Man who drowned in lake for 15 minutes days before graduation reveals ‘ultimate truth’ about dying
A man who was drowning in a lake for 15 minutes has revealed what happened to him while he was dying.
In 1955, Andy Petro was having a picnic with his high school friends by the side of a lake in Michigan.
Days away from their graduation, they'd been playing games by the side of the water when he noticed a group sitting on a floating raft in the water.
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Explaining how he didn't want to enter the water because it was so cold, Andy said he decided to jump in instead.
But as he was swimming out towards the raft, he started suffering from pain in his abdomen.
He quickly noticed that he couldn't kick his legs and began to slip beneath the surface.
Panicking, he realised he was choking and falling deeper and deeper into the cold water, eventually hitting the weeds on the bed of the lake.
"Everything is screaming in my body, I'm dying, I finally admit that I'm dying and then all of a sudden there's a voice in my head. I don't know who the voice is, but it says, 'Andy you need to stop it and rest for a while'," he recalled in an interview with Dorothy Shelton.
Andy explained he started talking to himself in his head, adamant that he needed just one breath of air.
But he heard the voice again, saying: "Andy, you really need to rest, relax and let go. You need to let go."
Andy says the voice promised him that if he let go, everything would be fine. But what he experienced next has stayed with him forever.
"From complete terror to complete ecstasy."
"The moment I let go, I popped out of my body," Andy said.
"At one point I'm in my body, the next point I'm in this tunnel... and I'm warm, I'm happy, I can breathe again, I'm filled with joy and unconditional love. It was such a change from complete terror to complete ecstasy."
Andy looked down and could see his body at the bottom of the lake, but he didn't care about his life, or being on Earth, simply explaining that he 'knew [he] was home'.
He then turned in the other direction and saw a bright light, which he was 'drawn to like a magnet'.
"All of a sudden, I'm no longer in the tunnel, I'm in the middle of a giant sphere... and around it are little motion picture screens of all of my lives of all the things that I'm doing," he explained.
"And the light is next to me, I don't see it but I know it's there and the light and I begin to communicate about all these events and all of my lives.
"Nothing was confusing, I could understand all the lifetimes. When I focused on one particular screen I would relive it."
Andy said it seemed like he was there for months but really, he'd only been in the water for 10-15 minutes.
"I knew everything."
Moments later, Andy revealed he was back in the tunnel and heard a voice saying, 'Andy, I love you', followed by another voice that said, 'Andy, we love you'.
"There are thousands and millions and trillions of other lights just like me and they say in one chorus, 'welcome home Andy' and at that point I was absorbed into the light, I became the light.
"I was a piece of the light and it's the most fantastic feeling as a human that I could ever imagine.
"I knew everything, there was nothing I did not know."
Andy explained that the light was 'really funny' and asked him, 'why didn't you loosen up? Why didn't you have more fun when you were on the planet? You were only going to be there a little while because it's not real, Earth life is not real, it's like a play, a movie'.
"There's eight million actors on the planet and they're all playing a role," he continued.
"Once the costumes have gone and the play is over and you're back in the light, we're all one, we're all the same, we're made out of the same stuff."
"I've been there and I'm ready to go back."
Andy revealed that moments later, he was told he would have to go back, but he didn't want to.
"I felt myself being stuffed back into my body, the most horrible feeling I could ever imagine. I didn't want to be there, I still don't want to be here, I'm just doing what I've got to do," he said.
At that moment, he realised he was on the sand at the side of the lake, coughing the water out of his lungs.
"All I cared about was being in the light," he said, revealing that he didn't speak about his experience for 30 years.
"I'm still waiting to get back home. I'm doing the best I can to feel joy whenever possible. What I'm choosing to do is help people feel better about themselves and help get them to know that there is a home, I've been there and I'm ready to go back."
Andy has written two books about his experience, Alive in the Light: Remembering the Light and Eternity and Remembering the Light Through Poetry.
Lucy Devine