Keene wandered along a portion of the battlefield known as the Sunken Road while his wife stayed in the car. He was inexplicably overcome with emotion. In addition to the overpowering emotions, he had trouble breathing and the whole experience made him wonder if he was having a heart attack.
It passed, and he walked back to the car mystified at what he had just experienced.
At a friend’s party, he talked to a psychic. She asked him if he believed in reincarnation and he told her about his experience. As they were talking, the words “Not yet,” appeared strongly in his mind and he was compelled to say them.
Later, he found a Civil War magazine in his home that he had bought but never read. With a new interest in the subject, he decided to flip through it, and as he skimmed the pages, the words “Not yet” in quotation marks jumped out at him.
The magazine article told the story of General Gordon, who had emphatically repeated “Not yet,” while holding his troops back—during the Battle of Antietam, along the Sunken Road.
Keene also recognized the face. It looked startlingly like his own.
As Keene researched Gordon’s life, he found that some of the soldiers who fought under Gordon looked remarkably like the men on his fire crew in Westport, Conn. He also discovered parallels between marks on his body and wounds Gordon had received, and between events in his life and Gordon’s life.
For example, on Keene’s 30th birthday, he felt an immense pain in his jaw and face and went to the hospital. The cause of the pain was never determined and it subsided in a little while. A documentary filmed by Sci-Fi obtained medical records corroborating Keene’s account of his visit to the hospital. Gordon was 30 years old when he was shot in the face.
“I don’t worry too much about whether people think this happened to me,” he said in the documentary. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s proof to me.”
