Reincarnation May Exist: Boy Remembers Past Life As Hollywood Agent

When he was just four years, he began to have "horrible nightmares". When he was five, he said that he had something to tell her, and explained: "I used to be somebody else."

He would then talk about "going home to Hollywood, meeting stars like Rita Hayworth, traveling overseas on lavish vacations, dancing on Broadway, and working for an agency where people would change their names."

Ryan remembered a big, white house and a swimming pool in Hollywood, miles away from his Oklahoma home. He said he had three sons, but couldn't remember their names, which made him cry.

"I really didn't know what to do," Cyndi said to uvamagazine. "I was more in shock than anything. He was so insistent about it. After that night, he kept talking about it, kept getting upset about not being able to remember those names. I started researching the Internet about reincarnation. I even got some books from the library on Hollywood, thinking their pictures might help him. I didn't tell anyone for months."

"His stories were so detailed and they were so extensive, that it just wasn't like a child could have made it up," she said.

Being a Baptist, she kept his "memories" secret from everyone, even her husband, but kept searching in the library for a clue. "Then we found the picture, and it changed everything," she said to today.

A publicity shot from the 1932 movie, "Night After Night," starred Mae West in her debut film. One picture in the book showed Ryan who he had been in his previous birth. He had been an extra in the film, without any words.

She approached Dr. Jim Tucker, M.D., the Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, a child psychiatrist, who has spent more than a decade studying children between two and six years who remember a past life.

In a book, "Return To Life," Tucker details some of the American cases he has studied over the years, including Ryan's.

"These cases demand an explanation," Tucker said, "We can't just write them off or explain them away as just some sort of normal cultural thing."

In his office, he had filed away the documents of more than 2,500 children from everywhere in the world by his predecessor, Ian Stevenson, who died in 2007. The strange cases had been probed into since 1961.

Tucker has documented and coded all the handwritten files, and discovered intricate patterns of all the children. About 70% of the children died violent deaths, of which 73% were male. "There'd be no way to orchestrate that statistic with over 2,000 cases," Tucker said.

Tucker pointed out that most of the children seemed to remember average, not famous lives. Ryan's case stood out due to the "incredible detail he was able to provide," he said.

Going back to the life of the man Ryan pointed out in the book, Tucker found that he had been Marty Martyn, a former movie extra who became a "powerful Hollywood agent and died in 1964."

"If you look at a picture of a guy with no lines in a movie, and then tell me about his life, I don't think many of us would have come up with Marty Martyn's life," Tucker said, "Yet Ryan provided many details that really did fit with his life."

Tucker found nothing of Marty's life on the Internet, so he went on a search in life, and tracked down Martyn's own daughter, and confirmed 55 details Ryan gave him.

He had not been just a movie extra, but had also "danced on Broadway, traveled overseas to Paris, and worked at an agency where stage names were often created for new clients."

Ryan said he had lived in a street with the word "rock" in it. Tucker discovered that his address had been 825 North Roxbury Dr. in Beverly Hills.

Other details too were confirmed, such as the number of children he had, how many times he had been married and the number of sisters he had. While Martyn's daughter thought he had just one sister, Ryan confirmed exactly that he had two, as Tucker found.

Only one of Ryan's details seemed to be wrong. "He said he didn't see why God would let you get to be 61 and then make you come back as a baby," Tucker said. However, Tucker found that Martyn's death certificate listed his age as 59 years.

More research unearthed census records that showed that Martyn was born in 1903, not 1905, which meant that Ryan's statement, not his official death certificate, was correct.

Dr Tucker's article was featured in The University Of Virginia Magazine, but got sharp reactions. One reader said he was "appalled" and another called it "pseudoscience." However, Tucker responded that he was only undertaking scientific research.

Today, at the age of 10, Ryan is losing his past life memories. Ryan is happy that he can now move on and just be a child.