Fighter Planes and Irish Brogues: What Reincarnation Means

What Is It?

Fighter Planes and Irish Brogues: What Reincarnation Means

"The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Curious Case of James Leininger

James Huston was a World War II navy fighter pilot of the Natoma Bay aircraft carrier. On March 3rd, 1945, he fell to his death after the propeller of his plane was blown off during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

James Leininger was born over forty years later on April 10th, 1998. He developed a fascination with airplanes at an early age as many boys do, but his parents, Bruce and Andrea Leininger, noticed that he was far more knowledgable about World War II technology than the average two-year-old. Despite a relative lack of exposure to World War II history, he knew obscure terminology on the subject, as was evident when he corrected his mother’s referral to a drop tank on a toy plane as a bomb, and when he corrected a narrator on the History Channel regarding the names of different Japanese planes. He knew that Corsair planes veered to the left during takeoff, and that Japanese fighter planes were given boys’ names while bomber planes were given girls’ names.

Around the same time, James began having a recurring nightmare in which he was unable to get out of a burning plane. He would wake up several nights a week screaming, “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!” When prompted by his parents, he said that the

“little man” was him and that he’d been shot down by the Japanese over Iwo Jima. The boat his plane had taken off from was the called the Natoma.

It was Andrea Leininger’s mother who suggested that the nightmares combined w...

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...Bridey Murphy. She was skeptical, unsure of whether this past-life persona of hers had actually been a real person. However, she did tell her daughter, “The older I get, the more open I am to it” (Stacy Horn, Unbelievable: 125). We can’t know what Tighe was really thinking, but her statement reveals the fear she had of dying as it grew closer with age and the consequent hope she had for being reincarnated again. This is what it ultimately comes down to. We are far from proving that reincarnation is a reality and there is sufficient inexplicable evidence that prevents us from ruling out the possibility altogether, but what really matters is that it shows how much we humans have always and will always want to live forever.

**Note: I plan on going further into the psychoanalysis of belief and disbelief in the last section, and from there writing a suitably introduction.