In the Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), people perceive that they have travelled to a location and are present there in all ways except the physical presence of their bodies, which remain at their place of origin.1 Robert Monroe was a pioneer in exploring the phenomenon,2 conducting research that spanned hundreds of experiments over twelve years3 and that he classified and sorted into approximately 589 out-of-the-body experiments.4
Monroe’s own accounts describe the experience beginning with deep relaxation followed by vibrations he associated with what he termed the State of Vibration;5 during one episode, on 1960-04-18, he separated from his physical body to a height of about eight inches (twenty centimetres) above it.6 He described encountering a range of non-physical entities. In the 1960-04-18 experience, a small, nude, human-appearing male figure, apparently about ten years old and roughly one metre tall, with thin legs and undeveloped genitals, approached his body,7 climbed onto his back and wrapped its legs around his waist as though performing a habitual, unremarkable act,8 before Monroe retreated back into his physical body rather than confront it.9 Monroe said the entity seemed more animal-like than human in intelligence despite its humanoid form.10 On the night of 1960-07-13, in a hotel room in North Carolina Durham, with his wife beside him in bed, Monroe was attacked by an unseen entity that fought at what he described as an animal level, biting and scratching;11 he fought it through the room and ejected it through a window, estimating it was pure animal, about 1.2 metres long, like a large dog.12 Afterwards he found his hand passed through the closed window, which he took as confirmation that he had not been in his physical body.13 He also wrote a letter to Richard Gordon describing his OOB experiences and a technique for leaving the physical body, which Gordon had read to him repeatedly in hospital at his own request,14 and of a further episode — the 1963-08-23 explosion out-of-body experience (Robert Monroe) — Monroe said he considered it might represent true death rather than a typical out-of-the-body experience.15 Monroe’s ability was also tested under laboratory conditions at the Electroencephalographic Laboratory, University of Virginia Medical School: in sessions recorded by Charlie Hickson, he was asked on eight occasions to try to produce an OOBE while connected to instruments measuring his physiological functions;16 he was unsuccessful on the first seven nights17 but produced two very brief episodes on the eighth.18 During the second of these he correctly described that the laboratory technician was out of the room and that a man, later identified as her husband, was with her in a corridor19 — an instance of what is termed veridical out-of-body perception. A further session under improved conditions, in California in 1968, produced two more brief episodes;20 one was observed on closed-circuit television by researcher Charles T. Tart and his assistant Joan Crawford, who saw Monroe move his arm slightly away from his throat just before he awoke and reported the experience.21
Joseph McMoneagle had continuing spontaneous OBEs following a near-death experience (NDE) in 1970, though he was initially unable to control them.22 By 1983 he regarded Monroe as the one person he trusted who claimed he could control the experience.23 McMoneagle went on to work in Monroe’s laboratory for nearly fourteen months, eventually learning a degree of control over his own OBE ability, though not as complete as Monroe’s.24 The two men reported visiting a number of targets together, both in the OBE sense and through Remote Viewing (RV),25 and McMoneagle said his OBE training with Monroe produced a substantial increase in control over his remote-viewing ability.26 He nonetheless said it was impossible to confirm whether genuine out-of-body travel was occurring, as opposed to ordinary psychic functioning during remote viewing.27
OBEs are also frequently reported during near-death experiences. Pam Reynolds reported that on leaving her body during surgery she felt no more pain, suffering, fear, or anxiety, and could move around at will by thought.28 A woman named Maria told Kimberly Clark Sharp that she had left her body and watched her own resuscitation from a corner of the ceiling of her hospital room;29 Sharp said that, while out of her body, Maria was distracted by something elsewhere in the hospital and found herself staring closely at a single tennis shoe on a window ledge three or four storeys above the ground.30 In a Dutch prospective study, cardiologist Pim van Lommel found that 25 percent of near-death experiencers reported an OBE,31 and he said he regarded Maria’s case as providing the strongest evidence for the existence of consciousness outside and separate from the body.32 Van Lommel also said that, based on cases of corroborated OBEs, there were good reasons to assume consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of the brain — an instance of what researchers describe as nonlocal consciousness.33 He cited a report by Janice Holden on about 100 OBEs occurring during a near-death experience, in which 8 percent contained minor errors and 2 percent were found to be false.34
Later accounts of deliberately induced OBEs come from participants in the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Experience (Monroe Institute program), which uses Hemi-Sync audio technology intended to synchronise the brain’s hemispheres and facilitate OBEs and other altered states of consciousness.35 Graham Nichols, described as a leading figure in the study of OBEs,36 developed the G Technique, one of his methods for inducing the experience.37 While demonstrating the technique to friends in 1999, Nichols entered a deep state and went into an OBE.38 According to the documentary I Left My Body – The Gateway Experience, Nichols left his body and witnessed an explosion in downtown London that occurred five days later39 — corresponding to the 1999 Admiral Duncan pub bombing — an episode the documentary describes as an unusually strong session of remote viewing that resulted in an OBE.40 Nichols said that after witnessing the explosion, a physical pressure struck his chest and pulled him back into a void-like state of rudimentary consciousness.41 In a separate case, Nelson Delis reported an OBE while on a red-eye flight from Portland, Oregon, following a 40-mile (approximately 64-kilometre) ultramarathon;42 he checked and confirmed that his eyes were physically closed while he reported being able to see clearly, which he interpreted as evidence that he was perceiving with a non-physical body rather than imagining it.43 Nichols and Delis reported having OBEs about a week apart from each other after returning from the Gateway Experience program.44
More recent, sceptically minded discussion of the phenomenon has come from podcast host Chris Ramsay and psychologist Julia Mossbridge. Ramsay said his first OBEs happened at his home, not at The Monroe Institute,45 and that he had never heard of the phenomenon before his first one occurred.46 He said he considered the out-of-body state objectively different from a Lucid Dreaming episode, having on one occasion woken from a lucid dream directly into it.47 Mossbridge said she considered deliberately inducing OBEs unsafe if not done well, reasoning that if consciousness can leave the body, another consciousness could enter it;48 Ramsay said he understood the goal described by Jordan Jozak, in conversations and published writing about the GATE program, to have been getting participants out of body so they could build a construct for the programme’s operators.49 Both raised caveats about how the phenomenon should be interpreted: Mossbridge said that obtaining veridical information during an OBE, such as reading a target hidden in an envelope, does not prove a person left their body, since someone gifted at remote viewing could acquire that information while having the experience;50 she also said it was possible that an OBE is the experiencer wandering within the brain’s own construction of where the body is in space and what the room looks like,51 while Ramsay raised bilocation — being in and out of the body at the same time — as an alternative explanation.52 Author Whitley Strieber has also described OBEs: he has been taken out of his body by the beings he refers to as the visitors.53 While he was writing Communion, people suggested to him that what happened to him may have been an OBE;54 in one such episode he moved around his bedroom, looked at his own body lying there with his wife Anne Strieber beside him, and moved through the wall and window into the front yard.55 In another account, tied to the 1987-01 Whitley Strieber clearing encounter and childhood-memory regression, Strieber found himself gliding in what he recognised as his mother’s office in the old family house in San Antonio, Texas, where he had lived as a baby.56