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The Boy Who Lived Before (Cameron Macaulay; Barra)

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triplesod

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Extraordinary People is a television documentary series broadcast on Channel 5 in the United Kingdom. Each programme follows the lives of people with a rare medical condition and/or unusual ability.
(A 2006 episode examined the story of ... )
Cameron Macaulay, a boy who claims to have memories of a past life on the Island of Barra, Scotland.

Sorry for such a quick post but the show has already started.

Anyway, it is on channel 5 now (9pm UK) and is a documentory about a 5 year old boy who claims to have lived another life. Seems fascinating and will definately be one for all the imaginative sceptics and non-prejudiced believers alike.

Anyway, enjoy. Sorry I am late in bringing this to the board but I believe most around the UK will already be expecting it.
 
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I watched the Extraordinary People tonight on channel 5 which featured a boy who seemed to remember a past life and the guy from the University of Virginia department that is studying past lives.

Some thoughts:

1. One really must ownder if some kind of Trickster is at work as it seems so tantilising but the specific facts just didn't measure up. They tried some fudging the issue by claiming it may be he is confusing a number of past lives but I think that is reaching. There was nothing that couldn't be explained by the lad seeing a brief TV report and some luck (although Robertson is quite a common name so it wasn't that much luck).

2. I liked the room full of filing cabinets full of past life cases. All very interesting - I'd love a peek at their contents!!

So again another interesting case but nothing proved and just enough right for the Believers to grasp at and just enough wrong for the Skeptics to dimiss.
 
Robertson may be a common name, but I think the point is that it's not a common name on the tiny island of Barra.
The odds of a toddler being able to pic another out of the blue would be rather large I think.
 
I suppose my think is that if you went to any island in Scotland and looked for records of a Robertson you'd find one.

They might have lived in a white house near the coast but so do a lot of people on Bara (as far as I could see all the houses were white and pretty close to the sea) and the other facts were off - you can't see the planes landing from there, there was no father called Shane and no one in the family killed by a car.

So the vague details you could get lucky on were found to match while the specific details that would have proved the case were way out.

As I say enough ammo for both sides to hold the case up and say "I told you so" but not enough to actual prove it. Pity as I thought they were toying with us leaving the big reveal for the end but it just sort of stumbled to a conclusion.
 
You may be right that there were bound to be Robertsons on Barra at sometime, and yes a lot of people on Barra live by the sea in white houses, but the question is how does a city living toddler with no known connection to the island know this?

How does he know planes go to Barra, never mind that they land on the beach?

In fact how does he even know Barra exists? It's not somewhere that's in the news much, and apparantly he was two when he started talking about the place.

You've got to admit the childs reaction to being shown his "house" was quite thoughful.
 
Scunnerlugzz said:
You may be right that there were bound to be Robertsons on Barra at sometime, and yes a lot of people on Barra live by the sea in white houses, but the question is how does a city living toddler with no known connection to the island know this?

How does he know planes go to Barra, never mind that they land on the beach?

In fact how does he even know Barra exists? It's not somewhere that's in the news much, and apparantly he was two when he started talking about the place.
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We the Skeptic chappie questioned here and she couldn't think of any way he could have got the information but we live in a media saturated age and all it would have taken was a report on the news for the basic details to stick - white houses and beeches were and planes land (which, if it had been featured would have been the images shown and were the strongest "memories" he had). The mother would never have remembered that but it could just have stuck and grown from the seed of that.

It'd be a bit like a kid saying he had a previous life in Blackpool and the only facts that fitted his memories was the Tower and lights.

Scunnerlugzz said:
You've got to admit the childs reaction to being shown his "house" was quite thoughful.
Click to expand...

It was interesting indeed but there were a number of explanations:

1. He was awash with emotion from returning home.

2. He was feeling bad as there was such an air of expectation in the van and he couldn't tell them much or he felt under pressure to be definitive when couldn't be.

3. He has had a long couple of days and was tired (and possibly tired of being dragged out to "perform").
 
Unfortunately I missed that program even though I planned to watch it. Anyway, I have to make do with everyones comments instead. However from what I can gather it would be silly [if it was a hoax] to choose a small not very known island as the target. Wouldn't the chances of "being right" [about names, places etc] higher by chosing a large city instead?
More of the same basically so you could be a little vague but the chances would be higher to get a "hit".
So choosing this island seems odd as even "exact" memories such as a name, a building etc would be so much harder to match.

Just a thought.
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
We the Skeptic chappie questioned here and she couldn't think of any way he could have got the information but we live in a media saturated age and all it would have taken was a report on the news for the basic details to stick - white houses and beeches were and planes land (which, if it had been featured would have been the images shown and were the strongest "memories" he had).
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Wish I'd seen the prog.

