In 27% of accounts, the person described obtaining specific knowledge during the experience that they could not have acquired by ordinary means, about distant events, about deceased relatives, about unknown facts later confirmed.
Accounts where the person described knowing something they could not ordinarily have known, a distant death, a hidden object, a fact confirmed afterwards. The archive records these claims as reported; no independent verification was performed by the RERC.
The large majority of accounts contain no claim of anomalous knowledge, the experience was transformative, but entirely internal. The person was changed by something they felt or saw or understood, without any claim that this correlated with external facts.
A veridical claim, for purposes of this analysis, is any account where the person described obtaining specific, checkable information during the experience, information they credibly did not have access to beforehand. This includes:
Contact with the deceased, the person was given specific information by a deceased relative or friend that was subsequently confirmed: a hidden location of something, a message passed on, a detail about circumstances the living person did not know.
Crisis awareness, the person became aware, at a distance and without normal communication, of a crisis or death affecting someone they knew. The event was subsequently confirmed to have occurred at the time the awareness arose.
Precognitive knowledge, specific information received during the experience about future events, later confirmed to have occurred as described.
The archive records these claims exactly as the respondent described them. No follow-up investigation was performed. The 27% figure reflects accounts containing such a claim, not accounts where the claim was independently verified. The philosophical and scientific significance of these accounts therefore rests on the patterns across the archive rather than on any single case.
The following examples are drawn from account types in the archive. They are representative of the patterns found, not direct quotations.
"My husband came to me the night after he died. He told me where he had hidden something, something I needed, something I did not know existed. The next morning I found it exactly where he said."
"I was at work when I felt a sudden, overwhelming certainty that my mother had died, a sensation so strong I sat down. I called home immediately. She had just died, minutes before, while I was feeling it."
"During prayer I was shown, clearly and without ambiguity, that my daughter would have a son. She was not pregnant. Six months later she became pregnant, and the child was a boy."
These accounts are records of what people experienced and believed, they are not evidence of the paranormal in the strict sense of that phrase. What they are evidence of is a consistent pattern across a large archive: a significant minority of people who had religious experiences also reported obtaining information in ways that, if the reports are accurate, are not explicable by ordinary means. Whether this pattern is explicable by normal psychology, by memory distortion, by unconscious inference, or by something else entirely is a question this archive cannot settle but is well equipped to raise.