Chapter 28

Psychics, Mediums, Aliens, and the Dark Fringes of the NDE World

The first time Shaun Tabatt walked into the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) national conference in 2024, he expected to spend a few days hearing afterlife testimonies and meeting fellow researchers. He did not expect to find a pet psychic in the exhibit hall ready to translate the inner thoughts of someone's golden retriever. He did not expect to sit in a packed session led by a medium offering — for a fee — to "reconnect" grieving parents with their dead children. He did not expect alien abduction lectures shoulder-to-shoulder with cardiac arrest research. But that is what he found.¹

I want to be careful here, because I have spent most of this book arguing that near-death experiences are largely genuine spiritual experiences, remarkably compatible with biblical Christianity, and powerful evidence that the soul survives the death of the body. I still believe that. But the same NDE community that hosts honest medical researchers and devout believers also hosts a darker fringe — psychics, mediums, past-life regression therapists, and alien-encounter speakers — and that fringe is growing. If we are going to engage NDE testimony faithfully, we cannot pretend that fringe does not exist. We have to walk into the room with our eyes open and our Bibles in hand.

This chapter is the eyes-open chapter. My thesis is straightforward: the infiltration of psychics, mediums, past-life regression, and alien encounter narratives into the mainstream NDE community represents a deliberate strategy of the enemy of our souls — a strategy designed to corrupt a genuine divine phenomenon and to lure vulnerable seekers into spiritual darkness. Christians who care about NDE evidence must learn to recognize these doorways and stay out of them.

The Genuine and the Counterfeit Live Side by Side

Before we walk through these doorways, let me say what this chapter is not arguing. I am not arguing that all NDEs are demonic. I dealt with that wholesale dismissal in the chapter on Satan's hijacking strategy, and I will engage it again when we answer John MacArthur's critique. The point I made in Chapter 25 still stands: most NDEs appear to be genuine, but some elements of some NDEs can be hijacked or counterfeited by the enemy.² The wheat and the tares grow in the same field (Matt. 13:24–30). And nowhere is that more visible than at an NDE conference.

What I am arguing is that adjacent to the genuine NDE phenomenon there are several side doors. The doors look spiritual. They look loving. They even look like they offer comfort to grieving people who desperately want one more conversation with someone they have lost. But every one of these doors opens onto something the Bible flatly forbids us to walk through. Tabatt calls these doors the "dark side" of the NDE space, and he identifies three main ones: past- and pre-life memories, psychics and mediums, and alien encounters.³ Let's walk past each door together — not through it, but past it — and learn to recognize the signs.

Door One: Psychics and Mediums

The first door is the busiest. Psychics and mediums have become, in Tabatt's words, a massive part of the mainstream NDE community.⁴ Why? Because the NDE space is filled with bereaved people. A widow misses her husband. A mother misses her child. A grown daughter cannot stop crying about the father she lost too soon. These are the most tender wounds a human heart can carry, and the NDE community is already teaching them that the soul survives death. The leap from "souls survive death" to "let's see if we can talk to one" feels small. The medium charges a fee, the bereaved person pays it, and the door opens.

It is worth pausing to define our terms. A psychic claims to use intuitive abilities — clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairaudience (clear hearing), or clairsentience (clear sensing) — to gather information about another person's past, present, or future. A medium claims to communicate with spirits of the dead, acting as a bridge between this world and the next.⁵ The categories overlap, and most popular figures do both. What matters for our purposes is that both involve seeking knowledge or contact from spiritual sources outside of God's appointed channels.

What the Bible Actually Says

The Bible's verdict on this practice is not subtle. Listen to Moses speaking to Israel just before they enter the Promised Land:

This is one of the most comprehensive lists of forbidden spiritual practices anywhere in Scripture, and it deserves careful attention because Chapter 28 is the chapter that owns it for our project. Moses lists nine practices in two verses, and almost every one of them maps onto something you can find at a modern NDE conference.

The Hebrew word translated "divination" is qesem (קֶסֶם), which describes the attempt to discover hidden knowledge by occult means — pulling answers out of the spiritual realm without going through God. "Fortune-teller" translates me'onen (מְעוֹנֵן), often understood as one who reads omens or signs. "Sorcerer" is mekhashshef (מְכַשֵּׁף), one who practices magical arts, the same root that gives us the New Testament Greek pharmakeia (φαρμακεία) — sorcery, often connected with potions and charms (see Gal. 5:20; Rev. 21:8). The two words at the heart of our chapter are the next ones. "Medium" translates 'ov (אוֹב), an ancient term that originally referred to a ritual pit or a hollow vessel and came to describe one who summons the spirits of the dead. "Necromancer" translates yidde'oni (יִדְּעֹנִי), literally "a knowing one," a spirit-consultant who claims special knowledge from beyond the grave. "One who inquires of the dead" — doresh el-hammetim (דֹּרֵשׁ אֶל־הַמֵּתִים) — sums up the whole project.⁶