Probably unlike most people here, I have been to Barra, so I'd likely have picked up on any media coverage of the place. And I can't remember much at all, TBH! Probably some colour supplement has done the odd article, or maybe a travel programme has covered it. It certainly seems an unlikely thing for a 2 year old to have picked out from all the rest of the 'media saturation'.

I think we all have places that we like or dislike, for no very obvious reasons, whether we've been there or not. Perhaps reincarnation is some sort of explananation for these feelings. Or maybe there's some kind of cosmic consciousness that we occasionally tune into, giving us information we'd not normally have.

I dunno... :?
 
Frankly, we only have the mother's word for it that any of the 'Barra mum' etc stuff started when the child was so young. She could have made it up herself and implanted the idea, just for attention.

I didn't notice any of the wider family around her, giving support at this interesting time. Could it be that they think she's a manipulative nutter?

If you catch a child young enough, you can make them believe anything, at least until they are old enough to mix with others and see different viewpoints.

I feel that something was going on there, but that reincarnation was the least likely explanation, much as I'd have liked to be convinced. ;)
 
rynner: All that would be required is a brief piece on TV possibly not even an otherwise memorable part of a local news item.

Dingo667 said:
Unfortunately I missed that program even though I planned to watch it. Anyway, I have to make do with everyones comments instead. However from what I can gather it would be silly [if it was a hoax] to choose a small not very known island as the target. Wouldn't the chances of "being right" [about names, places etc] higher by chosing a large city instead?
Click to expand...

No one suggested it was a hoax though.

The problem was that the only things that were right were iconic images of the island and some things that could have been purely random. The very specific information (that would have proved the case) was all wrong.

That series is repeated quite a bit so I'll keep an eye open for it coming round again - it is well worth a watch.
 
I saw this and found it quite fascinating. I have heard these type of stories before obviously, but it was quite amazing that they went to the right house, and Cameron's reaction was very strange.

I can't say it totally convinced me that he was reincarnated although I tend to believe in that anyway (I think.... :? ) but I think there was definitely something in it.

I just hope that it was all as it appeared to be and his mum really was a supportive and open minded as she seemed, there's always room for doubt in these situations as to whether the parents are prompting the children.

My very sceptical other half was wavering by the end of the programme too.
 
I have to say I didn't see the programme. But my sister was discussing it at work and they came to the conclusion that the boy was remembering being the family dog. (he was left in the house while the others went to play. And his father was run over).

Well it's not that much harder to swallow... :)
 
BUMP!

The Boy Who Lived Before
LInk is dead.

A documentary following the story of Cameron, a 4 year old Glasgow boy who seems to have memories from a previous life on Barra, a remote Scottish island.
 
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(FROM THE REINCARNATION THREAD)

youtube.com/watch?v=VFHWb7IuPno
Link is dead. Video unavailable. No archived version found.

Interesting documentary.
 
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Thanks for that, very interesting, it's quite long but if anyone watches it I'd be interested to here their views.
 
Yes, as with many of these reports, they get tantalisingly close to being convincing but always with an element of doubt.
 
Ronson8 said:
Thanks for that, very interesting, it's quite long but if anyone watches it I'd be interested to here their views.
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There were a lot of what a psychic would call hits, but at the end they emphasized the few misses on the most specific details.

One "miss" was the father's name being Shane instead of what it was, but they also said his full name was Seamus xxxx xxxx, apparently he went by his middle name. Seamus/Shane is not so far apart and I suppose could be chalked up to the child using the father's real first name. I found it odd that he knew the name of his Barra father, but not his Barra mum, he always referred to his father by name, but his mum was always "Barra mother". If he knew his mum's name it was something they could check for a match, but it was not mentioned.

The next was the father dying in a car accident. Didn't happen according to the family member.

The third miss was the program asked the family member about a dying boy and she said there weren't any childhood deaths. However, the boy never said that he died (at least during the show), he always said he "fell down a dark hole and wound up here" with his family in Glasgow. If you're already going to entertain the idea of reincarnation, this leaves alternate fortean explanations open. For instance did the Barra version of the boy suddenly have a change in personality at some point (perhaps because his soul had left his body without dying only to wind up reincarnated in Glasgow)?

He had a lot of "hits", but many of these are rather generic, for instance a white house near the sea, on an island where most all the houses are white and near the sea.

There were some intermediate level hits such as the family name, given enough people you would be very likely to find someone with the right family name. The existence/color of the dog (which wasn't the family dog but apparently a friend/neighbor's dog, though a young child might not get the difference).
 
Ronson8 said:
Yes it's all very confusing it's as if he was mixing up more than one previous life.
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Yes, I believe someone in the video alluded to that as a possibility. The boy did get a lot of things correct, but I suppose they wouldn't have made a show about a boy who got everything wrong.

