A Vietnam War vet gave a chilling recollection of his supposed encounter with a hooded figure likened to the ‘Grim Reaper’ while he believed himself to be dead.
US Army Colonel John B. Alexander is, by all accounts, well-placed to offer opinions on the paranormal. A former Army Special Forces Commander, he headed up the Army Intelligence “psychic spy unit” at Fort Meade, Maryland – a secretive programme that later inspired the book The Men Who Stare at Goats.
According to the Daily Mirror, he once spoke to a helicopter gunship pilot named Jim who had survived a near-fatal crash after his aircraft, a two-man Bell AH-1 Cobra gunship, was brought down over the jungles of Vietnam during the war.
After enemy aircraft fire ripped through the helicopter, the pilot was left unable to keep it in the air. With nowhere to land, he made the decision to force the helicopter into a controlled crash. Upon contact with the ground, the helicopter’s rotor blades continued until they “beat themselves to death” against the ground, leaving the aircraft almost completely destroyed.
Soon after, the helicopter burst into flames. Speaking to podcaster Shawn Ryan, Colonel John B. Alexander told how Jim, the front-seat gunner, sustained severe injuries, including a broken leg and burns to his face.
Believing that his fellow pilot had been killed, he set about trying to get to safety before Viet Cong soldiers could capture him.
Yet Jim claims he suddenly found himself floating above the crash site, looking down at his own body. Moreover, he could see that there was a friendly fire support base hidden in the jungle around a kilometer and a half away.
Jim told Alexander that there, in the jungle, he was faced with a hooded figure who promptly gave him a four-word message: “You’re not dead yet.”
And as if that ordeal wasn’t shocking enough, Jim soon found himself returned to his body on the ground. And at that precise moment, he looked up, prompting his fellow pilot to run into the wreckage to rescue him.
“So the back seat [pilot] is out, he’s running away and he looks back and about that time Jim looks up,” Alexander explained.
“So he runs back and grabs him out. He says ‘I thought you were dead, you haven’t moved since we were hit’.”
Jim said he knew where they could get help, giving instructions to the other pilot regarding where he could find the friendly fire support base. Jim then hid behind large anthills waiting for rescue.
US troops eventually spotted the helicopter and rescued Jim. Jim, who was lifted from the scene via a jungle penetrator rescue device, reportedly recognized the aerial view he had outside his body.
Colonel Alexander, meanwhile, told the podcast that it was the only case where an alleged out-of-body perspective was replicated, and that in Jim’s case, his account matched the geography around the crash site.
