Jingszo !

Twenty years after the Bridey Murphy sensation, a much more impressive case of past-lives startled the public. The Bloxham tapes were first presented as a BBC television documentary produced by Jeffrey Iverson. Then they were included and enlarged on in Iverson’s book More Lives Than One? The tapes were regarded as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… amazingly detailed accounts of past lives – accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation.’ Inevitably they achieved international renown.

The tapes themselves had been accumulated for years by an elderly Cardiff-based hypnotherapist named Arnll Bloxham. Bloxham had been unable to study as a doctor and had turned to hypnotherapy. He was a life-long believer in reincarnation, but his interest in past-life regressions did not emerge until quite late in his career. Despite that, he managed to accumulate a cupboard full of tapes of his experiments with more than four hundred people.

Are past-life regressions really evidence for reincarnation? Or could they be glimpses of ancestral memories? Both theories have their followers. Yet rigorous research provides a distinctly different answer. These regressions are fascinating examples of cryptomnesia.