What does God call all of this? Toevah (תּוֹעֵבָה) — an abomination. The word is reserved in the Old Testament for things that are not just forbidden but deeply offensive to God's holiness, like idolatry and child sacrifice. In fact, Moses opens the list in verse 10 with child sacrifice and closes it with consulting the dead, and he treats them as the same kind of sin. That should stop us in our tracks. Calling a psychic for a "reading" feels nothing like burning your child to Molech. But God puts them on the same list because both reach past Him for spiritual help He has not authorized. Both say, in effect, "God, I do not trust you to give me what I need, so I will get it somewhere else."⁷

The same prohibition shows up again in Leviticus 19:31 — "Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them" — and in Leviticus 20:6, where God promises to "set my face against" anyone who does. Isaiah aims a piercing rhetorical question at his own generation: "Should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isa. 8:19). The contrast could not be sharper. God offers Himself; the medium offers a substitute. The story of King Saul and the medium of En-Dor (1 Samuel 28) is the cautionary tale that runs underneath all of these prohibitions, and Cooper's discussion in Chapter 5 of this book treats that passage in detail.⁸

The Witnesses Walk Out of the Other Side

What makes Tabatt's analysis so striking is not just that he points us back to these biblical texts. It is that he gathers testimony from former psychics and mediums who became Christians and now warn the rest of us. Their testimony is unanimous on one point: the entities they were communicating with were not the spirits of grandma and grandpa.

Jenn Nizza, once a working psychic medium, believed for years that she was channeling deceased loved ones for her clients. After her conversion to Christ, she came to recognize that the entities she had been interacting with were demonic, providing real and accurate-sounding information while masquerading as benevolent spirits or departed family members. Marcia Montenegro spent years as a professional astrologer and psychic before becoming a Christian and now devotes her ministry to warning people that engaging with these entities means engaging with demonic forces.⁹ Their testimony is not a fringe report; it is increasingly common among Christians who have come out of the New Age movement.

J. Steve Miller, in his work on distressing NDEs, gathers an even broader case from the research of psychiatrist Richard Gallagher, who has worked extensively with possession cases. Gallagher's findings line up uncomfortably well with what mediums describe their "spirit guides" doing. Demons appear to be able to access information no living human should have. They lie habitually, especially about their own identity. They will pose as angels, then as deceased souls, only later revealing themselves. They mimic love and compassion while, in the deeper exorcism cases, actually hating their human contacts.¹⁰ If you set Gallagher's clinical findings beside the typical medium's pitch — "I'm sensing a male presence, someone with a J name, he wants you to know he loves you" — the resemblance is uncomfortable. Miller's conclusion: be wary of any continued conversation that claims to come from someone who has died.¹¹

Even simple logic from NDE research itself cuts against the medium industry. Miller points out that, across thousands of NDE accounts, no one has ever reported being told by a deceased relative on the other side, "Hey, just consult a good medium when you want to talk." Not once. If mediumship were a legitimate channel, the heavenly side seems strangely silent on the point.¹²

Door Two: Past- and Pre-Life Memories

The second door, past-life memories, deserves only a brief mention here because Chapter 24 of this book is the chapter that handles reincarnation in depth. There I work through Hebrews 9:27, the resurrection passages, and the cultural patterns in past-life claims. What I want to flag here is just the mechanism by which past-life claims have crept into the NDE world, because that is what belongs in this chapter.

The Department of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, founded by Ian Stevenson, has gathered more than 2,500 cases of children — usually between ages two and five — who report detailed memories of someone else's life, sometimes with verifiable specifics about a deceased person they could not have known about by ordinary means.¹³ When researchers in this field offer reincarnation as the explanation, the NDE community absorbs the claim, and suddenly past-life regression therapists are speaking at NDE conferences. Tabatt's analysis — and mine — is that the most plausible non-naturalistic explanation for the verifiable cases is not reincarnation but demonic activity, since reincarnation is incompatible with everything Hebrews 9:27 and the resurrection passages teach about the singular human life.¹⁴ The pre-life memory variation — adults recovering "memories" from before they were born — is even more troubling. Tabatt notes one such teacher whose pre-life memories began only after he started practicing transcendental meditation, a practice many deliverance ministers identify as a known doorway for demonic influence.¹⁵ For our purposes, that is enough to note. Chapter 24 carries the full argument.

Door Three: Alien Encounters

The third door is the strangest. When I first heard that alien abduction speakers regularly appear on NDE conference programs, my reaction was the same as Tabatt's: how does that have anything to do with cardiac arrest patients? But it turns out the connection is not as far-fetched as it looks.

Tabatt examined five of the most well-known alien abduction accounts in the literature — Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton, Antônio Vilas-Boas, the Pascagoula incident, and Linda Napolitano — and ran them through a nine-point framework that identifies typical features of NDEs. The result surprised him. Six of the nine NDE features show up in the alien abduction literature: a kind of out-of-body component, encounter with non-human beings, travel to an otherworldly realm, a sense of receiving messages or special knowledge, transformation of the experiencer, and ongoing post-event effects.¹⁶ An alien abduction account, structurally, is a travel narrative to a strange realm where one meets strange beings — exactly what an NDE is.

