Return from Tomorrow by George G. Ritchie & Elizabeth Sherrill - Overview by Steve Freier

In my extensive research on NDEs and OBEs (Out of Body Experiences), I had occasionally heard of the NDE of George Richey as being one of the most significant influential NDE experiences, but I was not aware that he had written a book. Then one day I stumbled upon, Return from Tomorrow which outlines his NDE, and also sketches a brief bio as well.

From the publisher: In 1943 as a young army recruit in Texas, Ritchie caught pneumonia and passed out. He was placed in an isolation room. When an attendant checked him 24 hours later he found no pulse or breathing. A medical officer pronounced him dead, pulled a sheet over his face, and gave orders for his body to be taken to the morgue. But when the attendant came back nine minutes later he thought he detected chest movement, and although his vital signs were still negative he convinced the medical officer to give him a shot of adrenaline into the heart muscle. Ritchie's pulse returned and he started breathing. He regained consciousness four days later. But Ritchie had experienced waking up and seeing the body covered by the sheet. He then felt himself flying over the country, trying to get to Virginia to continue his training to be a doctor. At one point he came down in a town and tried to ask someone a question, but the man didn't hear or see him. (Ten months afterwards, Ritchie happened to travel through Vicksburg, Mississippi and saw the exact place he had seen during the experience.)

The major significance of his NDE story is that at some point after Dr. Richey had grown up and related his story here and there at random times, etc. At some point he crossed paths with Dr. Raymond Moody and told his story to him. Dr. Moody, being an atheist, had no interest in religion or spiritual experiences. However, he thought that Dr. Richie's account was credible and so it spurred him on to seek out other individuals who had had similar experiences. Moody’s research culminated in his now iconic book, Life after Life, in which he coined the term NDE or Near Death Experience. From that point the NDE became ‘a thing’ and thus inspired many other individuals to come forward and tell their stories as well.

I enjoyed George Richie's story which really begins in 1943 when he was a young teen in training at boot Camp Barkeley in Texas during World War II. There he contracted double pneumonia and was put into isolation. His dilemma was that because he had been accepted into medical school in Richmond, Virginia, and had to leave in a few days, he wanted to heal quickly. And of course he couldn't travel if he was still sick. There's a lot of drama around that, as he succumbs to the illness and then suddenly finds himself out of body flying through the night sky till he lands in a town which he later is able to identify as Vicksburg. There has some experiences where he discovers that people cannot see him. This scares him as he he does not understand what is going on. He becomes very frustrated, aborts his journey to Richmond and decides to fly back to the boot camp.

At camp he frantically tries to find his body which is fairly difficult because it is lying there in a tiny room of quite a large hospital there and many of the rooms as well as the recruits look very similar with their shaved heads. Eventually he locates the room where his dead body lies. The only way he can identify his body is by the presence of a special ring sticking out from under the sheets because his face has been covered. At that point, he becomes aware of an angelic presence in the room, which turns out to be Jesus, and from there, he is escorted into the heavenly realms for the rest of the NDE experience, which I won't go into here. You can get those details when you read the book!

Ritchie’s book was co-written with Elizabeth Sherrill, and published in 1978. In the book he tells of his out-of-body experience, his meeting with Jesus Christ, and his travel with Christ through the different dimensions of time and space. Return from Tomorrow has been translated into nine languages. Later he published another book, Ordered to Return: My Life After Dying, to elaborate on his heavenly experience. Dr. Ritchie died on October 29, 2007, at his home in Irvington, Virginia, aged 84, following a long battle with cancer. Get the book on AMAZON here!