The strange case of Barbara Anne Hsiao [SEE History of the Outcast Earth Project] seemed to open the psychic floodgates for young Ash. Whatever impulses and insights he had had previously experienced, he suddenly felt secure enough to share the information with his family. In many ways, his reaction to his own abilities was very childlike. He enjoyed the attention, often elaborated details for dramatic effect, and occasionally concocted something so outlandish as to make it completely unbelievable. The trick for his father was to distinguish real psychic phenomenon from the intense imagination of a small child.

"In some ways, I think his imagination helped to hone his psychic visions," said Polaris. "Once a piece of information came to him, he would begin to turn in over and over in his mind. This was really obvious when it came to the artwork he was producing. You’d see this kind of genesis from the first vision to the final result. It was like the more he pondered it the more details came trickling forth."

Polaris, who is also an artist, found that sitting and drawing with Ash helped to encourage his visions. As he worked with the boy, a new pattern to the information began to appear, with a definite emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s. Speaking in the first person, Ash began to tell stories about living in a small town that was built on the side of a mountain. Nearby, he said, you could see two big smoke stacks and the air often smelled foul. At night, you could hear the trains rumbling along the tracks below and hear their whistles blow. Polaris would talk freely with the child about these "recollections," and then write down the details in secret.

"I didn’t let Ash know I was taking notes," he said. "I was afraid if he knew that he’d think this was some sort of game and he’d start making stuff up. What really amazed me, however, is how utterly sincere he was about these tales. He told them like they were recent memories, like they had happened just the day before."

In time, an image of another life began to appear. The exact location is still unknown, although Polaris was certain that the boy was describing a Depression-era mining town somewhere in the western United States. Ash described brothers and sisters, a widowed mother who struggled to make ends meet, and a father who was buried "beneath a big hunk of cement" in a cemetery nearby. As specific as these recollections seemed, Ash was never able to conjure up a name or an exact location for this alternate life. The lack of those details made the phenomenon that much harder to verify through other sources.

Still, Ash fit the typical profile for a reincarnation experient. Reincarnation is the belief that some nonphysical element of human consciousness survives death in order to inhabit different bodies during different times. Many religions that embrace reincarnation stress that these multiple lives have meaning and purpose. The reincarnated individual is generally given a destiny to fulfill, often to become the best possible human being. For this reason, karma is also a key aspect to the reincarnation theory. Karma is the universal law that provides consequence (both positive and negative) for all action and decision. Positive actions bring about positive karma which creates happiness. The opposite is equally true. With good karma, the person’s destiny is more readily achieved and the cycle of reincarnation eventually ceases. Then the spirit is allowed to join with the Divine.

Most modern religions address reincarnation in some form. During the rise of New Age craze in the 1980s, a theory was begun that even Christianity had embraced reincarnation but that the references to it in the Bible were subsequently eliminated by the Church hierarchy.

Ash was within the age frame when most people remember their past lives, memories that seem to fade as the experient ages. His recollections were lucid, spontaneous and did not seem to contain information that he could have gleaned from a secondary source. What wasn’t immediately apparent was the connection between a mining town on the American mainland and a 7-year old boy in Hawai’i.

"Most studies on reincarnation found that there was some consistency between the person remembering the experience and the person in the former life," Polaris explained. "Usually they were of the same race and cultural background, usually of the same gender too. Most interesting to me was the fact that reincarnation doesn’t have really long legs. When you’re reborn, you generally stay in the same geographical area. But Ash was born on Kaua'i, over 1,500 miles from the mainland."

The connection would not become clear until February 2001 when Ash sat down at the kitchen table and drew a very detailed image of a large battleship.

"When I saw that picture I thought ‘ah-ha, this is it, this is the missing piece,’" said Polaris. "It suddenly became clear to me that Ash was remembering different pieces of the same life, but those pieces were often out of order. One piece might have been from this individual’s childhood, where the memories of the battleship must have been from when he was a young man, probably serving in the military."

The naval and time references pointed to one logical area on the islands: Pearl Harbor, Oah'u.

