A real-life story · Nebraska, United States, 1963
Ken Leth’s near-death experience
In 1963, when Ken Leth was eight, he had emergency surgery for appendicitis. He was put under with ether. He later said that he left his body and that spirits attacked him in the dark. He said that an angel took him to a place where he met his great-grandparents and Jesus. He also said that he was shown the future of the United States there, and that he did not remember it until he was an adult.
Starting in 2017, Ken described one of those scenes of the future on the radio. Donald Trump is pushed out of office. Trump speaks to a crowd in Washington with his fist raised. Then there is fighting in the streets. Those recordings are dated. Trump lost the 2020 election. Then, on January 6, 2021, he spoke to a crowd that went on to storm the Capitol. How closely does what Ken said match what happened? And could it have been expected?
Step 1
Before · 1963 · He is well · Ken’s account
An eight-year-old boy in a small Nebraska town
Ken Leth was born in 1955 in a small town in central Nebraska, in the United States. His family came from Denmark. His father’s name is Lyle.
His mother is very religious. She takes him to church and Sunday school every week. Ken knows what heaven is, because he has read and heard about it. But he says that at eight he had no idea what a near-death experience was.
He warns that what he tells today is “the memory of an eight-year-old kid.”
Step 2
Fall 1963 · Sick at home · Ken’s account
Appendicitis that looks like the flu
One day he comes home from school very sick. For days he vomits nonstop, until nothing comes up but bile. He can’t keep even water down.
His parents call the town doctor. Over the phone, the doctor thinks it is the flu. Ken spends at least a week at home on the couch.
One day he is left alone for a few hours. He goes to the kitchen, drinks a little water, and faints. Everything goes white. He crawls back to the couch. Then he feels something in his belly. In that moment he feels fine.
The next morning his mother takes one look at him and drives him to the doctor. Later she told him he was so pale that he looked “like white paint.”
Step 3
The same day · Critically ill · Ken’s account
He has emergency surgery under ether
The doctor sees right away that it is serious and sends him to the hospital. His father is away on a trip, and there is no way to reach him. His mother leaves a message at a diner where she thinks he will stop for coffee.
They don’t wait for his father. Two nurses shave his belly. They strap him to the operating table, and that scares him. It is a small hospital, and they put him under with ether. They put a mask over his face. The nurse tells him to breathe hard, as if he were blowing up a balloon.
He gets dizzy. It feels as if his head comes away from his body and circles around it, like the moon around the Earth. Then everything goes black.
No hospital records have been published. Even the date is unclear. In a text from 2019, Ken says it was in September 1963. In 2022 he says it was in early November. What comes next we know only from him.
Step 4
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says that, tied to his body by a cord, he is attacked by spirits in the dark
It is dark and silent. He realizes he can think and that he is still himself. But he is no longer in his body.
Little by little he begins to see. He sees older people with gray hair rising upward, people who have just died on Earth. They look happy. He wants to go up with them, but he can’t. A silver cord runs from his belly down to his body. His body is on the operating table.
In the distance, eyes appear. They sense that he is afraid, and they attack him. They fly at him, hit him, and spin him around as he hangs from the cord. They laugh like happy children. Ken says he had arrived at “the entrance of Hell.”
Finally, from deep inside, he says, “Please, God, make them stop.” Far away, a voice answers.
Step 5
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says an angel rescues him and puts him in a bubble
The voice asks where he is. He shouts, “I’m down here!” When the owner of the voice arrives, he shines. The spirits flee because they can’t stand that light.
It is a kind man in a long white robe with a belt. He carries a sword and a horn slung over his shoulder. He has no wings. Ken believes he was an angel.
The angel asks him whether he knows who God is. Ken tells him about Sunday school. The angel searches through his life and finds a memory. Ken, very small, sings a song wrong in church, and another boy corrects him in front of everyone.
Then he draws his sword and cuts the silver cord. He puts him in a bubble. It seems to be made of plastic, and it even squeaks. The angel tells him: “This will take you up to where all the others went.”
Step 6
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says he rises through a whirlwind of colors and meets relatives he didn’t know he had
The bubble rises. He sees the Earth from above, the lights of the cities, the stars. Other people are rising like him. They enter a tunnel that spins like a whirlwind, with colors like gemstones: emerald green, blue, ruby red.
At the end there is a barrier, like a cloud. Two arms grab him by the shoulders and lift him up. In front of him is a young man he doesn’t know. Years later, when he told the story at home, his father said he thought it was his cousin Eddie. Eddie died in the Korean War.
