Kenneth Ring

Kenneth Ring (born December 13, 1935, in San Francisco) is an American psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and one of the principal architects of organized near-death studies.

Trained as a social psychologist, he set out to test Raymond Moody’s early reports with more systematic interviewing, publishing Life at Death (1980), a structured study of NDEs that proposed a recurring “core experience” unfolding in stages.

He co-founded the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and the Journal of Near-Death Studies, giving the field its first durable scholarly infrastructure. In Heading Toward Omega (1985) Ring shifted attention from the experience itself to its aftereffects, arguing that NDEs reliably produce deep, lasting changes in values, reduced fear of death, and heightened compassion — which he framed, more speculatively, as a possible foreshadowing of an evolving “planetary consciousness.” FLAG: the aftereffect data are taken seriously, but his evolutionary and metaphysical interpretations are contested and not accepted as established science; his later linking of NDEs with UFO-encounter experiences (The Omega Project, 1992) is more speculative still.

Presented as a sincere research program, his stage model and aftereffect findings remain influential even where his larger conclusions are disputed.