Departures of note

From adolescence, Arthur Flowerdew experienced vivid visions of a stone city carved into a cliff, images that sharpened when he played among the multicolored pebbles on a beach near his Norfolk home. As an adult, he watched a BBC documentary on the ancient city of Petra in Jordan and immediately recognized it as the city of his visions. Convinced he had lived a previous life there, he contacted the BBC, which filmed a short piece on him. The Jordanian government saw the broadcast and, intrigued, offered to fly Flowerdew to Petra to examine its remains.

Before his departure, according to an account in Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Flowerdew was interviewed by an archaeological expert excavating Petra to test his knowledge. He reportedly described the city with striking accuracy, pointed out three landmarks prominent in his memory, and upon arrival went directly to those sites, including his purported place of murder. He also offered a plausible explanation for a device that had baffled archaeologists and correctly identified the locations of many landmarks that had yet to be excavated. The archaeological expert who accompanied him said Flowerdew's details were consistent with known facts and that he did not believe Flowerdew was a fraud, adding that sustaining such a deception would require a mind very different from his.

Flowerdew maintained he had never seen or heard of Petra before the BBC documentary and had never read any literature on the city. His experience was cited by spiritual leaders, including Rinpoche, as suggestive evidence for reincarnation. Some have suggested that Mircea Eliade may have used Flowerdew's experience as the basis for his 1976 novel Youth without Youth, later adapted into a 2007 film by Francis Ford Coppola. Flowerdew died on 30 September 2002 at James Paget University Hospital in Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk, at the age of 95.