My Moment in Eternity

I'm a retired US Navy Chief Petty Officer with 22 years of service. I was an Instructor Flight Engineer on the P3 Orion aircraft for twenty years and logged over ten thousand flight hours. The P3 Orion is a 71 ton four-engine heavyweight turbo-prop aircraft designed for long-range maritime patrol missions.

One does not have to physically die to have a Near-Death Experience (NDE) or to have a Near Death Like Experience (NDLE). The psychological and emotional after-effects caused by an NDLE are identical to those experienced by someone declared clinically dead whether the body physically dies or not.

People who have crossed the veil and returned are called "Experiencers." As an Experiencer, I lived in spiritual crisis with a moral injury for decades. I needed help but never got any because I wasn't believed by anyone I tried to talk with about what happened to me. These "Experiences" are happening to soldiers around the world while in combat or during some other non-combat, traumatic event like what happened to me during an emergency engine-out landing that didn't go well causing our plane to depart the runway, which triggered my spiritual experience while doing my job as the flight engineer. That means the number of people being clinically affected after an NDE or NDLE type event is far higher than currently understood or believed. That alone makes this an enormous military readiness concern, not to mention a huge concern for front line providers and clergy as well. After I had my "Experience" in the Light, I urgently needed help to understand what exactly happened to me, and I lived in spiritual crisis mode for over two decades without any real professional help. That is the essence of the "Gap in Care" problem that's unknowingly creating moral injuries. Something must be done to bring more awareness to this problem, ergo my primary reason for sharing my story.

Unbeknownst to me for years, my "Gap in Care" moral injury and my NDE aftereffects affected my ability to maintain proper military readiness even though I hid it well from everyone, including myself, until I didn't. I didn't even know I was struggling with NDE aftereffects for years. All I knew was I desperately needed help getting answers and to understand exactly what happened to me. Instead, I got no help at all due to a "Gap in Care" culture. I can assure you there are many more people out there suffering emotionally than just the people who physically died in a professional clinical environment during a medical emergency and then lived to tell about it later. For that very reason, I made a video at the following link discussing the psychological impact of NDE Aftereffects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3aAk8AKRQg.

Here's what happened. In 1982 during an emergency engine-out landing at Naval Air Station Barbers Point in Hawaii, the aircraft suddenly departed the runway at 135 knots (just over 155MPH) due to pilot error on the landing. We narrowly missed slamming into a firetruck that was prepositioned a mere 100 feet away off the right-hand side of the runway. The moment I realized my death was just seconds away was the most helpless, hopeless, and terrifying moment I have ever known, and it caused a raw, visceral terror within me that somehow triggered a spontaneous Out of Body Experience (OBE) while I was wide awake doing my job.

My perception of reality suddenly changed. Time itself slowed down, and I began experiencing the sense of being in two distinctly different places both inside and outside the airplane at the same time. I was totally confused and desperately trying to understand what was happening to me. I was stunned at how much went through my mind when I knew I only had a few precious seconds left to live. Nothing in my twenty-two years of military training ever prepared me for anything like that. It absolutely rocked my world and changed my life forever.

My OBE in the plane was later followed up by a full...