Jeffrey Long

Jeffrey Long is an American radiation oncologist and near-death researcher who, in 1998, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF). Through its website he assembled one of the largest publicly available collections of near-death accounts, gathering thousands of self-reported cases via a standardized online questionnaire.

He distilled this material for a general readership in the New York Times bestseller Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2010, with Paul Perry), followed by God and the Afterlife (2016).

(His specific year of birth is not reliably documented in public sources, so it is left unstated here rather than guessed.) Long argues that consistent patterns across his large sample — lucid awareness during apparent crisis, out-of-body perceptions, and transformative aftereffects — point toward the reality of consciousness surviving bodily death.

FLAG: his approach relies on self-selected, retrospective online testimony rather than prospective clinical design, which critics identify as a significant methodological limitation, and his afterlife conclusion is not accepted by mainstream science.

Presented as a sincere, large-scale documentation effort, NDERF is a valuable case archive even where the inferences Long draws from it are contested.