The hardest kind of discernment is the kind that protects us from the stories that never happened at all.
In 2010, a small Christian publisher released a book that would sell more than a million copies. Its cover featured a little boy with a gentle smile. The title told you everything you thought you needed to know: The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. The boy was Alex Malarkey. He was six years old when a car accident nearly killed him in 2004, and the book described what he saw during the two months he spent in a coma — angels, Jesus, the gates of heaven, even the devil. Churches bought copies. Pastors recommended it. Parents read it aloud to their children. The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association honored it with a platinum sales award in 2013.1
Five years later, Alex Malarkey — now sixteen years old and still quadriplegic from the accident — wrote a short letter that would shake Christian publishing to its foundation. The letter was posted on a small apologetics blog on January 13, 2015. The words were plain and brief. "I did not die," he wrote. "I did not go to Heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention."2 He ended with a plea for readers to stop buying the book and to turn to the Bible instead. Within days, Tyndale House Publishers halted sales. LifeWay Christian Stores pulled the book from its shelves. The bestseller was out of print.3
That story is painful for a lot of reasons. A little boy was hurt terribly in a car accident. A family suffered. A marriage broke apart. Christian readers who had trusted the book — who had given copies to dying friends, who had read passages aloud in grief counseling, who had felt their own faith warmed by what they thought was a true story — discovered that the story wasn't true. And a whole genre of popular Christian books was suddenly under a cloud of suspicion that, for some readers, has never really lifted.
We have to talk about fabricated NDEs. We cannot do the work of discernment honestly without facing this category head-on. In earlier chapters I argued — and I still believe it — that most near-death experiences are real spiritual events, and that deathbed experiences are even more reliable. Wholesale rejection of all NDE reports is both cruel and wrong. But wholesale acceptance is equally wrong. Somewhere in between sits the small but damaging category of stories that are not spiritual experiences at all. They are inventions. Or they are real experiences buried under so much embellishment that the original event has vanished. Or they are honest memories that got reshaped by money, fame, or repetition into something their original bearer would not recognize.
This chapter is about those stories. My goal is to help you spot them before they mislead you — not to make you suspicious of everything you read, but to give you tools so that you can trust the trustworthy and set aside the rest. I want to be honest that this is delicate ground. Accusing a book or an author of fabrication is a serious thing. I will not name a single author in this chapter as a fabricator unless they have admitted it themselves, or unless the documentary record makes the charge impossible to avoid. Where there is doubt, I will say there is doubt. Where there is only concern, I will say only concern. That is the rule. But the rule cannot be silence, because silence has costs too.
Let me say a word about why this chapter is harder to write than almost any other chapter in this book. In the earlier chapters, I was evaluating ideas — the shape of an NDE, the features of a DBE, the biblical tests for spiritual experience, the question of whether a light being is really Jesus. Those are conceptual questions, and you can be as rigorous as you like in engaging them without ever touching another human being's reputation. This chapter is different. Here I am engaging real books written by real people, and in a few cases evaluating whether what they published was true. A wrongly placed accusation in this area can injure an honest person. A wrongly withheld accusation, on the other hand, can let a fraud keep hurting readers. The chapter has to walk carefully between those two kinds of failure, and it will probably not walk that line perfectly. I ask your patience if I am too cautious in places and too direct in others. The problem does not admit of a tidy solution.
I also want to say, before we go further, that the existence of fabricated NDEs does not affect the broader evidential case for the conscious survival of the soul. Most of the strongest evidence for post-mortem consciousness does not come from bestselling memoirs at all. It comes from carefully conducted prospective studies in cardiac care units, from the NDERF database of thousands of submitted accounts, from veridical cases verified against hospital records, and from research into deathbed experiences by hospice nurses and physicians. That body of evidence has nothing to do with whether The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven was true or false. It stands independently. So as we work our way through this chapter, keep in mind that we are evaluating a specific problem within a specific sub-category of NDE literature — popular memoirs marketed to Christian readers — and not the whole field.
A small but significant portion of popular NDE literature consists of accounts that are not genuine spiritual experiences but fabrications, embellishments, or testimonies so reshaped by commercial and personal pressures that they have lost contact with whatever may have originally happened. These accounts damage the whole field. Christians need a way to spot them — markers, warning signs, and simple questions — so that the existence of fabrications does not lead us either to swallow them whole or to reject genuine NDEs along with the counterfeits.
Let's begin where we must begin: with the Alex Malarkey story itself, told carefully and fairly. I want to walk through it slowly because the lessons it teaches are the lessons this whole chapter depends on.
On November 14, 2004, six-year-old Alex Malarkey was riding in a car driven by his father Kevin near Rushsylvania, Ohio. The car was struck on the side by another vehicle while making a left turn. Kevin suffered only minor injuries. Alex was not so lucky. His injuries were catastrophic — severe spinal damage, severe neck trauma, brain injury. He would be left quadriplegic. He was in a coma for two months.4
During his recovery, Alex — still a small boy — began describing visions of heaven, of angels, of Jesus, even of the devil looking at him through the window of the wrecked car. His parents recorded some of these accounts on a recovery blog. At first the blog attracted little attention. But in 2009, when Alex became the youngest person to receive a particular surgery that allowed him to breathe on his own — a surgery first performed on Christopher Reeve — the family's story gained national notice. A literary agent approached the family. A book deal followed. Tyndale House Publishers, a respected evangelical publisher, agreed to publish the account. It was released in 2010 under the joint authorship of Kevin and Alex Malarkey, though the copyright, as later reporting would note, was held by Kevin alone.5
The book was part of a booming publishing category that critics would later call "heaven tourism." The genre had been pioneered by Don Piper's 90 Minutes in Heaven, which spent years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than six million copies, and by Todd Burpo's Heaven Is for Real, which eventually sold over ten million copies and was made into a feature film.6 In that climate, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven sold well over a million copies. It was marketed to Christians. It was stocked in Christian bookstores. Kevin Malarkey gave talks and interviews. The story entered the bloodstream of evangelical culture as a genuine testimony of a miracle child who had glimpsed heaven.
