Another great case from The Survival Top 40 is the James Leininger reincarnation case. This story is sufficiently well known that I don't think I need to summarize it; anyway, Miles Edward Allen's excellent summary is readily available at this link.*
[*Update, 2023: The Survival Top 40 site is gone, but Allen recaps the Leininger case in this YouTube video. ]
Besides the strongly evidential value of James' statements about the plane he piloted, the ship he flew from, the names of his fallen comrades, etc., there are three aspects of the case that strike me as particularly interesting.
First, little James showed strong emotions when remembering his past life as a pilot. The whole episode began with James' nightmares, in which he struggled and screamed in bed. Whatever he was experiencing was obviously vivid and terrifying. Moreover, he showed flare-ups of righteous indignation that would seem more appropriate for a WWII flier than a two-year-old. As Miles Edward Allen recounts, when James identified his ship as the Natoma, his father replied that the name sounded Japanese. "Little James grew indignant and said no. It was American!" It's certainly credible that a patriotic serviceman would have that reaction; after all, it was the Japanese who shot him down. James, on the other hand, was probably too young to know or care about the Japanese through his own personal experience.
Second, James' description of the downed pilot, given while he was in the throes of his nightmare, was "Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can't get out!" I don't know if this has been commented on by others, but I couldn't help wondering why James would describe the pilot as a "little man." After all, the pilot was a full-grown adult, considerably larger than James, a toddler. It occurred to me that the description would make sense if the pilot were viewed from a distance – that is, from an external vantage point. Looking down (say) on the struggling pilot in the cockpit, one might very well see him as a "little man." Such a perspective is commonly reported in NDEs and OBEs, when a person rises out of his body and looks down on himself from a height. There have also been reports of "dual consciousness" in such situations, where the person is simultaneously looking at his body from an external perspective and still experiencing the pain or anxiety of his physical body. If James was in fact remembering an event from a former life, it is possible that he was reliving the pilot's experience of separating from his dying body while still maintaining some connection to it. Naturally James was much too young to have been exposed to NDE literature or influenced by it.
Finally, the coda to Miles Edward Allen's summary connects neatly with accounts given by people who have been hypnotically regressed to remember a life between lives – that is, a spiritual existence bookended by earthly incarnations. Accurately describing a "big pink hotel" in Hawaii and his parents' romantic dinner on the beach, James said, "When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me." The dinner in question took place five weeks before James was conceived. Many life-between-lives subjects have stated that they were allowed to choose their next set of parents, and that they would look in on various couples before making a selection. Again, it seems impossible that a young child would know anything about this research, especially since his parents were committed Christians who rejected the very idea of reincarnation until James' own testimony eventually changed their minds.
To me, the evidential details supplied by James (exhaustively researched and confirmed by his father), in combination with his intense emotional connection to the memories, his arguably NDE-like description of the "little man" in his wrecked plane, and the similarity of James' last remark to life-between-lives testimony, add up to an especially powerful case.
It may be worth adding that the great majority of children who spontaneously recall a past life report that their previous incarnation ended suddenly, either by violence or a quickly fatal disease. Perhaps an unexpected death, one that the soul is not properly prepared for, is more likely to be recalled in the next incarnation, either because of lingering trauma or from a sense of unfinished business. James' story clearly fits this pattern; he remembers dying young, in combat, on the very last day before he was scheduled to ship home.