Tom Sawyer’s near-death experience

Step 1

Before · 1945 to 1978 · He is well · Tom Sawyer’s account

A Rochester working man who believed in nothing

Tom Sawyer was born in 1945 in Rochester, a city in New York State. He has the same name as the boy in Mark Twain’s novel. It isn’t made up: it’s his real name. Kenneth Ring, a researcher who knew him well, makes a point of saying so.

He is married to Elaine, and they have two sons, Todd and Tim. He works in construction, running heavy equipment. He races bicycles at the national level. And he is a good mechanic. He always fixes his truck himself.

He was raised Catholic. But as a young man he decided that religion was “hocus pocus baloney.” Those are his own words. He says he had no relationship with God at all.

He is 33 when he crawls under his truck.

Step 2

May 23, 1978 · Evening · Pinned under the truck · Tom Sawyer’s account

The truck he is fixing falls on him and crushes his chest

He is in his driveway, lying under the pickup. His son Todd, who is nine, is helping and learning. He has put in extra jacks and wooden blocks to be safe.

But there are hollows under the asphalt. The ground gives way, and the truck comes down on his chest. It squeezes all the air out of his lungs.

Todd runs into the house to call emergency services. According to Sawyer, he goes a little over 15 minutes unable to breathe, until they manage to lift the truck off him.

There are records of the accident. Kenneth Ring wrote in 1984 that he had a photo of the truck and Sawyer’s medical records. They have not been published.

As he loses consciousness, he starts seeing colors.

Step 7

Coming back · The truck is lifted off him · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says he chooses to stay in the light, and still goes back to his body

The choice is this. If he wants to go back to his life, he will go back instantly. If he chooses to stay and become part of the light, he will never again be able to go back on his own.

He chooses to stay. He says he merged with the light and that, for an instant, he knew everything.

But he comes back. He goes back through the tunnel. He says he slams into his body just as the truck is lifted off him. He doesn’t know how or why he came back. No one explained it to him.

Eleven years later, in 1989, he says he is probably the happiest person you will ever meet, and that he looks forward to his natural death. What he says he brought back changed his life.

Step 8

The following years · Recovered · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says he comes back knowing things about physics he never studied

Sawyer and his wife say that when he came to, a word he didn’t know kept running through his head: “quantum.” It is a term from physics. He starts reading physics, filling notebooks with formulas, and taking science classes.

Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, described his case in a 1984 book. Ring tells it just as Sawyer and his wife told it to him. And he warns that he is not presenting it as proof of anything. Sawyer may have heard these things before and forgotten them.

Sawyer also says that, from then on, he knows things before they happen. At first, these warnings came to him several times a day, in no particular order: “everything from a major plane crash to the birth of a child.”

Bruce Greyson believes this didn’t happen to him before the accident. He suspects that back then Sawyer would have laughed at anyone who claimed such powers. By 1983, according to Ring, he was already something of a local celebrity and was appearing on television.

Sawyer says one of those premonitions comes to him one night in 1983, in Connecticut.

Step 9

Mid-October 1983 · In Connecticut · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says that, at a gathering with researchers, he blurts out: “But that’s not true!”

Kenneth Ring has a house in Connecticut that people call “the Near-Death Hotel.” People who have had an experience like Sawyer’s meet there to talk with the researchers. Sawyer goes often.

It is night. He is talking nonstop, and some people are recording him. Next to him, four women are talking among themselves. One of them is Norma Krenzel, who acts as hostess at the house.

They are talking about a book and a movie called The Ghost of Flight 401. The book and the movie tell the story of an L-1011 airliner that crashed in Florida in 1972, and of the ghost of its pilot. At the end, the ghost says there will never be another L-1011 crash.

Sawyer turns to them and says, very worked up, “But that’s not true!”

Then he realizes what he has said. If that isn’t true, there will be another crash. He starts to cry. The L-1011 is his favorite airliner.

Ring talks to him in his psychologist’s voice. Sawyer answers: “Ken, knock off the psychology talk. This is just me.” Ken is Kenneth Ring. He steps out onto the balcony for a moment. When he comes back, Ring asks him whether he knows anything more.

Step 10

That night, around 3:30 a.m. · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says he gives details of the crash, but doesn’t know when or where it will happen

Sawyer blurts out half-finished sentences. He is angry with himself because he knows so much and still can’t see it all clearly. In 1989, he remembered what he said that night like this:

• The plane. It is an L-1011, a model of passenger jet.
• The heat. It is exactly 103 degrees Fahrenheit (about 39 °C). “How can I know that it’s exactly 103° and yet I don’t know when or where it is?”
• A white building. The plane hits something large and white that he can’t make out clearly.
• The place. He sees an airport. But the plane doesn’t come down on the runway. It comes down in a muddy field.
• The people. He feels he knows everyone on the plane, and he knows that nine in ten of them will die. “Ken, I can read you off their first names.”
• A man in a car. A man who is not on the plane dies too. He is in a car, and he is a mechanic, like Sawyer.