Very few people outside the family knew that trouble had been brewing for years. Beth Malarkey, Alex's mother, had been raising serious concerns about the book at least since 2012. She posted on her personal blog in April 2014 that the book was hurting her son, that he was not receiving most of the royalties despite his enormous ongoing medical needs, that a pastor had told Alex not to recant the story because the book was "blessing people," and that Alex's own objections had been suppressed.7 She had contacted Tyndale House. She had contacted Christian retailers. Her objections were not public enough to gain traction. They were, for several years, almost entirely ignored.8
Alex himself had posted an online comment as early as 2011 describing the book as deeply deceptive. The comment was deleted. He was blocked from the page it had appeared on.9 That is part of what makes his 2015 letter so striking. He had been trying to say it for years, and no one with the power to stop the book had been listening.
In January 2015, Alex — then sixteen — dictated his open letter. Because of his physical limitations, the letter was short. He addressed it to the Christian retailers who were still selling the book:
Please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short. I did not die. I did not go to Heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.10
Within two days the story was everywhere. Within three days Tyndale House announced it was halting production and pulling the book. LifeWay and other Christian retailers followed suit. Tyndale said it had confirmed the retraction directly with Kevin Malarkey and was "saddened" to learn that the story had been fabricated. The company offered retailers full returns.11
The story did not end neatly. Kevin Malarkey, Alex's father, went silent for years and eventually gave a single interview in 2019 in which he said he still stood by the book. Kevin and Beth divorced in 2018. Alex, now an adult, sued Tyndale House for defamation and exploitation, arguing that the publisher had used his name, image, and injuries for profit while he and his mother had tried unsuccessfully to stop the book. A judge dismissed the lawsuit. Alex and his mother, according to public reporting, have faced financial hardship in the years since.12
Some of what happened inside the Malarkey home in the years between the accident and the recantation is disputed between family members. I am not, in this chapter, trying to adjudicate those private disputes. What I am treating as settled is the public record: the book was published; it sold over a million copies; Alex publicly and in his own name recanted his part in it; the publisher pulled it. Those are the facts the Christian public needs to reckon with, and those facts alone are enough to teach us what this case has to teach.
I do not think Christians have fully absorbed what happened here. So let me lay out five lessons that I believe this case teaches, as plainly as I can.
First, commercial pressure can corrupt even Christian publishing. Tyndale House is a serious and respected Christian publisher. It has produced countless faithful books. And yet, in this case, it published a sensational story that was not true, kept it in print for years over the objections of the child's own mother, and was apparently not moved to thorough investigation until the child himself publicly recanted in writing. J. Steve Miller draws the blunt conclusion: "Sometimes people lie. Sometimes people are confused. Some people have mental illness. Some have false memories. Therefore, don't be gullible."13 That is not a knock against Christian publishing as a whole. It is a reminder that a Christian label on the spine is not the same thing as verification. When a story is sensational enough to sell millions of copies, the incentive to publish it will always exceed the incentive to investigate it carefully. Readers cannot assume a publisher has done the hard work for them.
Second, Christian content does not validate an account. The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven featured Jesus. It featured angels. It featured biblical imagery. Almost nothing in the book, taken in isolation, was obviously anti-Christian. The main content aligned with broad Christian expectations about what heaven should look like. And yet the whole thing was invented. Christian content is not a substitute for verified accounts. A fabrication can be dressed entirely in evangelical clothing. Shaun Tabatt makes the point repeatedly in The NDE Conspiracy: even accounts that sound thoroughly Christian must still be weighed against Scripture, against historic Christian teaching, and against the evidence for the event itself.15 The test is not whether a story sounds Christian. The test is whether the story is true, and whether what it teaches lines up with what Scripture teaches.
Third, primary sources should be engaged directly. In the Malarkey case, the child was the alleged experiencer, but the account was told and shaped almost entirely by his father, who held the copyright. The child himself was never the primary voice of the book. When he did try to speak for himself, he was silenced by the people around him. We should have noticed this earlier. A simple rule is: if the experiencer is unavailable for direct questions, or if the story must be told through a parent, pastor, co-author, or ghostwriter, the testimony becomes harder to evaluate. That does not make it automatically false. But it does make caution appropriate. Miller calls this a red flag in his "Gray Scale" of warning signs for any NDE report: "The report isn't first-hand, but was reported second or third hand."16
Fourth, the damage of a fabrication is wide. When a book like The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven is exposed, the hurt ripples outward in several directions. Grieving Christians who drew comfort from the book feel betrayed. Pastors who recommended it feel foolish. Skeptics of NDEs point to the recantation as evidence that all such accounts are suspect. And — maybe worst of all — the exposure of the fake makes it harder for people to trust real accounts. That is a real cost. I do not think it is the biggest cost; the biggest cost is the harm done to Alex himself and to his family. But it is a serious cost to the broader work of understanding and evaluating NDE testimony.
Fifth, Alex's courage deserves honor. I want to say this carefully, because the pastoral situation of the Malarkey family is not mine to judge. But from the outside, the one thing that stands out clearly is that a sixteen-year-old boy, after more than a decade of paralysis and pain, used what little voice he had to tell the truth, even though telling the truth cost him further conflict with his father and further difficulty for his family. That kind of honesty at personal cost is rare. It is also a genuine service to the church. Alex's letter did more to clean up the "heaven tourism" genre than a hundred watchful theologians could have done. His call — "The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible"17 — is good theology. I think we should receive it as such.
· · ·
Before walking through the types of unreliable accounts, I want to stop and ask a question that I think is often skipped. Why does the category of popular NDE memoirs — as opposed to, say, the peer-reviewed NDE research literature — have such a serious fabrication problem in the first place? The answer matters because it shapes how we should read every book in the genre.
Several features make this genre unusually vulnerable. First, the events at the heart of each book are, by definition, private and internal. No camera recorded them. No witnesses can fully confirm them. The experiencer is the only person with direct access to what happened "on the other side," which means the publisher's investigation has to rely almost entirely on the experiencer's word. Compared to a historical biography, an investigative journalism piece, or a peer-reviewed study, the verification tools available are remarkably thin. A publisher can check the accident happened, the coma happened, the surgery happened. It cannot check whether the angels had wings like wrestlers.
