| Subjective Look-Alikes Not Always Biometric Matches |
From an Exchange Between a Reader and the Reincarnation Experiment
A person quite serious about reincarnation sent the following email to the Reincarnation Experiment on Aug 9, 2010:
When looking at re-incarnation videos on the Internet, I was wondering if that there are living people who have similar features who may be a soul in more than one body at one time. Let me give you a couple of examples.
My husband was meeting me in the dining room of the Jockey Club back in the early 80's. I went to the dining room and I saw him sitting at a round table with 8 people. I was confused because I expected him to be alone. I hesitated, but walked that way slowly. As I was about to reach the table I was surprised to see that the person was not my husband, but Michael Douglas the singer who had a TV show.
About 2-3 years later we were traveling through the Carolinas on our yacht. My husband was standing on the deck and unknown to us someone took his picture and the next day I received a copy of a newspaper that stated "Michael Douglas comes to town," and the picture was of my husband on our yacht...
Even more startling, I was at the airport in Savannah, Georgia, a man got off a small private plane and I was astonished, it was my cousin. I ran to him, so surprised to meet him on the tarmac, and as I threw my arms around him, I said,"Bobby what are you doing here!"
He said, "I am not Bobby, but, I don't mind being Bobby!"
It was William Shatner, who looked exactly like my cousin , in person.
The Reincarnation Experiment response follows:
You are correct in that many people living today (or recently) look
enough alike to confuse people about their identity. In reincarnation research. We
call this the look-alike issue. In such cases, two people may have
many differences, but enough superficial similarities to cause confusion. We see this phenomenon in alleged cases of past-life identities or so-called split souls.
However, when one looks more closely at the similarities, we find that the differences are quite significant at
the biometric level of facial architecture and other genotype features.
Our research has found that the similarities in strong reincarnation cases
have variances of only 1 to 3%, while solely look-alikes vary from 6% or much
more. In the latter group, comparisons
of both physical and personality features show little similarity.
But, keep in mind that the truth is that we don't know really all that is involved in what we call
reincarnation, so we're still far from any neat conclusions.
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