"Oah'u and Kaua’i are only about sixty miles apart, so that fit the theory that the soul does not migrate any further than one hundred miles before its rebirth," said Polaris. "It also explained how this other incarnation had such divergent experiences. If you were a boy growing up in a mining town in the middle of the Depression, perhaps your only way out was to join the Navy. If he was put on board a ship in the Pacific, he had to come to Pearl Harbor sooner or later."

In fact, the reincarnation theory would suggest that Ash’s former self died at Pearl Harbor.

"Most people who remember a past life do so because their end was violent, unpleasant or premature. I suspect that Ash’s former incarnation suffered all three of those, and if you’re talking about a violent death at Pearl Harbor in the 1940’s, then there is one obvious event you cannot overlook – the Japanese attack on December 7th, [1941]."

On that date, air and naval forces of Imperial Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet, most of which was resting peacefully in the harbor. The subsequent destruction and the loss of over 1,100 lives marked the entry of the United States into World War II. But with such a huge casualty count, would it prove impossible to narrow down exactly who Ash had been, and where he ultimately fell.

Polaris thought that some important clues might be contained in the child’s artwork. He concentrated his reflection on a single drawing made by Ash in March 2001, showing a battleship in profile. When asked what the drawing represented, the child responded simply by saying "That’s my boat."

There were several important details on Ash’s drawing:
1. Two sets of large guns on the fore and aft decks.
2. Two rows of portholes on the hull.
3. A prominent superstructure with a discernable pilothouse.
4. An area of the deck that appeared to be lower than the rest.
5. A crane on the stern of the ship.

With these features, Polaris was able to establish that the battleship had to be either the U.S.S. Nevada or the U.S.S. Arizona. Both ships sustained causalities during the Japanese attack, but only the Arizona was considered a complete loss. Polaris prepared a makeshift photo lineup for his son, including vessels that were not even at Pearl Harbor on December 7th. To his amazement, Ash chose the Arizona immediately.

"It made the hair on my neck stand on end," he remembered.

Although Ash had been to Oah'u previously, and he even flown over Pearl Harbor en route to Honolulu at times, he had never been to the naval base itself.

"At the time, I still thought Ash was too young to understand or appreciate what had happened there," Polaris said. "To the best of my recollection, we had never even had a discussion about it. It was on a different island and not a real destination point for us, not like with the tourists."

In 2002, however, Polaris, Ash and Coyote made the short flight to Oah'u to visit the harbor. Although the anxious father expected some kind of epiphany from his son, Ash was unusually quiet. He stood near the water’s edge and scanned the harbor as though looking for something in particular. At one point he pointed out a tall tower standing on Ford Island.

"I don’t know if that tower triggered a memory or something, but he was quick to point it out," Polaris stated. "I learned later that that was one of the few obvious things still there from 1941."

Of additional interest to the father was the proximity in time between the Pearl Harbor attack and the abduction of Barbara Anne Hsaio in 1940.

"I began to wonder if Ash’s knowledge about Barbara Anne was based in part on his past life recollections," he said. "Her disappearance was front page news in Hawai’I, and a sailor on shore leave in Oah'u in May 1940 would have certainly heard about it."

Although purely circumstantial, naval records confirmed that the Arizona was moored in Pearl Harbor from April 26 to May 14.

Finally, the family took the ferry across the harbor to the long white memorial building that spanned the wreck of the Arizona. Although very few pieces of the ship are still visible above water, the crumbling outline of the vessel can be seen beneath a thin oil slick caused by her leaking tanks. Over a thousand men are still entombed inside.

Ash did not comment much on this first experience, saying simply that the visit was "okay but kind of boring." Still, Pearl Harbor was the one place Ash wanted to revisit before the family left Hawai’i at the beginning of the Outcast Earth project. So they returned in July 2004. The photos shown here are from that trip.

"Ash still doesn’t talk about it much," said Polaris. "He told me he’s thinking about it. I think it must be like trying to put together a very complicated jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know what the picture is supposed to be and you’re missing fifty-percent of the pieces. This maybe a life mystery he’ll still be working on when he’s an old man."