American psychologist and co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). His 1992 book 'The Omega Project' compared near-death experiencers with UFO and alien-encounter experiencers, finding overlapping psychological and phenomenological patterns and proposing both may reflect a shared underlying process.
Kenneth Ring is an American psychologist born in 1935 in San Francisco. A professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, he co-founded the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and served as founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. His early books, 'Life at Death' (1980) and 'Heading Toward Omega' (1984), established methods for measuring and studying near-death experiences (NDEs). In 'The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large' (1992), Ring compared the accounts and psychological profiles of NDE survivors with those reporting UFO encounters and abductions, arguing both groups showed similar shifts toward holistic worldviews, reported anomalous effects on nearby electronics, and described what he termed an 'encounter-prone personality.' He continued research on near-death and out-of-body experience, including studies of blind experiencers, through the late 1990s.