The young man takes him to a group of people dressed in old-fashioned clothes. No one knows who Ken is. They ask his last name, and he answers: “Leth.” They ask his father’s name: “Lyle.” “He’s our grandson,” say two older women. They are his great-grandmothers. Ken hadn’t even known his father had grandparents.
Step 7
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says a woman he calls “Mother” introduces him to Jesus
One of his great-grandmothers tells him someone very special is coming. It is an older woman. She wears a robe of coarse cloth, like a potato sack, and her hair is cut unevenly. She explains that when she was alive, she cut her hair with a knife. She treats him with so much love that Ken calls her “Mother.”
She shows him a cave with steps. On each step stands a generation of his family. There are ten or fifteen generations, maybe more. At the far end, beside a very bright light, is a very tall old man leaning on a staff.
The light comes closer and becomes a young man. “On earth, you might have been told that his name is Jesus,” she tells him. “This is my son.” Ken understands that he is with the Virgin Mary. Jesus fills him with light. Ken says that light is the food of heaven.
Then he is taken before God. Ken sees a light so bright he doesn’t dare look at it, and hears a very deep voice. He sees his whole life, from the day he was born. And then “Mother” takes him to a very large hall.
Step 8
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says he sees a model of the Earth that holds the past and the future
In the hall there is an enormous model of the Earth on a pedestal. It turns like the real Earth. Some beings look after it. One of them is like a schoolteacher. She is serious, practical, and a little impatient.
Ken asks her where he fits into all of it. She points to central Nebraska, where he was born. Something like a screen opens in front of him.
The first thing he sees is a line of cars moving slowly through a city. Something happens, people cry, and the cars speed away. He understands that it is President Kennedy. He says he saw it shortly before Kennedy was killed, on November 22, 1963.
But he says he did not remember it until his twenties. And he says Kennedy’s death left him “just as surprised as everyone else.” That is why this scene cannot be checked.
The teacher tells him he will see important things at the end of his life. The images start going by very fast.
Step 9
In the operating room · Under ether · Ken’s account
Ken says he sees a president thrown out of his office who riles up a crowd
He sees the Supreme Court building, with its columns. He is told that something will come out of there that will cause the country trouble. He sees a woman campaigning for president. And he sees a blond president, always angry, who divides the country.
In 2018 and 2020, Ken described what comes next like this. Some men walk into the Oval Office, confront the president, and remove him from the White House. Then Ken sees him in Washington, in front of a government building. He is in street clothes, at a microphone.
“He was yelling and shouting and getting crowds riled up. And he was shaking his fist. And he was telling them to fight, fight, fight.”
After that come fights and protests across the country, with people hurt. He says these are followed by a civil war, a flood near Omaha, and a huge explosion near Yellowstone. None of that has a date.
The blond president first appears in his recordings at the end of 2017. By then, Trump had already been in office for almost a year. But what comes next was recorded before it happened. Ken said that the president is pushed out and that the president speaks to the crowd.
Step 10
Coming back · In the hospital · Ken’s account
Ken says “Mother” wipes out the future so he won’t be a child prophet
“Mother” takes him back to his family in heaven. He has to choose between staying and going back. They tell him his mother on Earth is praying for him and would suffer terribly if he stayed. He decides to go back.
First, she touches the inside of his head and smooths over his memories of the future. “I do not want you to be a child prophet,” she tells him. If he remembers the future as a child, his life will be very hard.
He wakes up in the hospital. He needs two operations. Ken says he was still in the hospital when Kennedy was killed. He heard the nurses talking about it quietly in the hallway. He says he remembered nothing of the future.
Step 11
At age 23 or 24 · Ken’s account
Ken says a dream brings his memories back
He is 23 or 24. One night he dreams he is in his hometown church, hiding behind the back pews. A very deep voice says his full name: “Kenneth Peter Leth.” It asks him whether he will come forward. He answers no, he is not ready. And the dream ends.
Ken says that from that day on, the memories of the future come back to him little by little, over years. The first memory, and the clearest, is the one about Kennedy.
In 2020, at 65, he says new details still come to him. They come in dreams, or while he is talking in an interview. For decades he does not talk about it in public.
Step 12
2015 to 2020 · Recorded, with dates
He tells it on the radio, and the recordings are dated
In November 2015, Ken tells it in public for the first time. It is on NDE Radio, the show of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). The host is Lee Witting. Ken will come back to the show several times. This part can be checked, because the recordings are dated.