When the family found the actual house of the family and went to it, he seemed to identify it though the mum says they didn't tell him it was the family house. On the other hand they didn't show him going into other houses, so he could have known consciously or not that this house was special.
 
When we saw it a few years ago I had the impression that it was all baloney, as one'd expect. All the 'hits' were predictable, like the 'white house near the sea' mentioned above, and the boy didn't get any really crucial details right.

What I found most interesting was why the child was insisting that he'd had another life in the first place. I've met people whose children have talked like this, British people with no culture of reincarnation, and they're just baffled. Unlike the family in the documentary though, without a specific location to investigate they just have to be content with the kid's nightmares and tall tales.

It's a puzzle. As this programme shows, there aren't any solid answers.
 
The 2006 documentary video is currently accessible at: https://watchdocumentaries.com/the-boy-who-lived-before/

Ever since little Cameron Macaulay first learned to talk, he has been telling stories of his apparent ‘previous’ life and family in Barra, a remote Scottish island some 220 miles from his current home in Glasgow. Cameron has never been to Barra, yet he describes in great detail his life on the island. His mother Norma takes him to the island to verify his story and find out details of his previous family.
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I was one of those children about whom people used to say 'how can she know that!'

I had very acute hearing and the kind of ADD that makes you notice very tiny details that other people miss. I never intended to mislead people, but there were an awful lot who thought I had some kind of psychic powers, when all that had really happened was that they'd been talking about something between themselves ('there's no way she could have overheard xxxxx', yes, yes, I could) and I might mention something about it, or I seen a photograph or picture very very briefly but enough that the details were clear to me, such as on a shelf in an elderly aunt's house - that I would ask about maybe sometime after the event. For example 'who was that man with the moustache that was kissing auntie XXXX?' (because that was what had been in the picture), and everyone would swear I'd seen a ghost in auntie xxxx's house, when all I'd done was notice a photograph that was tucked away somewhere ('she couldn't possibly have known that Frank had a moustache!' oh, yes, I could).

Just examples, but adults should NEVER underestimate what a child notices or takes on board, often in a fraction of a second.
 
Coal said:
Especially a child that learned to read when very young...
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Yep, that was also me. Children have much faster reaction times, their senses are more acute and they have less expectation cluttering up their minds. Adults underestimate children to an almost criminal degree.
 
Given this boy lived in Scotland and Barra is in Scotland then he may well have watched a factual tv programme about a family on Barra with a little boy who looked just like him. Even a magazine article would be sufficient. His young mind and ego innocently processes this likeness of him as having another, different mother and family.

Despite recognising landmarks, he didn’t find the actual house, which is either mysterious or convenient. Perhaps the tv company used a bit of dramatic licence and filmed a house on one of the other islands close by.

Also, the Outer Hebrides are a stronghold of the Gaelic language:

https://www.visitouterhebrides.co.uk/our-islands

Cant help but feel a young boy would have known some Gaelic words and phrases yet I don’t recall any mention of this.
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
Given this boy lived in Scotland and Barra is in Scotland then he may well have watched a factual tv programme about a family on Barra with a little boy who looked just like him. Even a magazine article would be sufficien. His young mind and ego innocently processes this likeness of him as having another, different mother and family.

Despite recognising landmarks, he didn’t find the actual house, which is either mysterious or convenient.Perhaps the tv company used a bit of dramatic licence and filmed a house on one of the other islands close by.

Also, the Outer Hebrides are a stronghold of the Gaelic language:

https://www.visitouterhebrides.co.uk/our-islands

Cant help but feel a young boy would have known some Gaelic words and phrases yet I don’t recall any mention of this.
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You could be right here. Small children can have a bit of trouble with the difference between 'this is you' and ;this is someone who looks like you.' As I found when I used to show my children photographs of them when they were babies - none of them could tell who was who, so a picture of a baby being held by my aunt would bring a response of 'I remember that!' No, you don't, that was your sister, long before you were born.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Also, the Outer Hebrides are a stronghold of the Gaelic language:

https://www.visitouterhebrides.co.uk/our-islands

Cant help but feel a young boy would have known some Gaelic words and phrases yet I don’t recall any mention of this.
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The Gaelic point is pivotal.
It's still spoken widely there to this day.
Don't think it was ever brought up in the documentary or anywhere else.
 
Investigators could start with:

“Innis dhomh beagan fiosrachaidh mu do bheatha ann am Barraigh.”

(Tell me some details of your life on Barra), or;

“Carson nach b’ urrainn dhut sgeulachd nas cinntiche a chruthachadh?”

(Why couldn’t you make up a more convincing story?)

maximus otter
 
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