There are few people on Earth who can claim to understand what might happen after we die as well as Dannion Brinkley.
The former US Marine was declared dead for 28 minutes after being struck by lightning in 1975, before ultimately returning to his body and making a full recovery.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are less than one in a million — meaning you have to be extremely, extremely unlucky for it to happen.
But, of course, it isn’t impossible. Technically, every time there’s a storm, there’s a small chance someone could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get hit. Brinkley knows that better than anyone.
The businessman, athlete, and veteran had been holding a phone to his ear on September 17, 1975, when lightning traveled down a phone line, through the phone he was using, and straight into his body.
“It went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine,” he said, via 8 News Now.
“It welded the nails of the heels of my shoes to the floor. It threw me up in the air, I see the ceiling, it slams me back down, a ball of fire comes through the room and blinds me. I am burning. I am on fire. I am paralyzed.”
But here’s where it gets really interesting…
Brinkley says he actually left his body after the horrifying incident, and he didn’t return to it until after it had been taken to the morgue — some 28 minutes later.
So what happened while he was gone? Well, it didn’t all just fade to black. In fact, he has since spoken about the traumatic experience to offer insight into exactly “what happens when you die.”
Brinkley recalled feeling as though he was floating alongside the ambulance as it transported his body to the hospital, watching from above as doctors pronounced him officially dead.
He added that his consciousness traveled through what he described as a tunnel before encountering a spiritual being made of light in a “Crystal City.”
Speaking in an interview with T&H – Afterlife on YouTube, Brinkley said he witnessed a replay of his entire life in a “360‑degree panorama.”
“You watch it from a second‑person point of view,” he explained. “In the life you just reviewed, what difference did you and God make?”
Needless to say, Brinkley has his skeptics, but he has stood by his account ever since. Not only that, but he has had two additional near‑death experiences that he says reinforced his beliefs.
In 1989, while undergoing open‑heart surgery, Brinkley recalled being “reunited with his angelic instructors” and said he learned how to “use his new psychic and spiritual gifts to aid the dying and the desperate.”
He later had another near‑death experience during brain surgery.
“When you learn you don’t die, when you learn you’re a spiritual being, you’re not going to go to hell, that’s enough to inspire you to change,” he said, per 8 News Now.