A month later, Ring asks him privately whether he recognizes that airport. Sawyer says it looks like Philadelphia’s or Pittsburgh’s. He says it is the one with water next to it, with boats.

He told all of this in 1989, four years after the crash. Nothing written or recorded from that night in 1983 has been published.

For almost two years, he looks for that airport.

Step 11

1983 to July 1985 · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says he searches for the airport and uses the crash as an example in his talks

He keeps an eye on every airport he sees on television. When he travels, he asks for connecting flights to see whether he recognizes his. Once he goes through four airports to get from Philadelphia back to Rochester. He doesn’t find it.

When someone at his talks asks him for an example of a premonition, he always gives the same one. It is a plane crash, with the 103 degrees and the white building. He says he told dozens of people.

In July 1985, he gives one of those talks in a hair salon. A man is taking notes in a notebook. Sawyer thinks his name was Charles. The man tells him he believes that crash is real and hasn’t happened yet. He asks Sawyer to say when it will happen.

Sawyer thinks about it. He says it will happen between July 1 and his birthday, in September. Then, very sure of himself, he adds: “In fact, it’ll happen exactly halfway between that time.”

No one has found that notebook. His family told a Rochester newspaper in 1989 that they already knew the details in the weeks before the crash. These were a storm, the 103 degrees, a man who was not meant to die, and a large white building.

Then comes August 2, 1985.

Step 12

August 2, 1985, morning · In Rochester · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer says that morning he knows it is the day, and he calls a psychiatrist friend

He opens the door to go to work. The newspaper was tucked between the two doors, and it falls at his feet. He feels something run through his whole body. It is as if he could already see the next day’s headline. “Oh, this is the day,” he says out loud.

He goes to work, running his machine at a landfill. Around 11 in the morning he can’t take it anymore. He parks the machine, tells his boss he isn’t feeling well, and goes home. He had never missed work before.

No one is home. He calls the University of Connecticut hospital and asks for Bruce Greyson, the psychiatrist who is his friend. He says Greyson already knew a lot of what he had said about the plane. Here it is in our own words:

And the two of them just stay on the phone, without speaking.

Greyson remembers this call too. In 2016 he told other researchers that Sawyer called him that day, some six or seven hours before the crash. According to Greyson, Sawyer had foretold the type of plane, the day, and a window of hours. He had also said that the plane would go down in a storm as it approached an airport. No note written that day has been published.

That afternoon, in Texas, there is a storm.

Step 13

August 2, 1985, 6:05 p.m. in Dallas · Public record

A Delta L-1011 goes down in a storm as it comes in to land at Dallas

Delta Flight 191 is flying from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Los Angeles, with a stop at Dallas–Fort Worth airport, in Texas. The plane is an L-1011. There are 163 people on board.

As it comes in to Dallas, the plane flies into a storm. A very strong downward gust of wind pushes it toward the ground. In those years, planes had no way of detecting gusts like that.

The plane touches down short of the runway. It crosses a highway and hits a car. The driver dies. Then it crashes into two of the airport’s water tanks and catches fire. In all, 137 people die: 136 of those on board, and the man in the car.

Several things match what Sawyer says he had told people. It is an L-1011, there is a storm, the plane comes down short of the runway, a man dies in a car, and the plane crashes into something very large.

Not everything matches. The plane crashed into two water tanks, not a building. Sawyer acknowledged that. The airport was not Philadelphia’s or Pittsburgh’s. A little over eight in ten of the people on board died, not nine. And the National Weather Service recorded a high of 101 degrees Fahrenheit at the airport that day, not 103.

What Sawyer said about the plane was only recorded from 1989 on.

Step 14

1989 to 2007 · Tom Sawyer’s account

Sawyer tells his story in a newspaper and in a recorded interview, and dies in 2007

On January 12, 1989, the Rochester newspaper Times-Union runs a long article about his experience and his premonitions, including the one about the plane. In it, Sawyer says he blames himself for keeping so many details to himself.

On October 24, 1989, he records a long video interview with everything he remembers about the plane. It is the fullest version there is in his own voice. In 1993, the writer Sidney Saylor Farr publishes a book based on her interviews with him.

In that interview he says something else. He says that after the crash he expected the researchers who knew about his premonition to call him. And he says hardly any of them did.

He dies in April 2007, at 61. The following year, Kenneth Ring devotes an article to him. “This, what we call life, is temporary,” Sawyer said in 1989.