Bucky, forgive me for taking your post out of its original thread and putting into this one, but 1) I don't want to derail that other thread, and 2) it fits nicely here. I just did a little search on this and wanted to post what I found.
You are talking about the Ryan case in Jim Tucker's book.
Explain how a children of 5 can provide the detailed life events of an unknown, uncredited movie extra from the 40s that not even experts were able to identify. It required researchers multiple consultations with specialists of the field, and multiple trips to the library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, to finally identify the actor.
I think it's pretty difficult to avoid the "anomaly". Be it an elaborate scam of two psychopaths (the parents) and their brainwashed child or, at the very minimum, a case of multiple psi instances.
I haven't read the book yet, but given that I have an interest and some knowledge in old movies, I thought I'd look into this a bit more.
This article summarizes the story. Ryan and his mother are flipping through a Hollywood film book, Ryan stops at a still from the 1930s Mae West movie
Night after Night, and his mother doesn't recognize the faces of the six men in the picture but Ryan points to one of them.
"Hey Mama," he said. "That's George. We did a picture together." His finger then shot over to a man on the right, wearing an overcoat and a scowl. "That guy's me. I found me!"
The mom then identified George as George Raft, but the other man she was not able to identity. (Just as an aside, George Raft himself was not an obscure actor; he was part of Warner Bros.'s stable of lead men in the 30s and 40s and is easily identifiable by movie fans of that era).
The story continues:
Cyndi wrote Tucker, whom she found through her online research, and included the photo. Eventually it ended up in the hands of a film archivist, who, after weeks of research, confirmed the scowling man's name: Martin Martyn, an uncredited extra in the film.
This is the part I researched. His name is actually
Marty Martyn, and his name
is supplied as part of the cast of the film on the
Internet Movie Database (playing the character Malloy). Now that doesn't mean he is credited in the film, someone could have found it out and put it there.
But then I googled and found that the film is available on youtube, and the actor IS credited.
See at 0:57.
So that is an incorrect fact. (Although, according to IMDB, this is his only appearance in a movie.)
This then also makes me a bit skeptical of the account that it took this film archivist "weeks of research", unless it just took him that long to locate the movie. But I see it's been available since 2006 on a
Mae West DVD boxset. (Although Martyn plays one of the several unidentified thugs in a gang in this movie, so I can understand it may have taken some time to identify which character was which actor.)
Hopefully what I posted is not too pedantic, and it doesn't change my appreciation of the unexplainable findings in studies of children's memories of past lives, but I just wanted to clear this up.
EDIT:
Marty Martyn's bio on IMDB:
Marty Martyn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1903. His birth name was Morris Kolinsky, and he was the son of Ukrainian-born parents, Philip and Rebecca Kolinsky. His father operated a clothes press in a tailor shop. Marty grew up in Philadelphia before moving with his younger sister, Florence, to New York, where, under the name Marty Kolinsky, he once lived in a brownstone apartment building at 108 West 69th St. Working as a dancer, he appeared in a Broadway production called "Gay Paree" in 1925. He only appeared in one film, "Night After Night," which starred George Raft. Martyn may have had a line that was cut from the final film, which would explain why his name appears in the credits even though he has no apparent lines in the version that reached theaters. Frustrated as a performer, Martyn opened the Marty Martyn Agency and became a successful talent agent. Among his clients was Glenn Ford. He had four marriages, one biological daughter and five stepchildren. He died in hospital in 1964, while suffering from leukemia. Immediate cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. His widow, Margaret, was the niece of 20th Century-Fox president Spyros P. Skouras.