I highly recommend James Randi's weekly column.
It's at the James Randi Educational Foundation website,
www.randi.org
This week, his weekly commentary has the case of a young man in India whose account of a previous life supposedly provides evidence of reincarnation, a staple of Hindu belief. A correspondent from India explains how something went wrong when the skeptics investigated:
From Here
Sometimes roasting the believers provides endless entertainment.To prove that his son was Pavithra's reincarnation, the father held the boy towards the cameras and quizzed him repeatedly: “What is your name?” “What is your father's, mother's sister's name?” And “Where did the bullet hit you?” The boy answered in accordance with his father's tale. Without any hesitation, he gave his name as Pavitra and the names of his relatives as those of Pavitra's. When asked about the bullet, he pointed to his own neck: here! The villagers were impressed and completely convinced that the boy was Pavithra's reincarnation. And so was the dead man's family, who had already taken the child into their house and thought about adopting him.
I indicated some flaws and discrepancies in the case. The dates of Pavithra's death and the boy's birth, for example, did not match. There was a gap of two years between the two, where the "soul" wouldn't have had a body. Most disturbing, however, was that the boy's answers were obviously tutored. After he reacted several times "correctly" to his father's never-changing sequence of five questions, the reporter put the same questions in a different order, and the child gave his monotonous set of answers like a parrot: “What is your father's name?” “Here!” (He pointed to his own neck.) Strangely, nobody was disturbed by this fact, before it was pointed out.