Second, the audience is highly motivated to believe. Readers who pick up a popular heaven memoir are usually Christians who already believe heaven is real, who are often grieving a lost loved one, and who are emotionally hungry for confirmation. That hunger is not a flaw in the reader — it is a perfectly understandable feature of faith meeting grief. But it does make the audience easier to satisfy than, say, a skeptical review panel. Books that tell Christian readers what they already hope to hear will sell copies that books requiring careful scrutiny of their own claims will not.
Third, the financial rewards are enormous. 90 Minutes in Heaven sold over six million copies. Heaven Is for Real sold over ten million copies and was made into a major film. Even the mid-tier of the genre has produced book deals and speaking careers that can change a family's finances overnight. Where the incentives are that large, the pressure to produce a book in this category — and to make the book as compelling as possible — will be correspondingly large. That does not mean every author is corrupted by the money. Most are not. But the structural incentive is there, and some will be corrupted.
Fourth, the genre rewards novelty. Miller's observation bears repeating here: "Niche, anomalous NDEs may sell better than core NDEs, since the former claim to have something fresh to offer."14 A short, biblically ordinary NDE — out-of-body, tunnel, light, love, return — is not actually enough to carry a whole book. So authors, under pressure to produce book-length material, extend the original experience outward. Sometimes that extension is honest reflection and Bible study. Sometimes it drifts into new details that were not in the original experience. The drift is rarely all at once. It happens across drafts, across interviews, across chapters, across sequels.
Fifth, there is very little professional accountability. A published NDE memoir does not pass through the peer review that a medical journal article would. It does not get fact-checked the way a major newspaper story would. The publisher's interest in investigating the author is inversely related to the book's commercial potential. If the book is going to sell a million copies, the publisher will not want to derail the project over an uncertainty that might kill it. That is a structural flaw in the system, and it produces predictable problems.
Sixth, and this is important, the audience has been trained by the genre to expect more. Once Heaven Is for Real sold ten million copies, the bar for what a heaven memoir looks like shifted. A simple account of a peaceful presence and a sense of being sent back no longer feels "like enough" to the reader. The reader now expects a multi-chapter tour, with specific architectural details, conversations with identifiable relatives, and clear answers to theological questions. Authors whose original experience cannot meet that bar face an uncomfortable choice: write a short, true, commercially modest book; or fill out the manuscript with material that goes beyond what they actually experienced.
Notice what I am not saying. I am not saying that every popular heaven memoir is fabricated. I am not even saying that most are. I am saying that the structural features of the genre — private events, motivated audiences, enormous rewards, novelty incentives, thin accountability, and rising audience expectations — make it predictable that a meaningful minority of books in the genre will be unreliable. That is a diagnosis of the genre, not of any particular author. But the diagnosis should shape how we read every book in the genre, because the pressures that produced the Malarkey case are still acting on every book published today.
"Fabrication" is the most dramatic category, and because of the Malarkey case it gets most of the attention. But it is not the only category. If we zoom out a bit, unreliable NDE testimony comes in several flavors. Not all of them involve conscious dishonesty. Some are innocent. Some are subtle. Some are entirely understandable. Understanding the full range helps us evaluate any specific account more fairly.
The Malarkey case. The experience did not happen. The account was invented. This is the worst category because it involves active deception — though, in fairness, in the Malarkey case the inventor was a six-year-old child who told a story for attention and then found himself trapped inside an adult-managed publishing machine that would not let him take it back. Complete fabrication is rare. I do not want to give you the impression that the NDE literature is riddled with it. But it exists, and when it exists, it is usually attached to large amounts of money.
Here is a gentler and much more common problem. The experiencer did have something — a brush with death, a vivid dream during a medical event, a short NDE with a handful of core features. But over time, as the story gets retold, it grows. Dramatic details are added. Conversations are remembered with more specificity. New elements appear in later tellings that were not there at first. This is not always conscious dishonesty. Human memory, especially for vivid events, actually gets more confident over time rather than more accurate, and retelling a story in response to audience feedback reshapes it. Ask any police investigator: eyewitness accounts often drift. Miller notes this specifically about medieval vision reports — "some of these stories changed as they were repeated through the years" as they traveled from one sermon to another and from one generation to another.18 The same thing can happen in three years in a speaking career today.
Some reported NDEs were not clinically "near death" at all. The person had a medical event — a high fever, an anesthesia reaction, a seizure, a drug interaction — that produced hallucinatory imagery but no actual cardiac or neurological crisis. The account is told as an NDE, but it does not meet the usual medical criteria. Miller calls this out directly: "The person was not close to death. Perhaps it was a vision or hallucination, but NDEs are by definition 'near-death.'"19 He also notes that experiences with "common characteristics of hallucinations," like obvious misidentifications of ordinary things, should raise a warning flag.20 This doesn't mean the person is lying. They may genuinely believe they had an NDE. But if the medical event did not actually put them close to death, we're in a different category.
An NDE may be genuine, but the published version of it may have been substantially reshaped by the person who wrote it down. Ghostwriters, co-authors, interviewers, and editors all leave fingerprints on a text. Most of the time, that's fine — writers are supposed to help a story be readable. But sometimes the reshaping is more than cosmetic. The experiencer's actual memories may be blurred and simple; the published version may be crisp, dramatic, and rich with theological conclusions the experiencer never drew. The issue here is not always fabrication; it is more like drift between the real event and the polished text on the page. In the Malarkey case, the book was told almost entirely in Kevin's voice, not Alex's, which means we never really had direct access to whatever Alex himself may have remembered or not remembered from his coma.
Imagine an NDEr who had a real experience in 1995. Over the next twenty years, they read a dozen NDE books, watched dozens of YouTube testimonies, attended several conferences, and joined an online support group. Do you think, after all of that input, they can still tell the difference between what they experienced and what they absorbed from other people's accounts? Honestly, it's hard. This is a well-known phenomenon in memory research: external information gets stitched into autobiographical memory without the person being aware of it. When an NDEr's later tellings include elements that track very closely with other popular NDE accounts, one possibility — not the only one, but a real one — is that some of the detail has been picked up from the wider NDE culture rather than from the original experience.
