James Leininger has had a love for aviation since the age of two years old, but his passion for aeroplanes took a turn after he experienced a shocking nightmare one evening in 2002.
The young boy woke up screaming after he experienced a plane crash in his sleep, where he was shot down by a plane with a red sun on it — a Japanese plane.
The child's family was then convinced he had been reincarnated after he started experiencing dreams and memories of being Lieutenant James McCready Huston.
Lieutenant Huston was a World War II fighter pilot from Pennsylvania who had been killed in Iwo Jima, Japan, over 50 years before James was born.
According to James' mother, Andrea, he would scream at the top of his lungs "Aeroplane crash, on fire, can’t get out, help," as he kicked and pointed to the ceiling during his sleep.
On another occasion, James told his parents, who reportedly had no knowledge of aeroplanes, that he had flown a plane called the Corsair from a boat called the Natoma during the Second World War.
This comment led James' father, Bruce, to do some research and he later discovered that there had been a small escort carrier called the Natoma Bay.
This aeroplane took part in the Battle of Iwo Jima, and its pilot was Lieutenant Huston who sadly died in the carrier after it was hit in the engine by a Japanese aircraft on March 3, 1945.
After Bruce concluded his research on the fighter pilot, he and his wife wrote a letter to Lieutenant Huston's sister, Anne Barron, about their little boy and she believed that young James was a reincarnation of her brother.
She told ABC News: "The child was so convincing in coming up with all the things that there is no way on the world he could know."
Psychologist Jim Tucker told National Public Radio (NPR) that Lieutenant Huston’s plane crashed exactly the way that young James Leininger had described.
The psychologist from the University of Virginia, which has studied 2,500 cases of children with memories of past lives, explained: "James Huston's plane crashed exactly the way that James Leininger had described - hit in the engine, exploding into fire, crashing into the water and quickly sinking.
"And when that happened, the pilot of the plane next to his was named Jack Larsen."
When the psychologist was asked by the radio host Rachel Martin about whether the story could have stemmed from James' imagination, Jim shut down the claim.
He said: "If we had never been able to verify that what the child said matched somebody who died, then you could certainly just mark it down as being fantasy.
"But in cases like James', the previous person, James Huston, was so obscure - I mean, he was a pilot who was killed 50 years before; and he was from Pennsylvania, and James was in Louisiana - I mean, it seems absolutely impossible that he could have somehow gained this information as a 2-year-old through some sort of normal means."
Over time, James' recollections of the Second World War began to fade but among his prized possessions are two haunting presents that were sent to him by Ms Barron - a bust of George Washington and a model of a Corsair aircraft that were previously owned by Lieutenant Huston.
