over there.”
Someone takes off his mask and lets a few drops of water fall into his mouth. “It tasted like life,” he recalls.
One day a woman comes in wearing a blue tunic. Her eyes are very light. She sits on his bed and asks him: “Do you remember what we talked about over there?” He tells her no. She says goodbye and leaves. Israel says he still doesn’t know who she was.
He leaves the hospital unable to take care of himself. It takes him three years to recover, and he is left with lasting effects. And he has something to tell his family.
Step 12
Back home · Israel’s account
Israel says he told his family who was going to win
At first, no one at home believes him. They find him strange, because everything seems sinful to him and he wants to separate from his family. Two psychologists see him.
Israel says he tells them that Biden is going to be president of the United States. As he tells it, a few days later Biden is elected. He also tells them that the league champion will be América de Cali. His children follow soccer, and they argue with him. They say América is doing very badly and the champion will be Millonarios.
He also draws what he saw in a notebook. In a 2024 interview he shows some of the drawings. They show the being who greeted him, the bed, and the souls. He doesn’t say that any of those drawings are of Biden or América.
When did all this happen? In 2024 he said he was intubated a few days before the US election, which was held on November 3, 2020. In 2026 he said it was in early 2020, just before the pandemic. The exact date would be in his medical records.
Step 13
About three years later · Israel’s account
Israel says he tracks down the doctor and tells him about some pink chairs
Israel is preparing a film about his experience. He wants to thank Dr. Bernal, and it takes him three months to find him. They meet with the film crew present.
Israel asks him how things went with the medical center the doctor was planning to open with his wife. Israel tells him he saw himself get up and walk down a hallway while he was intubated. There he saw the doctor at a small reception desk. The doctor was talking with his wife about some pink and blue chairs to furnish the center. Israel describes what the doctor’s wife looks like. He says she has dark coloring.
According to Israel, the doctor stares at him: “You never got up out of that room.” But he confirms that he does have a medical center, that he did buy those chairs, and that his wife looks like that. The doctor has not given his own version in public.
Today Israel has a channel about the afterlife. He made the film Vida en el más allá [Life in the Afterlife] with his own money. He goes to funeral homes to pray for people he doesn’t know. And he says what was asked of him was simple: forgive, love, and don’t judge.
How many near-death experiences are distressing?
Israel 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 in 2023, when it reviewed 546 accounts in its archive.
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 said so in 2014. One is Bruce Greyson, of the University of Virginia. The other is Nancy Evans Bush, of IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies. According to them, many of these people hide or disappear when they are asked about it.
- The scales give them few points. The scales that measure whether something counts as a near-death experience were designed with the pleasant ones in mind. We did the calculation with Virginia’s own data. One in three distressing experiences would fall below the minimum score.
- 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. We explain more in What if a near-death experience is frightening? Israel’s case stands out because it mixes the frightening and the pleasant. He goes through nightmarish places twice and, at the end, reaches a valley of peace.
Where this story comes from
Interviews
- Israel Vargas tells his story on Experiencias Cercanas a la Muerte [Near-Death Experiences] (2026), in SpanishWatch on YouTube
- His earliest version, on the same channel (July 2024), part 1: catching COVID and the start of the experience, in SpanishWatch on YouTube
- Part 2: the screens, waking up, and the medical center, in SpanishWatch on YouTube
- Part 3: what he told his family and the meeting with the doctor, in SpanishWatch on YouTube
- Israel Vargas on The Other Side en Español (September 2024), in SpanishWatch on YouTube
Studies
- Bruce Greyson (2023), “The Darker Side of Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Scientific ExplorationRead for free
- Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson (2014), “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics,” Missouri MedicineRead for free
Learn more
Our archive
- His record, with the five interviews, and our assessment of what he described, as of October 10, 2026
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