An experiencer publishes a first book. It sells well. The publisher — or the experiencer, or both — wants a second book. But the original experience was brief, and its core features have already been used up. What fills the second book? Sometimes honest reflection. But sometimes new details appear that were not in the original telling. Miller points out a similar pressure in the medieval world: "Since visionary reports could launch a speaking career or add to a spiritual resume for a prominent position in Medieval times, impure motives such as gaining respect or landing a church job could result in exaggerated details, or even entire fabrications."21 The modern version of this pressure is the book contract, the speaking tour, and the conference circuit. When the incentive structure rewards bigger stories, bigger stories tend to appear. This is one of the reasons I am nervous about any NDEr whose account keeps growing across multiple books.
Some experiences described as NDEs may be symptoms of untreated mental health conditions — dissociative states, psychotic episodes, severe depression with visual phenomena, or conditions the person has not disclosed. Miller lists this as his second red flag: "There are indications of mental illness. Some will actually say that they have been referred to a psychiatrist, perhaps for regularly hearing voices. Some of their writing may be incoherent or contradictory."22 I want to say this gently, because mental illness carries enough stigma already and I do not want to pile on. But it is a pastoral kindness, not a cruelty, to recognize that some experiences that look like NDEs are actually medical conditions that need compassionate care rather than conference platforms.
The worst category. The person never had an NDE at all. They invented the account from scratch for financial gain, notoriety, or attention. This category is the rarest. Most fabrications I know of are a little more complicated than pure fraud — they involve at least some element of real experience, or at least a real medical event, distorted beyond recognition. But pure fraud is possible. It is the one category that deserves the strongest language.
Notice that of these eight categories, the most common ones — embellishment, conflation with other sources, commercial shaping — do not require us to suppose anyone is consciously lying. Most unreliable NDE testimony is not fraud. It is the ordinary human drift that happens when a vivid memory is retold over and over, in front of audiences, over years, with emotional and financial rewards for the telling. That means most unreliable accounts come from sincere people. Discernment is not about assuming dishonesty. It is about recognizing that sincerity is not the same thing as accuracy.
How do we spot a problem account? Here is a short working list of warning signs. I want to stress that no single marker is a verdict. Several markers together, or one marker that is especially strong, may be enough to set a book aside. One marker on its own, especially if the rest of the account is sober and reliable, often means nothing. Think of these as items on a checklist, not items on a firing squad.
When an NDE report includes dramatic details that line up a little too neatly with what Christian readers want to hear — specific angels with specific appearances, specific Scripture quotations given to the experiencer as prophecies, specific theological teachings that happen to resolve current evangelical debates — my internal caution light starts blinking. Real NDEs are usually short, strange, and hard to put into words. They do not usually come home with a tidy list of answers to the latest book-club questions. Miller's research on the core NDE experience describes it as "overwhelmingly devoid of doctrinal teaching,"23 and that matches the medical literature. When an NDE report arrives loaded with doctrinal content, ask where that content actually came from.
Compare a book, an earlier blog post, an interview, and a conference talk given by the same NDEr. Minor variations are normal and expected. Major contradictions are not. If a detail that is central to the first telling is missing from the second, or a new central detail appears in the third that was not in the first, something is off. Either the person's memory is being reshaped by repetition, or the story is being adjusted for audience. Either way, the account has become less reliable as a historical document.
A genuine NDE usually has some medical correlate — a documented cardiac arrest, a loss of vital signs during surgery, a serious crisis that was noted in the hospital chart. When an NDE report cannot be tied to a medical record, or when the records that do exist show something less dramatic than the account claims, we have a problem. Dr. Michael Sabom made the case carefully in Light and Death that one of the things that distinguishes serious NDE research from "heaven tourism" is the willingness to compare the patient's recollection against hospital records — and the willingness to let the records complicate or correct the story.24
The people who were in the room during the event — family members, medical staff, first responders — sometimes give an account of the event that does not match the NDEr's later telling. Where that happens, the non-experiencers' accounts are not automatically correct; they may have missed things that happened while the patient was unconscious. But their version should be taken seriously. In the Malarkey case, Alex's mother — who was physically present for his entire recovery and all of his reporting — consistently disputed the book. That alone should have halted the project for a careful second look.
When someone has an NDE and, within a few months or a year or two, they have a book contract, a speaking tour, a YouTube channel, and a growing list of paid appearances, I worry. Not because none of those things are legitimate — they can be. But because very rapid commercial development creates intense pressure to make the story bigger and more saleable than it originally was. Miller lists this directly: "They are promoting their books or services. This introduces possible motives (monetary, fame, a post to go viral, etc.) to exaggerate claims, target a niche audience with specific doctrine, etc."25 He adds a reminder: "Niche, anomalous NDEs may sell better than core NDEs, since the former claim to have something fresh to offer."26 The freshness market rewards novelty, and novelty is precisely what a short, simple, biblically ordinary NDE cannot offer. So novelty is what the market starts to manufacture.
Real NDErs, in my experience, are often reluctant to tell their story at all. They find it hard to put into words. They worry about being thought crazy. When they do tell it, they welcome questions. What should worry us is the opposite posture: the experiencer — or, more often, the ministry that has grown up around them — resists investigation, bristles at questions, declares that their experience is beyond ordinary evaluation, or tells critics they are attacking the Holy Spirit. Miller observes that "overwhelmingly, true experiencers are reluctant to share their NDEs. Thus, researchers may be cautious about trusting those who seem eager to tell everyone. Perhaps they are delusional or are seeking attention."27 When a ministry treats questions as attacks, the answer to why it treats questions as attacks is almost never flattering.
If an NDE report uses specific phrasings, imagery, and theological conclusions that track very closely with other well-known accounts — if the experiencer describes a life review in nearly the same words as a famous earlier NDEr, or describes the gates of the city with the exact same architectural details as a bestselling book — one possibility is that the two accounts are independently correct because they are describing the same real place. That happens, and we should not rule it out. But another possibility is absorption: the later experiencer read or heard the earlier account, and the specifics have crept into the later telling. I don't think we can always distinguish these cleanly. But when two accounts feel like copies rather than like independent reports, it is fair to ask why.
