Bondi+

An English couple loses their 9 year old son to cancer. After his death, they ‘meet’ him over three hundred times. According to this man, there is nothing extraordinary or supernatural about this. What is extraordinary is that he believes scientists will soon prove how and why this happens. Forget God and atheism. This is the Third Way beyond death. Follow me on this journey into Michael Roll’s world of the undead.

Quite simply, this man believes that when we die our next stop is neither heaven nor hell. In this sense, he is not a “religionist”, to use his term. But for him neither does death signal the end of your existence. On the contrary, it is only the beginning of your journey for eternity.

For Michael Roll, it works like this. When the brain as an organ dies (along with the physical body) the mind migrates to another plane of existence which is invisible to most human beings on earth. With the onset of death your mind switches to another ‘frequency’ where you continue to live for eternity. Along with every other human being who has died since the beginning of time.

These living dead “are all around us, unseen and unsensed, operating on a different frequency”. As I was interviewing him, he claims, there were probably a lot of them around us. Why? Because they would be “terribly interested” in what we were doing.

How does he know that that there this life after death, that these beings were orbiting around us as we were speaking? Because some people - mediums - have a special ability to make dead people materialise, to tune into their frequency as it were. Haven’t we heard this a million times before and pooh poohed it. Not quite, says Michael Roll. Just as we cannot see television frequencies without a TV set, a medium is necessary to turn the invisible undead into the visible undead. These mediums - which he hastens to distinguish from the thousands of charlatans on TV and the streets - are born with ‘a gift’ just like others are born with a musical or a literary one.

So what form do people take when they ‘live on’ after death? “People who once lived on earth fully materialise in front of the scientist ... and they are as solid as you and me.” The bodies on this earth are made of protons, neutrons and electrons while theirs, the ‘soul’ that separates from the physical body, “must be made of much finer substances than subatomic particles. For a short time, people can come back to earth in what he calls a ‘space suit’ or ectoplasm, and prove to us that they are still alive. Just like the story of Jesus, who said to his disciples ‘Come and feel me’”.

Do they have a body, speak, think and feel, have sex? Do they get ill or hungry? “They speak in the voices they had on earth, he says”. But apparently, in the other world we will not need food or clothing and can take “any shape or size” we want. What a relief. When we switch frequencies we will no longer have teleshopping programmes selling vibrating belts, pills and machines to lose weight. Incidentally, it is not quite clear yet whether in this other world the undead have sex. Mmm. Your frequency or mine doesn’t quite work does it?

Has Michael Roll himself ever witnessed such a materialisation? “I don’t think I could be doing what I’m doing unless I had such an experience. In 1983 I was invited to participate in one of these experiments and my father who I loved very much and who died in 1967 fully materialised. This gave me the crushing personal proof that he had survived death. My father came up and touched me, he talked to me, I could smell tobacco as he was a smoker and liquor as he was also a heavy drinker. He even patted me on the head like he used to when I was a boy”.

Michael Roll also claims that a couple who lost their nine-year old son to cancer have been reunited with him 300 hundred times through a medium. Apparently, the boy first communicated with the medium and gave his parents’ London phone number. Sure enough, it was the right number. Who you gonna call, I was tempted to ask? Ghost finders?

What do these people who died tell him in conversation? “Very often they say that people die and they don’t know that they are dead because the other world is very similar to this one. You don’t get any shocks when you pass over.”

Roll asked one of the materialised people whether he would still have his beloved rugby, cricket and golf after death. Yes, said the undead. But the undead also told him that in their world he would be less interested in chasing a ball and much more in “bringing enlightenment to people”.

What is the concept and experience of time in this other world? Can those who live in it rewind the years to ‘live’ in another period? When I die, can I go and ‘watch’ a live Beatles concert? “What materialised beings say is that there is no time dimension in their world.” They can go back in time and relive history as it happened. “You can go back and see the Siege of Malta,” he quips.

Well, I am not particularly interested in seeing a bunch of men slaughtering each other in the Grand Harbour. But yes, apparently I would be able to watch John, Paul, George and Ringo bashing out their tunes from the front row. Now let me see which ones. In my life? Ticket to ride? I’ve just seen a face? Nowhere man?

Joking aside, what makes Roll’s claims intriguing is that he does not expect you to believe in anything except hard science. “I don’t want people to soak up any rubbish coming through mediums. Challenge everything that comes through. I want people to be sceptical, not gullible … The next step is to get the mediums to work with our scientists, to get this all on film. It has got to be repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions backed up with a mathematical theory. Just stone cold scientific facts.”

Are there any reputable scientists taking Roll’s ideas seriously? Profs Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize Laureate for Physics, a lecturer at Cambridge University seems to be a convert who writes: “It’s hard to change how people think. People have vested interests, and their projects and reputations would be threatened if certain things were shown to be true”.

I keep looking deeply into the eyes of this mild-mannered and impeccably articulate English gentleman. Has Michael Roll discovered the key to the riddle of life after death or is he just another charlatan? Is he a mad man or the bearer of the most important scientific tidings since Galileo? The jury is still out.