An icebreaker
A psychiatrist spent four decades documenting thousands of young children, mostly outside the West, who described detailed memories of a specific previous life. Some details reportedly checked out; critics say the methods can't rule out ordinary explanations.
Starting in the 1960s, he traveled the world interviewing young children who described specific memories of a previous life, publishing his first major case collection in 1966. He spent the rest of his career trying to verify or rule out each case.
He took over the research program after the founder's retirement and has continued collecting and verifying children's case reports since. His 2005 book summarized decades of findings for a general audience.
He published a book-length critique arguing that every case he examined had holes large enough to undermine it as evidence of reincarnation, and that the idea itself faces problems no case could fix.
In a book examining pseudoscience broadly, he named children's reports of verified past-life details as one of few paranormal claims he thought deserved serious, sustained scientific study. He stopped short of saying the evidence proved reincarnation.