The experiencer is a child whose account is mediated by a parent. The experiencer is deceased and the story is told by the family. The experiencer is elderly and has limited capacity, and the account is developed by an admirer or a disciple. The experiencer is anonymous. In each of these cases, the account cannot be fully verified by engaging the experiencer directly. That is not a disqualification — many genuine and moving testimonies come to us through third parties — but it is a reason to hold the account more loosely. When the primary source is unavailable, the account is weaker evidence by its nature.
Read an NDE book with the markers in mind the way a doctor reads an X-ray with anatomy in mind — not as a judgment machine, but as a way of noticing what might be out of place. A book with zero markers is not automatically true; a book with two markers is not automatically false. Look for clusters. Look for severity. And above all, weigh the book's theological content against Scripture. The seven-test framework developed in Chapter 10 of this book is the more complete tool; these markers are specifically for spotting fabrication or unreliability of the account itself, independent of its theological content.
It is one thing to offer markers in the abstract. It is another to say how they apply to books that real Christian readers have on their shelves. Let me walk through a few cases. I want to be careful. Where the documentary record is clear, I will say so. Where there is doubt, I will keep the tone charitable and say only what the public record supports.
I have already told this story at length, so here I just want to note how every marker listed above lights up in the Malarkey case. Marker 1 (elaborate details too convenient): the book featured specific encounters with Jesus, angels, and the devil in ways designed for Christian readers. Marker 2 (inconsistencies): the adult Alex directly contradicted the child Alex. Marker 4 (witness contradiction): Beth Malarkey, physically present throughout, disputed the book. Marker 5 (commercial prominence early): a book deal was arranged within a few years of the accident. Marker 6 (refusal of scrutiny): concerns raised by Beth and by Alex himself were suppressed for years. Marker 8 (primary source problems): the experiencer was a six-year-old child, the account was told by his father, the father held the copyright, and the child's later objections were silenced. This is not one marker with a little weight on it. It is a cluster so dense that, honestly, the book should never have reached a million copies before the problems were taken seriously. We can't change that now. But we can let it teach us.
Captain Dale Black, a commercial airline pilot, wrote Flight to Heaven with co-author Ken Gire in 2010. The book recounts Black's experience following a devastating plane crash, including imagery of the heavenly city, angelic escorts, and a sense of the beauty and love of heaven. Black's account is widely cited in popular evangelical NDE literature; John Burke quotes Flight to Heaven favorably many times in Imagine Heaven, using Black's imagery to describe everything from the colors of heaven to the architecture of the city to the experience of 360-degree vision.28
I mention Black here not to accuse him of fabrication — I have no basis for that — but because some Christian critics have raised questions about specific elements of his account and because his book is prominent enough that readers encountering his name in connection with "heaven tourism" critiques may wonder what to make of him. My honest answer is: I do not know of any published retraction, recantation, or documented falsification of Black's account. His crash is a matter of public record; he survived it; his career as a pilot is verifiable. What remains harder to evaluate is the rich interior detail of his heavenly tour. That is true of every NDE account that includes extensive visual description, not just Black's. What I would say is that his book should be read with ordinary discernment — compare its content against Scripture, notice where the book's theological conclusions exceed what the experience itself could have established, and remember that the richness of the imagery does not itself prove or disprove its origin. That is the same posture I bring to any account of this kind.
"Heaven tourism" is a label coined by critics — including pastor John MacArthur — for the broad category of popular Christian NDE books that claim to offer extended tours of heaven. Not every book in this category is fabricated. Some are reliable accounts from serious Christians. Some are genuine experiences told with some embellishment. Some are problematic at the level of theology rather than of factuality. And some, like the Malarkey case, turned out to be inventions.
Miller makes a careful point here that I want to share. He notes that MacArthur's and Hanegraaff's blanket dismissal of the category was, in one way, wrong — wrong because it dismisses genuine experiences along with the fakes, and it ignores the large body of peer-reviewed medical research on NDEs that has nothing to do with the popular book market.29 But MacArthur and Hanegraaff were also, in another way, right — right because the popular "heaven tourism" genre does have a real problem with unverified, heavily commercialized, doctrinally expansive accounts, and Christians who assume everything in the genre is reliable are being naive.30 The right response is neither "reject the whole genre" nor "accept the whole genre" but "evaluate each book carefully, on its own merits, with Scripture as the standard."
Over the years, a handful of popular NDE books have been withdrawn from publication, had their authors distance themselves from them, or been publicly disputed. The Malarkey case is the most famous. There have also been disputes involving family members of other published NDErs who have objected to how their stories were told, co-authors who have disagreed in public, and authors whose later work contradicts their earlier work. A reader who wants to keep up with the current state of things should watch the trade press — Christianity Today, Publishers Weekly, The Gospel Coalition — and Christian discernment ministries that track this area. The list of specifically disputed titles changes over time, and I do not want to freeze it into a chapter that will still be in print when some of the disputes have been resolved and others have emerged.
Instead of trying to provide an exhaustive running list of problem books, let me offer a short procedure for reading any heaven memoir that you pick up. I think this is more durable than any list I could write today.
Begin by reading the account slowly, one chapter at a time, asking what actually happened during the experience. Underline the parts that describe real physical events — the accident, the coma, the surgery, the return. These are the parts that can in principle be verified. Next, separate the experience itself — the out-of-body, the tunnel, the light, the encounter with a person — from the experiencer's later interpretation. The experience may be described in a few sentences; the interpretation often fills most of the book. Third, compare the theological conclusions the book draws against Scripture. Do the book's teachings about heaven, about salvation, about Jesus, about the afterlife match the Bible? If not, where do they diverge, and on what basis? Fourth, ask who else was present during the event and whether their accounts match the author's. Fifth, compare the first published version of the story (if an earlier version exists in an interview, blog post, or an earlier book) with the latest version. Look for drift. Finally, notice how the author handles questions. Does the author welcome investigation? Or does the author — or the ministry around the author — treat questions as attacks?
This procedure will not catch every problem. But it will catch most serious problems. And the procedure can be applied to any book, old or new, without requiring a discernment expert at your elbow. The ordinary Christian reader is not helpless here. The basic tools are available.
