Ingrid Honkala holds a PhD in marine science and says she spent years working as an oceanographer for NASA and the U.S. Navy. She also says she has had multiple near-death experiences, beginning when she was two years old, that have convinced her that consciousness continues after the body stops.
The first happened at her family’s home in Bogotá, where she fell into a tank of icy water.
“The panic disappeared and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace and stillness,” she told Jam Press, according to Yahoo! “It felt as if my awareness separated from my body.”
Honkala says she found herself looking down at her own body from above. She was born with serious health problems, and she says she recognized the body below her as a source of pain and had no particular wish to return to it.
“At that moment, I no longer felt like a child in a body but like pure consciousness, a field of awareness and light,” she said.
She also says that from outside her body she could see her mother, who was away from home, and that her mother turned around and came back in time to pull her out. Skeptics have the hardest time with this part of her story, because it’s the only element anyone other than Honkala could confirm and her accounts of that detail have varied a bit between tellings.
After that incident, two more happened. She was in a motorcycle accident at 25, and then at 52 she had a complication during surgery. Each time, she says, the same thing occured.
“It felt like entering a deeper layer of reality that exists beyond our physical senses,” she said. “Death does not feel like the end of existence.”
Honkala, now 55 and living in Bogotá, writes about it all in her book, Dying to See the Light, published this year. She doesn’t frame any of this as a break from science; in fact, she says that first experience pushed her toward scientific research.
“I wanted to understand the nature of reality through observation and research,” she said.
Researchers have studied near-death experiences for decades without agreeing on a cause. A 2025 review of 87 studies found that researchers can approach them through physiological, psychological, or consciousness-based explanations, with no single model agreed upon. Most researchers in that field lean toward a neurological explanation that what people describe is something the brain does as it shuts down.
Honkala’s story obviously can’t be scientifically proven, because what she describes is, by its nature, something only she experienced.
