A father who believes his son was a World War II fighter pilot in “a past life” says his Christian faith has remained in tact despite his new belief while his wife says the situation has “enhanced my belief system”.
“I am a Christian, and this has only reaffirmed the strength of my Christian faith,” Bruce C Leininger said in an appearance on Good Morning America on Monday.
“It’s a new reality,” he added.
Around nine years ago, Leininger’s then two-year-old son, James, began to have recurring nightmares of a plane crash that got worse and more frequent as time went on.
"I'd wake him up and he'd be screaming," Andrea Leininger told "Primetime Live" co-anchor Chris Cuomo back in 2004. She said when she asked her son what he was dreaming about, he would say, "Airplane crash on fire; little man can't get out."
Over time, James' parents say he revealed extraordinary details about the life of a former fighter pilot – details that eventually convinced even Bruce Leininger, who originally thought the idea of James remembering a past life was “baloney”.
“Him (James) giving us the name of the ship, the name of the man he flew with, the location where he was shot down, and then three years of hard work verifying all the details right down to an eyewitness account seeing the face of James M Huston Jr (the WWII fighter pilot) being shot down, describing the way the plane hit, matching exactly what James described. The overwhelming details were there,” Leininger recalled Monday. “I had to give up the battle.”
Though the concept of reincarnation seemingly clashes with verses in the Bible such as Hebrews 9:27, which states how a man “is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment”, Leininger said the events of the past few years had given him a “much deeper understanding of the fact that our spirit has an eternal life”.
“And we really don’t know. We still have to go on faith on what happens,” he stated. James, he said, was "just an example of a spirit deciding to rejoin us”.
Today, 11-year-old James doesn’t remember the dreams that he had shared as a little boy – a common occurrence, according to those who have come across cases like his.