The rule I follow, and I commend to you, is this: I will name an account as fabricated only when the experiencer themselves has admitted it, or when the documentary record leaves no other reasonable conclusion. Short of that, I will speak in terms of "concerns," "unanswered questions," or "markers worth noticing." Christians owe charity even to the authors we cannot endorse. An author may have written a flawed book without being a fraud. A story may contain errors without being a lie. The language should fit the evidence.
I want to stop here and address a question that I think is often more important than the pure-fabrication question. What do we do with NDE reports that started out as real experiences but have been substantially embellished in their published form?
This is probably the largest category of unreliable testimony in the popular NDE literature, and it is harder to handle than outright fraud. With fraud, the remedy is simple: the book comes off the shelf. With embellishment, we are often left with a real kernel surrounded by a lot of growth that should not be there. The book contains truths. It also contains distortions. What do we do?
Several thoughts. First, we should still read such books with discernment rather than throwing them away entirely. A book that is mostly real but partly embellished is still a different thing from a book that is entirely invented, and we should treat the categories differently. Second, we should weight the simpler, earlier tellings more heavily than the later, more elaborate ones. If an NDEr's first interview describes a brief experience with three or four features, and their fourth book describes an extended multi-day tour with dozens of specific details, the first interview is probably closer to what actually happened. Third, we should ignore doctrinal conclusions that are not supported by what the experience itself could have established. A brief encounter with a loving light does not teach universalism. A sense of peace does not teach reincarnation. A glimpse of a beautiful landscape does not teach the geography of heaven in a thousand-page sequel. What we really learned from the experience is usually small. What grew up around it over the years is usually large.
Fourth — and this is a hard one — we should be willing to say that even sincere, faithful Christians may have told an account that grew over time. Embellishment is not always sin. Memory is fragile. Audiences reward drama. Writing is hard. The drift from a real four-minute experience to a published two-hundred-page book is almost never accomplished without some help from the writer's imagination. The question is how much help, and whether the help has crossed into invention. That is not always easy to see, even from the inside.
John Burke, whose Imagine Heaven is, I think, one of the most responsible popular treatments in the genre, handles this problem in an interesting way. Rather than building his book around any one experiencer's testimony, he weaves together many accounts and compares their common features against Scripture and against each other.31 The result is that no single account has to bear the weight of the argument, and readers are invited to evaluate patterns rather than individual books. That is not a perfect safeguard — commonalities in the genre may reflect absorption from each other rather than independent witness to the same realities — but it is a better method than building a theology on one experiencer's published memoir.
Here is something the Malarkey case taught me that I did not expect. When a fabricated NDE book is exposed, the people who are hurt most — after the experiencer and their family — are ordinary Christians who trusted the book. They used it to pray for dying parents. They read passages aloud in hospice. They gave copies to grieving friends. They felt their own faith warmed by the story. And now the story is not true. What does that do to them?
I have talked to some of these readers. The hurt is real. It is not just disappointment. It is a feeling of having been played, of having been naive, and sometimes — more painfully — of having, in some small way, cheapened their love for a dying friend by attaching it to a story that turned out to be fake. I do not want to minimize that pain. It is a real pastoral problem, and it needs a pastoral answer.
Let me offer four pastoral observations for Christians in that position.
The existence of fabrications does not mean all NDEs are fabricated. This is the single most important point. Just because The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven turned out to be invented does not mean Dr. van Lommel's careful Dutch study was invented,32 or that Dr. Long's massive NDERF database is invented,33 or that the dying grandmother who saw Jesus in her last hours was deceived. The bad cases do not contaminate the good cases. Anomalous reports are not the norm. Miller makes this point forcefully: a small percentage of anomalous or deceptive NDEs is not evidence that the phenomenon as a whole is fake any more than a handful of adverse reactions to a safe drug is evidence that the drug is dangerous.34 Do not let one exposed fraud rob you of the confidence that genuine testimonies deserve.
Christians who were misled were acting in good faith. The fault here is with the deceivers, not with the deceived. If you trusted The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, you did so because it was published by a reputable Christian publisher, because pastors recommended it, because its content looked Christian, and because you were not in a position to investigate medical records or family disputes. You were not foolish. You were trusting the Christian publishing system to do what it said it was doing. When that system failed, the failure was not yours.
The answer is not cynicism but more careful discernment. There is a temptation, after being burned, to reject the whole category — to become the kind of Christian who responds to any NDE testimony with "I don't believe any of that stuff." I understand that response. But it is not the right response. It is an overcorrection. It treats genuine testimonies the same way as fraudulent ones, which is unfair to the genuine experiencers. What we need, having been burned once, is not to refuse to trust anyone but to learn better how to tell the genuine from the fake. That is what the markers above are for. That is what this whole book is for. Discernment, not cynicism.
Publishers and ministries bear responsibility. It is fair to expect Christian publishers to do better due diligence on NDE accounts than they sometimes have done. It is fair to expect ministries that promote NDErs as speakers to check basic facts. It is fair to expect Christian retailers to listen when family members raise substantive concerns. The Malarkey case, in my judgment, is partly a failure of Christian publishing infrastructure. The industry should learn from it. Readers are not the only ones who need to do better.
Sometimes the pastoral situation is the reverse of the one I described above. It is not that your friend feels foolish for having trusted a book; it is that your friend does not yet know the book has been exposed, or refuses to accept that it has been. You are now in the delicate position of bringing bad news about a story your friend has loved. How should you handle it?
First, go gently. Your friend is not going to thank you for showing up with a printout of a retraction letter and a lecture about discernment. A book is often more than a book to the people who loved it; it is tied to a season, to a loss, to a hope. Treat the attachment with respect. Begin by asking what the book has meant to them. Listen first.
Second, distinguish the truths your friend has been holding from the book itself. If your friend drew real comfort from the thought that Jesus is present with the dying, or that believers see their loved ones in heaven, or that death is not the end — those truths are all biblical. They were not invented by the book. They do not collapse if the book collapses. You can affirm the comfort your friend has drawn from these truths while still being honest about the unreliability of the particular book that carried them.
