In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

Military researchers have also produced similar memories and visions by accelerating fighter pilots to unconsciousness in human centrifuges. Gravity-induced loss of consciousness—G-LOC—starts to occur at accelerations of five times the force of gravity, and modern fighter planes can achieve almost twice that in less than a second. Under those conditions, a 200-pound man effectively weighs almost one ton. Losing consciousness while flying a fighter plane at twice the speed of sound is obviously catastrophic, and Air Force researchers have accelerated test pilots to unconsciousness more than a thousand times to determine the limits of human performance. “You cannot die without losing consciousness,” Dr. James Whinnery observed in a paper titled “Psychophysiologic Correlates of Unconsciousness and Near-Death Experiences.” Winnery goes on to write: “Everyone should, therefore, have some interest in loss of consciousness since he or she will experience it at least once.”