- March 2016. He says he saw a woman who became president and that her voice was Hillary Clinton’s. He puts it this way: “we had a female president.” Hillary Clinton did not win. Ken acknowledges this in 2017 and in 2018.
- December 2017. He talks about Trump for the first time. He sees him “getting pushed out” of office, furious, shouting, with his fist raised. Then he sees fighting in the streets. “I believe he will be impeached,” he says, “… or perhaps he will lose the election in 2020.”
- December 2018. Now he also says that some men walk into the Oval Office. And he says that Trump speaks to the crowd outside government buildings in Washington. He says the fighting “looked an awful lot to me like Boston.” And he adds that Trump would die soon after leaving office.
- August 2019. He repeats the scene. Trump is on the steps of a government building, “probably in Washington, D.C.,” stirring up unrest. A month later, at an IANDS conference, two researchers read a text by Ken with the same scene. The conference is on video.
- November 1, 2020, two days before the election. On a podcast he describes the microphone scene and the “fight, fight, fight.” He is asked whether Trump will lose the election. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” he answers.
Two months later, this is what happens.
Step 13
November 2020 to January 2021 · Public record
Trump loses the election and speaks to a crowd that storms the Capitol
Trump loses the election of November 3, 2020, and does not accept defeat.
On January 6, 2021, at midday, he speaks to his supporters in a park next to the White House. He tells them, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thousands of them go to the Capitol and storm it. People die, and more than 170 police officers are injured.
On January 13 he is impeached for the second time. The first was in December 2019. On January 20 he leaves office.
The main points match. Trump leaves office against his will, speaks to a crowd in Washington, calls on it to fight, and there is violence with people injured.
The details don’t match. Trump does not leave office because a group of men remove him from his office. He leaves because he loses an election. On January 6 he is still president. He does not speak on a flight of steps, and the violence is not in Boston. And Ken had another scene about Trump.
Step 14
2022 to today · Ken’s account
Ken describes another scene: Trump clutches his chest at a rally
In October 2022, Ken gives a video interview. He says he saw Trump at a rally in the Northeast, not far from Washington. Shortly afterward Trump puts his hand to his heart, as if he had been hurt, and can’t breathe. Then Ken sees him in a hospital, surrounded by his family, dying.
“He had a heart attack … or maybe he was shot. I don’t know.” And he adds that he expects it to happen “very, very soon.”
On July 13, 2024, a gunman wounds Trump in the ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He is taken to a hospital and released the same day. He does not die. In 2025 he becomes president again. After the shooting, the channel changes the video’s title to say Ken was “SHOWN Trump Assassination Attempt.” Ken did not say that.
Today he lives in isolation in the countryside, in Nebraska. He says he is not so much into warning people anymore, because “everything’s in motion.” For him, living a good life is being an open, honest person who doesn’t take himself too seriously and is open to love.
How many near-death experiences are distressing?
Ken 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.
- The scales score them low. The scales that measure whether something counts as a near-death experience were designed with the pleasant ones in mind. By our calculation with Virginia’s data, one in three distressing experiences would not reach 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. There is more about this in What if a near-death experience is frightening? Ken’s case mixes both. It begins with an attack in the dark and continues in a place of peace. It also has something unusual. What he said about the future was recorded, with a date, before it happened.
Where this story comes from
Interviews
- Ken Leth tells his story on Next Level Soul, with Alex Ferrari (October 2022)Watch on YouTube
- NDE Radio (IANDS), with Lee Witting, first part of his experience (November 2015)Listen to the audio
- NDE Radio, second part (November 2015)Listen to the audio
- NDE Radio, the woman president he saw (March 2016)Listen to the audio
- NDE Radio, the first time he talks about Trump out of office (December 2017)Listen to the audio
- NDE Radio, the crowd in Washington (December 2018)Listen to the audio
- NDE Radio, the steps (August 2019)Listen to the audio
- Passion Harvest, part one: his experience (October 31, 2020)Listen on SoundCloud
- Passion Harvest, part two: what he saw of the future (November 1, 2020)Listen on SoundCloud
Conference talks
- Robert and Suzanne Mays, visions of the future in NDEs, IANDS conference (September 2019). They read a text by KenWatch on YouTube
The events, with dates
- The January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, on Wikipedia, in SpanishRead for free
- The attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, on Wikipedia, in SpanishRead for free
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
- What if a near-death experience is frightening?Read
Our archive
- His record, with the nine recordings from 2015 to 2022, and our assessment of his two claims about Trump, as of October 11, 2026
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