Third, when you share the bad news, share the evidence rather than the verdict. Instead of saying "That book is fake," say "Did you know that the author of that book publicly recanted in 2015, and that his own family had been saying for years it wasn't true? Here are the news articles if you want to read them." Let the evidence do the persuading. Your friend is more likely to accept information they can check for themselves than conclusions you have handed them.
Fourth, be patient. Some people will adjust quickly. Others will take a long time. Still others will never quite believe the recantation, especially if the book was tied to something emotionally important. That is all right. You have planted a seed. It will grow in its own time. The goal is not to win the argument today. The goal is to help your friend gradually build their faith on surer ground than a particular memoir.
Fifth, have a better book ready. If a fabricated heaven memoir has been part of your friend's spiritual diet, the removal of that book can leave a gap. Have a replacement ready — perhaps John Burke's Imagine Heaven, which draws carefully on many NDEs and compares them to Scripture; or Miller's work, which is rigorous but warm; or simply a good book on heaven from a biblical-theological perspective. Replacing a bad meal is easier than just taking it away.
Even while you are helping a friend move from a bad NDE book to a better one, remember that the long-term pastoral goal is not "find the perfect NDE book." It is to ground your friend's hope of heaven in what God has said, not in what some experiencer has described. A better memoir is a step toward Scripture, not a substitute for it. Alex Malarkey's own counsel — "They should read the Bible, which is enough" — should shape where we eventually land in these conversations.
If you know a Christian who trusted a book that turned out to be fabricated, and who now feels embarrassed or foolish, consider saying something like this: "You were not foolish. You were loving. You grabbed at comfort for someone who was suffering, and you grabbed at what your publisher and your pastor said was reliable. The failure was not in your love. It was in a system that should have protected you. Your love for your friend, and your hope for heaven, were not invalidated by a book that turned out to be false. Those loves were real. Heaven is real. The book was not the basis of your faith. It was just a comfort that let you down. The basis of your faith — Jesus, His Word, His people — is still standing."
I want to return now to Alex Malarkey's own words, because I think he gave us the right closing principle for this chapter. At the end of his recantation letter, he wrote something that I would like every Christian reader of NDE literature to hold onto. The letter's last real argument was not "check your facts" or "read more carefully" or "distrust publishers." It was this: "They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."35
That is the cure. Scripture primacy — the conviction that the Bible is the final authority for Christian faith and life — is not a new doctrine invented to deal with the "heaven tourism" problem. It is the settled teaching of the Reformation and, in substance, the settled teaching of the Christian tradition all the way back. The Apostle Paul put it with unsettling sharpness in Galatians 1:
"But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8–9, ESV)
Notice that Paul is not merely saying "test preachers against Scripture." He is also saying "test angels against Scripture." That is directly relevant here. The experiencer who says "an angel told me" — or even "Jesus told me" — something that contradicts what the Bible teaches is in the exact situation Paul anticipated. Scripture, not the experience, is the standard. Shaun Tabatt puts the principle simply: "we must always weigh any extrabiblical teaching gleaned from these experiences against the Bible and historic Christian orthodoxy and theology."36
Peter makes the same point in his second letter. He is recounting his own eyewitness experience of Jesus's transfiguration — one of the most extraordinary visionary encounters anyone in the early church would ever have had. Peter was there. He saw Jesus transfigured. He heard the voice of the Father. And then Peter says something surprising:
"And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." (2 Peter 1:19–21, ESV)
Peter is saying something remarkable. Even his own eyewitness experience of the transfiguration is not more authoritative than the written Scriptures. The "prophetic word" is the "lamp shining in a dark place." Experience must be interpreted by Scripture, not the other way around. If Peter submits his own transfiguration experience to the higher authority of Scripture, then every NDEr's report — genuine, embellished, or fabricated — must do the same. Scripture is primary. Experience is secondary. That ordering is not a put-down of experience. It is the rule that keeps experience from going off the rails.
This ordering is what Alex Malarkey was reaching for. He was a teenage boy with limited formal theological training, and yet he put his finger on the exact principle that would have saved his whole story from going wrong in the first place. If the people around him had measured his childhood words against Scripture instead of against sales potential, the book would never have been written. And if his readers had done the same, they would have asked harder questions sooner.
Scripture primacy is often misunderstood as a reason to reject NDEs altogether. That is not what it means. It means that Scripture is the standard by which NDEs are evaluated — not that NDEs are automatically rejected. Most genuine NDEs and DBEs pass the scriptural test easily. They bear witness to the reality of God, the conscious life of the soul after death, the love of Jesus, and the hope of heaven. What Scripture primacy does is protect us from accepting, on the authority of an experience, any teaching that contradicts what God has already said in His Word. Genuine NDEs welcome that test. Fabricated and corrupted accounts fail it. That is exactly how it should be.
Let me briefly engage a few objections to the approach I have taken in this chapter.
This is a fair concern. A marker-based approach has a real risk: it can produce false positives. A genuinely faithful NDEr who happens to have been called to public ministry may trip several of my markers — commercial prominence, book deals, speaking career — without being a fraud. Don Piper, who wrote 90 Minutes in Heaven, has been a public speaker for years; that does not mean his account is false. The markers are not a guilty verdict. They are questions to ask, not conclusions to draw. Several markers together, combined with theological content that fails a scriptural test, and inability to answer direct questions, and contradictions in the account itself — that kind of cluster is a much stronger signal than any one marker on its own. I would rather use the markers carefully and sometimes be wrong than drop them entirely and be defenseless.
Some readers will say that a little drift in a story is normal and harmless, and the chapter is making a mountain out of a molehill. I understand the instinct, but I disagree with the conclusion. A retold family story at Thanksgiving that grows a little with the years is one thing. A theological testimony that gets sold as "a true story" to a million Christian readers and used to shape their view of heaven is another. The stakes are not the same. When a retold story becomes a doctrinal anchor for people's faith, the standard of accuracy has to rise with the weight being put on it. Popular NDE books ask readers to rearrange their expectations of heaven around specific testimonies. If the testimonies are inflated, the rearrangement is built on air. That is a real problem, not an imagined one.
