Our Son Was a WWII Pilot

[Transcript below from full show transcript here.]
In totally unrelated news, the parents of "Balloon Boy" have been sentenced for perpetrating an elaborate media hoax which involved their innocent son.

Okay, obviously I'm being snarky, but my point is this: Let's just say, for shits and giggles, that 11-year-old James Leininger is indeed a reincarnated WWII pilot. Isn't that his story to tell, should he so choose, when he is old enough to make a decision like that fully comprehending all the possible consequences, good or bad, of being publicly (and forever) known as someone who claims to be a reincarnated WWII pilot?

Despite this segment ostensibly being part of a panel on "near death experiences" with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (author of Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles That Are Saving Lives Against All Odds), Dr. Deepak Chopra (author of Life After Death), and Dinesh D'Souza (author of Life After Death: The Evidence), it's just a big commercial for a bunch of books (the quality and accuracy of which I will not assess in this post), including the book James' parents have written about him, called Soul Survivor. (Get it? Har har.)

That his parents are trying to cash in on this story is not in question. The question is: Why do we consider that their right, rather than James'—a right he can exercise only when he is old enough to give truly informed consent?

We have a culture that encourages parents to exploit their children, with good intentions or without them. We take parents like the Leiningers at their word when they say things like "James wants to tell his story!" and don't question whether maybe, even if that's true, it's impossible for James to grasp the totality of what that means.

I wonder whether having parents' breaching the boundaries of their children's informed and uncoerced consent communicates to those children that consent isn't important and exploitation of others is acceptable. I wonder what a culture that communicates that message to more and more and ever more children might look like…

JEFF PROBST (filling in for Larry King): Andrea, when did you first realize that something was -- was not right, that James was having ideas or stories that he wanted to share about this?

ANDREA LEININGER, AUTHOR, "SOUL SURVIVOR": Well, initially it started off -- James always had a fascination with airplanes. And that seemed just like something that a little boy would be fascinated with, like big trucks or something like that.

The real problem started about two weeks after James' second birthday. He had a -- a night terror, which he had never had before. And this first nightmare began a series of nightmares that started occurring every other night, every night. Four or five times a week he would have these screaming nightmares where he'd be laying on his back, kicking his feet up at the ceiling like he was in a box, trying to kick his way out.

And after several months of this, he was having a nightmare and I came down the hallway and I was able to finally determine what he was saying. And he was saying, "airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out."

PROBST: Well, and Bruce, even at three, he was -- James was drawing pictures of an airplane crashing. In fact, I -- I think we have one.

Do you -- did you talk to him at that point?

He was very young then.

Did he have an idea what was going on?

BRUCE LEININGER, AUTHOR "SOUL SURVIVOR": Well, by the time he started drawing those pictures, he'd been talking about this and -- for several months. That didn't start until seven or eight months after he really began talking about what was happening. Prior to that, in the dreams or after the dreams or before he'd go to bed or in a dreaming state, mostly, he started to tell us things about what would happen. And he essentially gave us three items of information over about a three month period. One, he gave us the name of the ship, which I verified through research on the Internet (INAUDIBLE)...

PROBST: This is this ship the airplane took off from?

B. LEININGER: That's...

A. LEININGER: Yes.

B. LEININGER: That's correct. Natoma Bay. He gave us a name Natoma. I asked him one night where his ship came or where -- where his airplane came from, because he told us it was shot down by the Japanese. And he said it came from a boat. So in another question, he then -- I asked him the name of the boat. He said, Natoma. And I did a Google search on the word "Natoma" and found, 300 or 400 hits down, a history of a WWII ship that was in the Pacific.

About a month later, he gave us the -- the name of a guy he said he flew with. When we asked him if there was anyone else in his -- in his dream that he could remember.

PROBST: So I want to be clear on this, Bruce.

He gave you the name...

B. LEININGER: Yes.

A. LEININGER: Yes.

PROBST: ...of somebody he had flown with?

B. LEININGER: That's right. Jack -- Jack Larson.

A. LEININGER: I kept asking him if he remembered what his name has been -- had been in his last life or in his dreams. And he said his name was James. But that is his name. So I finally gave up on that line of questioning.

And I finally asked him, do you remember anybody else that you flew with or any friends?

And he said, Jack. Jack Larson.

PROBST: James, you're 11 now. You're a little older. You've been -- been dealing with this for a while.

What do you make of it now?

Do you still have these dreams?

Can you connect this to anything or are they starting to -- to lessen for you?

JAMES LEININGER, SON OF BRUCE AND ANDREA LEININGER: It has diminished.

PROBST: So you're not remembering it as clearly as you were when you were younger.

J. LEININGER: No.

A. LEININGER: And, Jeff, it wasn't like he had cognitive memory. It wasn't like he could just sit and I could say, Jeff, tell me about when you were on the last season "Survivor." These memories weren't active in his mind. It was just -- it was usually a trigger or something that would happen or he would see or smell or hear something. And then he would just come out with this little piece of information and that was it.

Then it was pretty much gone forever. There was probably only three or five instances where we were able to sit down and question him and ask him questions. The rest of the time when we tried to do that, if he didn't initiate that conversation, he didn't seem to know what we were talking about. It was a very interesting phenomenon.