Bestselling Christian author and former investigative journalist, Lee Strobel, says Americans’ recent fascination with the unseen world led him to tackle one of his most personal and provocative subjects yet — miracles and near-death experiences, in an attempt to affirm Scripture and draw them closer to God.
In his latest book, Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World, Strobel draws on research and interviews into what he believes is powerful evidence of the supernatural - evidence, he insists is neither “fraud” nor “fakery”.
Strobel believes this growing interest in the supernatural presents an opportunity — especially for people who might not otherwise be open to Christian teaching.
On the Into the Supernatural podcast, he said: “It told me that this is a bridge where we can connect with people who may be far from God and yet have an interest in the supernatural. It may be an entryway for them to really learn about what the Bible does teach about the world beyond our physical realm.
“Being an evangelist, that was always my desire.”
With faith discussions increasingly entering public discourse — and what Strobel describes as a cultural “resurgence” of spiritual inquiry — he believes the time is right to put these stories in the spotlight.
He stated: “You begin to see documented cases of near-death experiences where people see or hear things that would have been impossible for them to see or hear if they hadn’t had an authentic out-of-body experience after their clinical death. It just reinforces what Scripture tells us about the supernatural realm, and I think it gives us more courage.”
Among the most compelling examples in the book are accounts of near-death experiences — moments where individuals clinically die and report otherworldly visions or awareness impossible to explain by natural means.
One particularly gripping story involves a woman who was declared clinically dead in a hospital. She later described floating above her body and observing the room below, including a specific detail invisible from her hospital bed.
Strobel recalled: “She said, ‘Oh, by the way, on the ceiling fan here in the emergency room, on the upper part of the blade … is a red sticker.’ And she couldn’t have seen it. Nobody could see it from the room because it’s on the upper part of the blade of the ceiling. So they got a ladder, and they went up, and, sure enough, there’s the red sticker that she only could have seen from her perspective of her spirit floating near the ceiling of the emergency room.”
He continued, “People are doing scientific inquiries into miracles. In other words, they’re testing them scientifically and with documentation in a way that I don’t think has been done that much in the past. And we’re seeing cases of documented miracles that are really waking up people to the fact that this is not wishful thinking, it’s not … the placebo effect, it’s not fraud, it’s not fakery. There are documented cases.”
Strobel, who made his name investigating the historical claims of Christianity in The Case for Christ, says he brought the same level of scepticism and journalistic rigour to this project, emphasising corroborated cases and medical documentation.
Another story he shared was of a woman who had been blind for years and suddenly regained perfect vision after her husband prayed for divine healing — an event confirmed by doctors and maintained for over four decades.
“And I think this is kind of opening people’s eyes to the fact that these aren’t just stories that you hear at Sunday school or whatever,” Strobel said. “But you dig down into many of these stories and you find substance, and you find people with eyewitnesses who have no motive to deceive. You have medical records and so forth.”