It is true that talking about fabricated NDEs is grist for the mill of critics who want to dismiss the whole category. I have thought hard about this, and I still think silence is worse. If Christians who accept that some NDEs are real refuse to address the fabricated ones, we hand the whole subject over to critics who will then use the fabricated cases as if they disprove everything. Chapter 35 of this book takes up the MacArthur-style critique in detail and shows why the existence of bad cases does not license the rejection of all cases. But the Chapter 35 argument only works if Chapter 32 has done its job honestly first. We have to acknowledge what is true before we can defend what has been misrepresented. That is the order.
A sharp-minded reader might notice that the Apostle Paul's account of being caught up to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:1–4) has some features that look, on paper, like marker triggers. He was a public figure. His visionary experience fueled his ministry. It is reported only by him, in his own letter, with no independent corroboration. Does that mean Paul fails my checklist?
It doesn't, and the reasons are worth noting because they help us calibrate the markers. First, Paul's disposition toward his experience is the opposite of the fabrication pattern. He waited fourteen years before mentioning it. He refused to talk about the content. He only brought it up at all because critics were forcing him to defend his apostleship. He openly said that he would rather boast in his weaknesses. That is marker-six behavior, but in reverse — it is the posture of someone who resists attention, not someone who seeks it. Second, Paul's account is short, theologically spare, and contains nothing that contradicts Scripture. It adds no new doctrine. It confirms what we already knew. Third, the rest of Paul's ministry is not built on the experience. His gospel is rooted in the crucified and risen Jesus, the Scriptures, and the apostolic testimony — not on what he saw in the third heaven. That is exactly how an NDEr should relate to their experience. So Paul, far from failing the markers, illustrates the profile of a trustworthy experiencer. His example is not a counterargument to the chapter. It is a supporting case.
Let me close with a more personal observation. Most of my work on NDE discernment has come from my own study of veridical NDEs — cases where the experiencer accurately reported things they could not have known by ordinary means during their clinical death. Those cases are, to me, among the strongest evidences we have for the conscious survival of the soul after bodily death. They are, in my judgment, one of the reasons physicalist accounts of the human person cannot account for the data. I say this not to pick a theological fight in the middle of Chapter 32 but to say why it grieves me that this category also contains fakes.
Fabricated NDEs are not just a problem for readers. They are a problem for Christian witness. Every exposed fraud gives a critic new ammunition to dismiss the whole field. Every "heaven tourism" book that collapses makes it a little harder to point thoughtful skeptics to the serious medical literature. Every Alex Malarkey case — and I say this with full awareness of what Alex himself went through — is a gift to the opponents of the Christian worldview, because it lets them say, "See? You can't trust any of it." That is not fair, but it is how the cultural conversation works.
The answer is not to hide the fakes. The answer is to be the kind of Christians who, when the fakes appear, are the first to name them, the first to stop promoting them, and the first to repent of our part in spreading them. If the cleanup of the NDE literature is not done by Christians, it will be done by skeptics, and the way the skeptics do it will take the genuine accounts out along with the fake ones. We do not want that. We should be the adults in this room.
That means learning to say things like: "I loved that book. I don't love it anymore, because of what came out. I think it is fair to ask whether the whole thing was real." It means supporting publishers who do due diligence and walking away from publishers who do not. It means rewarding NDErs who refuse to sensationalize their stories and withholding our dollars from those who do. It means preferring careful studies of NDEs to thousand-page heaven tours. It means, maybe above all, being willing to sit with the quiet, biblical, simple testimony of a grandmother who saw Jesus and pointed to the corner of her room — and preferring that testimony to a bestseller.
Fabricated NDEs are the hardest category in the discernment field. They are rare but real. They damage trust in genuine accounts. They prey on grieving readers. They are produced by a tangle of motives — money, attention, commercial pressure, family complications, honest memory drift — that are often sincere even when the product is false. They can be dressed in thoroughly Christian clothing. They can be published by reputable Christian houses. They can be endorsed by pastors. None of that makes them true.
The tools for spotting them are not magic. They are the same tools we have been developing through this whole book: read the text carefully; compare its theological content to Scripture; notice where details seem too convenient or too close to other popular accounts; pay attention when family members dispute the telling; weight earlier and simpler accounts more than later and more elaborate ones; hold primary source problems as a reason for caution; and above all, make Scripture — not experience — the final authority. A book that passes those tests deserves to be read with trust. A book that fails them should not be an anchor for your faith.
I want to leave you with the same posture I hope this chapter has been modeling. Discernment about fabricated NDEs is not about suspicion. It is about love. It is about love for the truth, which deserves to be told accurately. It is about love for fellow Christians, who deserve to be protected from books that will mislead them. It is about love for genuine NDErs, whose trustworthy testimonies deserve not to be lumped in with fakes. And it is about love for the One who is the Truth, and whose Word alone stands as the final standard.
Alex Malarkey, at sixteen, in a few short lines, told us what the whole matter comes down to. I'll give him the last word: "The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."37
He is right. Let us read accordingly.
· · ·
Black, Dale, and Ken Gire. Flight to Heaven: A Plane Crash . . . A Lone Survivor . . . A Journey to Heaven — and Back. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2010.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Dean, Michelle. "The Boy Who Didn't Come Back from Heaven: Inside a Bestseller's 'Deception.'" The Guardian, January 21, 2015.
Graham, Ruth. "I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven." Slate, 2019.
Long, Jeffrey. God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2016.
Malarkey, Alex. "An Open Letter to Lifeway and Other Sellers, Buyers, and Marketers of Heaven Tourism, by the Boy Who Did Not Come Back From Heaven." Pulpit and Pen, January 13, 2015.
Malarkey, Kevin, and Alex Malarkey. The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life beyond This World. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2010. [Out of print.]
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
Tyndale House Publishers. "Tyndale's Statement Regarding The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven." January 21, 2015.
"The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven." Wikipedia. Accessed April 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Came_Back_from_Heaven.
"The 'Boy Who Came Back from Heaven' Retracts Story." Christianity Today, January 15, 2015 (updates January 17 and January 21, 2015). https://www.christianitytoday.com/2015/01/boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-retraction/.
Wehrstein, KM. "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven (recanted NDE)." Psi Encyclopedia. London: Society for Psychical Research, 2018. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/boy-who-came-back-heaven-recanted-nde.