I was an atheist until a near-death experience made me a believer… here’s what I saw

A former ‘true atheist’ has come forward to tell his story of the dramatic near-death experience that made him a believer and left him with a ‘deep sense of love.’

Jose Hernandez, from Canada, said his journey to the other side began with a brutal accident as an electrical engineer tending to roadside power lines.

When his colleague crashed their utility truck on January 6, 2000, the then 46-year-old Hernandez was left with multiple broken ribs preventing him from breathing as emergency medical technicians raced him to intensive care.

Despite his disbelief in the afterlife, Hernandez said that he spent those moments of deep physical pain seeking help from a higher power.

‘I started thinking about God,’ he said, recalling those desperate moments in hospital. ‘Saying: ‘If you get me through this event I will change.’

‘That fear that I felt in that moment was incredibly competitive,’ Hernandez said, ‘And I started asking myself, ‘Well, what if God is real?”

As doctors and nurses rushed to his aid, Hernandez said his consciousness was soon transported through a dark otherworldly portal that led to a mysterious transitional realm of living light and color that left him ‘instantly amazed.’ 

He spent three minutes clinically dead, came back but fell back into the same state for another two minutes, which he said felt like hours as he watched his lifeless body in the hospital.

An engineer and self-described former ‘true atheist’ – Jose Hernandez (above) – has come forward to tell his story of the dramatic near-death experience that left him with a ‘deep sense of love’ and made him a believer. Hernandez is now an artist and public speaker based in Canada

‘Everything I believe was destroyed when I died,’ according to Hernandez, now near 70 years old. ‘Everything I believed in science and all that. That wasn’t the answer. No. There was something more that was created.’ 

The Okanagan, British Columbia resident laid bare his emotional near-death journey during an interview with YouTube channel Shaman Oaks.

‘I was up on a bucket truck running some electrical lines,’ Hernandez said of the nearly fatal car accident. 

‘The guy that was with me, my partner, was more worried about electrocuting me up on top, so he was more worried looking up and he just kind of bumped into a tree.’

‘My expectation when I died was that I would encounter nothing and become nothing,’ the former atheist confessed, ‘now I’m beginning to see things that were mind-boggling.’ 

Hernandez described the origins of his atheism as his own compromise between his parents’ opposed religious beliefs. 

‘I had a conflict. My mother was Catholic, and my father was indigenous. My mother said, Go find God in church, my father said, look out the window. God is everywhere, right?’ as he told another podcast, Next Level Soul, in 2022. 

‘So I kind of chose a path of science.’

As doctors began performing CPR on his damaged ribcage, Hernandez recalled how he saw the entire scene play out from another corner of the room, alongside this ‘shadow, by the door.’

‘It just stood there,’ he told Shaman Oaks host Alan Chapman. ‘Then I started thinking ‘You know what, I’ve had such a hard and difficult life, maybe it’s okay to let go.”

Next, Hernandez recalled a feeling of ‘falling’ down a black hole and landing in a space enveloped in bright, warm colorful light. The light seemed alive to him and left him with ‘an amazing sense of peace and calm and tranquility’ (illustrated above by the Shaman Oaks podcast)

‘And the minute I said that, or thought that, the shadow just moved,’ he continued. ‘In my mind I could see its hand reaching out to me, and it just touched my toe. 

‘And the minute it touched my toe I just felt this tremendous sense of relief, and relaxation, peace and love and calm. I was in bliss.’

Hernandez next described this shadowy, spirit-like figure offering him words of comfort as he transitioned to ‘the other side.’

‘I heard the voice next to me say ‘Think of the your body as a car, and that car has like five million miles on it, and there’s nothing we can do to fix it anymore. So you have to now say goodbye to your body,” he remembered. 

‘Then the voice said to me ‘Okay, it’s time for us to move on.”

Next, Hernandez recalled a feeling of ‘falling’ down a black hole and landing in a space enveloped in bright, warm colorful light. 

The light seemed alive to him and left him with ‘an amazing sense of peace and calm and tranquility.’ And soon he was even reconnecting with his deceased father. 

He found himself flying over a beautiful, green Earth-like landscape where he learned he would be able to watch over his children from this heavenly spirit realm. 

This otherworldly flight concluded with him touching down on the surface to better see a man below, near a seaside cove. That fateful decision on this realm allowed him to reconcile with his deceased father.

‘It was even more amazing because me and my father had a very hard relationship,’ Hernandez noted. ‘We had a lot of clashes and I don’t ever remember saying to my father in life, ‘I love you,’ or he to me.’ But all that changed when they met again in this realm. 

‘When I met my dad on the other side,’ he told the podcast, ‘I realized sometimes we may not be able to say something here, [but] we’re gonna be able to say it somewhere else.’

Scientists in recent years, including a team from the University of Liege in Belgium, have started to take a deeper look at near-death experiences (NEDs), canvassing experiencers on the hunt for any clues and common features between their life-changing episodes.

‘When I met my dad on the other side,’ Hernandez said via video (above), ‘I realized sometimes we may not be able to say something here, [but] we’re gonna be able to say it somewhere else’ 

Charlotte Martial, lead author of the Liege study — published in the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and Cognition — hoped to learn how similar these people’s experiences really were to each other.

After surveying over 150 people who had experienced a ‘classic’ NDE, the University of Liege team found that roughly a third of the subjects experienced an out-of-body experience as the first feature of their near-death experience. 

The most frequent last feature was returning to the body (36 percent).

Across the study’s participants, a feeling of peacefulness (80 percent), seeing a bright light (69 percent) and encounters with spirits or the souls of dead people (64 percent) constituted some of the most common, recurring features.

The two outliers in this pool of NDE experiencers were ‘speeding thoughts’ (only five percent of survey participants) and ‘precognitive visions’ seeing the future (four percent).

‘While near-death-experiences may have a universal character so that they may exhibit enough common features to belong to the same phenomenon,’ Martial concluded, ‘our findings suggest that near-death-experiences may not feature all elements.’ 

‘And,’ Martial added, ‘elements do not seem to appear in a fixed order.’