Skeptics scoff at the idea of reincarnation and insist that it can’t be proven. But in fact, there’s plenty of well-documented evidence to support the truth of reincarnation. Respected researchers around the world have conducted extensive studies involving thousands of ordinary people, and they have all come to the same conclusion: we have lived before and will live again.

Skeptics usually consider past-life memories to be pure fantasy. But the research done by the late clinical psychologist Dr. Helen Wambach clearly shows otherwise. Over a twenty-nine-year period starting in the late 1960s, Dr. Wambach guided more than 1,000 people back to their prior incarnations using a method known as hypnotic regression. She reasoned that, if her subjects were merely fantasizing about who they’d been before, they would imagine exciting, glamorous lives as kings and queens, conquerors, celebrated artists and writers, and other famous people in history.

But exactly the opposite turned out to be true. Nobody saw himself or herself as Napoleon or Cleopatra or George Washington. Only one person remembered a lifetime as someone notable. All the others recalled simple, ordinary, frequently harsh existences, often as peasants, slaves, nomadic hunters, or children who had died young—hardly the sort of lives anyone would fantasize about!

Dr. Wambach also expected that, if her American subjects were fantasizing, they would “remember” living in places and at times they knew from movies, TV, or history books. But as it turned out, some who recalled living in the first century A.D. found themselves in Turkey, Pakistan, and the area around the Indus River in India—not in ancient Rome or the Holy Land, places with which most Americans would be more familiar. Of those who described lifetimes in the mid-1800s, only three even mentioned the Civil War.

Yet another interesting result challenged the idea that past-life memories were nothing but fantasy. Dr. Wambach assumed that, if her subjects were fantasizing, they would describe having been white men, because most of the accomplishments recorded in our history books have been those of white men. Furthermore, the majority of the people who took part in her studies were white.

In revisiting their past lives, however, these people often found themselves in black, brown, yellow, or red bodies. And regardless of their gender in this lifetime, half recalled previous lives as women, half as men, which corresponds to biological data that shows the earth’s population has always been evenly split between male and female.

Fantasies tend to be very personal; no two people are likely to have the same fantasy. So when Dr. Wambach tried another experiment and took twenty-one people back to incarnations in the Mediterranean region between 500 B.C. and 25 A.D., she was fascinated that all twenty-one saw themselves buying things with a certain odd, grayish coin. When Dr. Wambach checked with historians, she found that, indeed, a coin of this type had been used in that time and place. This was a peculiar detail her subjects couldn’t have known about, and certainly wouldn’t have considered important or exciting enough for a pure fantasy!