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Professor Ernest Bozzano Les phénomènes de bilocation Traduit de l’italien par Gabriel Gobron and translated further into English by Serge Patlavskiy

My friend, the engineer Joseph Costa, in his very interesting book: Di là della Vita. (Beyond Life), (p. 18), describes the incident that happened to him:

It is useful for me to mention the particular conditions in which I found myself when the most mysterious event of my life happened to me, because they can singularly shed light on the origin of the phenomenon itself. It was a heavy night in a hot June, during which I was intensely preparing for the bachelor's exams...

I had probably exceeded my limit of intellectual resistance in the terrible effort I was making to try to pass the tests of three whole courses with a preparation of only three months of study and after a period of complete inactivity of more than five years. Although I was supported by an unwavering willingness to resist the fatigue that oppressed my mind, I had already succumbed, totally exhausted, to an urgent need for rest, and I had let myself fall unconscious more than asleep on my bed, without turning off the oil lamp that was still burning on the night table. A senseless movement of the arm, probably, knocked the lamp over between the table and the bed, and the light did not extinguish, but made a thick smoke, for a long enough time to fill the room with a black cloud of acrid and heavy gases.

The atmosphere became more and more unbreathable, and my body would probably have been inanimate the next morning if a strange phenomenon had not occurred. I had had the clear and precise feeling of being with my only thinking "me" in the middle of the room, completely separated from the body, which was still lying on the bed.

I saw - if it is allowed to denote the sensation I felt - the things around me as if a radiation penetrated through the molecules of the objects on which my attention stopped, as if the matter had dissolved in contact with the thought.

My mind was struck by the things around me as a plate is impressed by the Roentgen rays, but with an overlapping vibration, also evident in the inanimate objects, which made the abstraction and immateriality of the matter perfect.

I saw my body perfectly recognizable by its particularities, its profile, my face, but also packets of veins and nerves vibrating with a luminous tingling

 I could not find any other words to express more precisely the vision of something that was not matter and that struck me with an indefinable sensation, that could not understand itself or even describe itself, because I am currently trying to give back with the impressions of the five senses what I then certainly saw with a sixth sense. If the comparison were allowed, I would say that if we could materialize the impression that the body feels of an electric shock by translating it into a visible form, we would have materialized the exciting image of nerves and my blood as I perceived them.

The room was in complete darkness, because the flame of the over-turned lamp could not spread the light outside the blackened glass. But as I saw the objects, or rather their almost phosphorescent contours, disappearing as well as the walls, my concentrated attention made me see the objects in the neighbouring rooms in the same way. My thinking "self" was without weight, or, to put it better, without the impression of gravity force and the notion of volume or mass.

I was no longer a body, since my body lay inert on the bed: I was like the tangible expression of a thought, of an abstraction, able to transport myself to any place on earth, the sea, the sky, faster than lightning, in the same moment that I would have formulated the will, and without even the notion of time and space.

If I said that I felt free, light, etheric, I would only express from a distance the feeling I had at this moment of infinite liberation. But it was not a pleasant feeling, I felt like I was caught up in an inexpressible anguish from which I had the intuition to be able to free myself by freeing my body from this oppressive situation. So I wanted to lift the lamp and open the window, but by an immaterial action that I could not accomplish, just as I could not stir my limbs that I thought I had to activate with the strain of my spiritual will.

I thought of my mother sleeping in the next room. I could see her perfectly through the wall that separated our rooms, resting quietly on her bed. But her body, unlike mine, seemed to emit a luminosity, a radiant phosphorescence. It seemed to me that there was no need for any effort to force her to come closer to me. I saw her rushing down from the bed, running to the window, opening it, as if she was executing the last thought I had before calling her, then leaving the room, turning into the corridor, passing through the door and walking forward, with her eyes wide open towards me. It seemed to me that her contact had the ability to bring my spiritual self into my body.

And I found myself awake, with a dry throat, hammer blows to my temples, panting breath, my heart ripping out my chest.

I can assure the reader that until that moment, I had not read or heard of spiritualism: spiritualist theories, phenomena of bilocation, doubling of soul and body. The mediumistic experiences and spiritualist sessions were completely unknown to me. I can therefore exclude altogether the hypothesis that for me it was simply a phenomenon of suggestion. Nor could it be a dream, because of the enormous difference between the sensations left in the memory of the images caused by a dream and those too dissimilar in their sensitive reception, which I had in mind at the time. In this memory I did not encounter this nebulosity, this indistinct feeling between the chimeric and the reality that the impressions of a dream are made of.

Because at the end I never had such a vivid feeling of really existing as in the moment when I felt separated from my body.

My mother, whom I interviewed shortly after the event, confirmed that she had first opened her room window as if she herself had felt suffocated before she rushed to help me. Now the fact that I saw her gesture through the walls, while lying inanimate on the bed, ruled out the possibility of hallucination and nightmare during sleep in physiologically abnormal circumstances.

Excluding the hypotheses of suggestion, dream, hallucination, nightmare, I have no other logical deduction than to suppose that my thinking "I" acted outside my body, and, in such conditions, endowed with transcendent faculties, it was able to see beyond the walls and urgently call my mother to my body so that she could come in to help me.

In this case, I would have had more obvious proof that my soul had separated from my body during its corporeal existence; in short, I would have proof of the existence of the soul and also of its immortality, since if it were true that it had freed itself, under the influence of special circumstances, from the envelope of the body, acting and thinking outside it, let alone finding at death the fullness of its freedom and the release of any attachment with matter."