I once did a deep dive into some of the peer reviewed academic research on "supernatural phenomena" including papers on studying patterns in past life memories, and trying to externally verify the details of remembered past life events.
First, I was shocked that these things are researched academically, and have their own regular looking peer reviewed journals. A lot of the papers are from tenured professors at well known universities, often from divisions affiliated with a medical school like this one: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
Secondly, I was also shocked to find I could find no obvious flaws in the reasoning or methodology in the papers I looked at- despite the subject matter seeming to be something that is "obviously impossible" they followed standard scientific procedures, and supported their findings with the same level of care and rigor you'd expect from other fields. I suppose then that the obvious explanation is that these "standard procedures" are themselves flawed, but from just reading the paper, I could not spot the flaw.
The US Army tried "psi" experiments in the 1970s/80s with the Stargate Project[0]. They were mainly trying "remote viewing" - seeing if somebody could spy on the Soviets with their minds from far away. There was a book[1] about it called "The Men Who Stare At Goats", the title referencing a guy who purportedly killed a goat just by staring at it.
I'd have to find them again... one that really stands out was simply studying the stories of people claiming to remember past lives and looking to see the spacial distribution of where those memories seemed to occur relative to where the person lived- and finding that they followed some interesting patterns.
First, I was shocked that these things are researched academically, and have their own regular looking peer reviewed journals. A lot of the papers are from tenured professors at well known universities, often from divisions affiliated with a medical school like this one: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
Secondly, I was also shocked to find I could find no obvious flaws in the reasoning or methodology in the papers I looked at- despite the subject matter seeming to be something that is "obviously impossible" they followed standard scientific procedures, and supported their findings with the same level of care and rigor you'd expect from other fields. I suppose then that the obvious explanation is that these "standard procedures" are themselves flawed, but from just reading the paper, I could not spot the flaw.