Are there any scientifically verified cases of past-life memories?

Extract from Chaitanya Charan’s upcoming book: “The Mystery of Reincarnation”

Is the correlation between past-life wounds and this-life’s birth marks and birth defects really so precise? Could this seeming precision be a result of mere coincidence? To find the answers to these questions, Dr Stevenson divided the average-sized adult body into a grid of 160 boxes, each ten centimeters square. By plotting the skin marks on this grid, he showed that the chance of the correspondence between the position of a birthmark and the position of a wound is just 1/160. Moreover, many cases like those involving death due to fatal bullet wounds feature two birthmarks on the child’s body corresponding with the two wounds – the entry wound and the exit wound – on the body of the previous personality. In these cases, the probability decreases to 1/160 x 1/160, or 1/25,600.

Let’s consider a case that involved six correlating birthmarks.

Case with multiple correlating birthmarks – Necip Unlutaskiran (From “Where Reincarnation and Biology Interesect – Ian Stevenson, pg 48)

Necip Unlutaskiran was born in Adana, Turkey, in 1951. On his birth, his mother noticed that he had seven birthmarks. When he was 6, he started speaking about a previous life in Mersin, a city that was about 80 kilometers from Adana. He said his name in that life had been the same as in this life: Necip. He also stated that he had children whom he wanted to see. He further said that he had been stabbed; and while describing the stabbing, he pointed to the parts of his body where he had birthmarks to indicate the places he had been stabbed.

His parents neglected his statements for 6 years, till finally his mother took him to a village near Mersin, where her father was living with his second wife. Though Necip had never met his grandfather’s second wife till then, on seeing her, he suddenly said that he recognized her from his previous life in Mersin. There, she had known a man named Necip Budak, and she confirmed the accuracy of Necip’s statements about him.

When Necip expressed his now-intensified desire to go to Mersin, his grandfather

took him there. There, he recognized several members of the family of Necip Budak, who provided further confirmation for the accuracy of Necip’s statements about the life of Necip Budak.

Necip Budak had been a quarrelsome person, especially when drunk. Once in a drunken state, he had begun teasing and then taunting an acquaintance, who, possibly drunk himself, had stabbed Necip Budak repeatedly with a knife. Necip Budak had collapsed on the street itself and was rushed to a hospital, where he had died the next day.

Among the various statements made by Necip, the most significant was his claim that he had once stabbed “his” (Necip Budak’s) wife in the leg, resulting in a lifelong scar. Necip Budak’s widow did indeed have a scar on her thigh at the place where Necip had claimed to have stabbed her.

Additionally, the twelve-year-old Necip also expressed emotions as if he were Necip Budak. He showed great affection toward the children of Necip Budak and showed such fond attachment toward Necip Budak’s wife that, out of intense jealousy towards her second husband, he wanted to tear up a photograph of that man.

Most importantly, the locations of Necip’s six birthmarks correlated with the locations of the knife wounds that had led to the death of Necip Budak. The probability of six correlations is extremely low, 1/160^6, making chance an unrealistic explanation.

For our analysis, these birthmarks cases with their precise correlations are particularly difficult, if not entirely impossible, to be explained away as products of exaggeration.