Now, that overlap by itself does not tell us what the alien encounters are. Maybe they are vivid dreams. Maybe they are a sleep disorder. Maybe — as some Christians have argued for decades — they are something darker. There is one piece of evidence that points strongly toward the darker explanation, and Tabatt highlights it as decisive.

Stop and feel the weight of that. If aliens are physical beings from a planet many light-years away — beings who have crossed an unimaginable distance using technology unknown to us — there is no physical reason for the syllables "Jesus" to do anything to them. A Spanish word should not stop a Martian. But that is not what we see. What we see is that across hundreds of cases, the moment an abductee invokes the name of Christ, the experience halts. That is not the behavior of a physical visitor. That is the behavior of a spiritual being subject to a higher spiritual authority. As the apostle James writes, "Even the demons believe — and shudder!" (James 2:19). And as Paul writes to the Philippians, at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, "in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil. 2:10). The earliest test of any spiritual being's loyalty in the New Testament is its response to the name of Christ (cf. Acts 19:13–17). If the so-called aliens flee at that name, we are not looking at extraterrestrials. We are looking at something the Bible already taught us to expect.¹⁸

Tabatt offers two further correlations that strengthen the demonic reading: certain abduction accounts (such as the Vilas-Boas case) include forced sexual encounters with the alleged aliens, which closely matches the historic literature on incubus and succubus demons; and some Christian prophetic figures report seeing in spiritual visions the same "gray alien" appearance reported by abductees, suggesting a common spiritual source rather than an interplanetary one.¹⁹ I would not stake the case on either of those secondary correlations alone, but they cohere with the central data point: the name of Jesus stops the encounter. That is enough.

The Common Thread

Step back and look at the three doors together. Mediumship invites the bereaved to talk with someone the Bible says they cannot reach. Past-life regression invites the curious to inhabit lives the Bible says they never lived. Alien encounters invite the lonely or wounded to be visited by beings the Bible has been describing for thousands of years under a different name. The packaging differs. The product is the same.

And the strategic effect on the NDE space is the same too. I count at least three things this dark fringe accomplishes for the enemy. First, it discredits legitimate NDE research by association. A skeptical neurologist or evangelical pastor walks into an NDE conference, sees the pet psychic table, and walks back out muttering that the whole field is nonsense. Second, it lures vulnerable seekers — bereaved, curious, spiritually hungry — into spiritual practices God explicitly forbids. Third, it distracts from the actual message NDEs seem to be carrying: God is real, the soul survives, love is the priority, Jesus is repeatedly present, materialism is wrong. If you can drown that message in a sea of side doors, you have effectively neutralized it without ever having to attack it head-on.

The Greek phrase translated "spiritual forces of evil" is ta pneumatika tēs ponērias (τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας) — literally "the spiritual things of wickedness." Paul is not speaking poetically. He is naming an organized, intelligent, malicious opposition that operates in the unseen realm and that targets human beings through every available avenue, including the avenues that look most spiritual and most comforting. A grieving mother lighting a candle at a medium's table is not stupid; she is being hunted. The right Christian response is not contempt but rescue.

Walking Past the Doors with Open Eyes

So what do we do with all of this? Let me close with three practical commitments.

First, we do not walk through these doors, even out of curiosity. The Bible's prohibition is not a piece of cultural debris from the Bronze Age that modern Christians can quietly ignore. It is a current, living command from a Father who knows the spiritual realm better than we do and who tells us to stay out of certain rooms. Curiosity is no excuse. "I just want to see if it's real" is exactly how Eve started.

Second, we recover the genuine where the counterfeit has crowded it out. The reason mediums find such a ready audience among grieving people is that the church has too often been silent about the rich, biblically grounded comfort available to those who mourn. The dead in Christ are conscious, present with the Lord, and waiting in the unbroken communion of the saints (cf. 2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23 — the topic of Chapter 20 here). The right response to a grieving widow is not "don't talk to mediums" full stop. The right response is "don't talk to mediums, and let me tell you what your husband is actually doing right now in the presence of Christ." Pastoral theology has to be richer than prohibition.

Third, we evaluate every NDE report by its content, not just its source. An NDE that ends with reincarnation teaching, an invitation to consult a medium, or a "spirit guide" insisting all religions lead to the same place is not necessarily fraudulent — it may be partly genuine and partly hijacked. But the content that is hijacked is not from God, and we are under no obligation to receive it. The discernment framework I lay out in Chapter 29 will give us a working tool for these evaluations.

The dark fringes are real. They are not the heart of the NDE phenomenon, and we cannot let them become the heart of the conversation either. But we are foolish to pretend they are not there. With the Bible in one hand and the research literature in the other, Christians can walk through the NDE world clear-eyed, compassionate to those caught in the side doors, and quietly confident that the genuine work of God remains, even where the enemy has crowded the room.