Jeffrey Olsen has shared the astonishing things that he – and others – saw after he “died” in a car accident in 1997 that tragically claimed the lives of his wife and their 14-month-old son. Jeffrey said he was transported to a “beautiful, glorious place” as his body lay in the wreckage of the collision.
“The only word that comes close to what I experienced was I was home,” he explained on the Afterlife Revealed podcast. “It felt so familiar.” Before the crash, Jeffrey admitted he had lived a “quite normal” life, growing up on a farm in Utah before heading to college on a football scholarship. “I fell in love, got married, had children and had a red personality... I was very driven in business [marketing and advertising].”
The crash and its aftermath
Aged 33 on the day of the accident, Jeffrey revealed his family were heading home on a road trip after visiting wife Tamara’s family when he “probably fell asleep at the wheel.” “I’m not saying that’s okay or making an excuse, but I was working very hard and I was a young father with all the pressures to provide and protect,” he conceded. “But I believe I just nodded for a second and in doing so I over-corrected to the right and then to the left and I lost control of the car.”
The Olsens’ vehicle subsequently rolled at speed six to eight times off the road and eventually came to a standstill. Jeffrey heard his oldest son “crying hysterically” and immediately tried to get to him, only to feel he was “pinned” down. He explained: “I then realised that nobody else was crying... I knew that right there at the scene that Tamara was gone and our youngest son, Griffin... he had been killed instantly too.”
Jeffrey had suffered injuries so bad that one of his legs had to be amputated and his seat belt had “ripped through and ruptured” his intestines. “I was really in rough shape physically,” he said. He went on to experience an astonishing near-death experience where his “soul left his body.”
Shared death experience
What sets his experience apart from many others is that he wasn’t the only person to experience something spiritual. “The ER physician and a nurse were both told to come into the operating room [at hospital] and they had both experienced Tamara’s spirit,” Jeffrey recalled. “He [physician] saw my wife’s spirit standing above the gurney and she communicated with him, which I didn’t know for months until I came out of ICU.”
Jeffrey went on to describe how the nurse had later felt “compelled” to tell him about her own experience on his recovery. “I looked over at Dr O’Driscoll, who Tamara had communicated with and he told me that my wife had simply shared her gratitude for what was being done to try and save me... and I burst into tears because I hadn’t shared my own experience with anyone.”
He elaborated: “I knew what I had experienced was very real. While they were talking to Tamara, I was having this out-of-body, near-death experience myself. That’s what makes it interesting, it was one of those shared-death experiences. Another doctor has since reached out and said this something you can’t argue with that experience.”
Return to the afterlife
Speaking about being back in his body, Jeffrey added: “There I was back in the body but I had this profound out of body experience. Very conscious. It wasn’t in my brain, it was something bigger, something different. I call it a spirit or a soul. There are all kinds of words for it but yeah, I was very conscious outside of my body, and boom back in.”
“I suppose my spirit or soul left my body but I was very much alive,” Jeffrey summarised of the crash. “I was held in this light and then my wife, who I knew was deceased at the scene, suddenly she was there in the light with me. She [Tamara] was there and very much alive, beautiful, she didn’t display any of the injuries that took her life. However, she was emphatic, like, ‘Jeff, you can’t stay, you have to go, you can’t be here, you have to go back’.”
Without his out-of-body experiences, Jeffrey said he is unsure whether he would have been able to get through the loss of his wife and child. As well as the aforementioned amputation, his right arm was left in a brace and he relied on a colostomy bag amid 18 surgeries he had to endure.
A second visit
But one night, after finally being able to fall asleep on his side, he claimed to experience his second visit to the afterlife. “I was in so much grief at the loss of half my family,” Jeffrey said. “Again, the light surrounded me, it felt like I was rising above the hospital bed. I was in the most beautiful, incredible place. I mean, there are words like heaven or the spirit world or the other side.”
