It Started with a Click. Then It Got Weirder.

I wasn't looking for God, the afterlife, UFOs or a reason to question everything I thought I knew.

I was a tech-focused entrepreneur. Before that, an analyst at IBM. Then management consulting. My world was built on the tangible, the measurable, the kind of stuff you can put in a spreadsheet. If you'd asked me about my beliefs, I'd have given you the classic non-answer: "spiritual, but not religious." It was a polite way of saying I wanted to believe in something more, but I just... didn't.

Then one night in 2020, a YouTube algorithm suggested a video: "The Near-Death Experience of Anita Moorjani."

I clicked. Maybe it was idle curiosity.

But as I listened to this woman describe leaving her body, feeling an ocean of pure, unconditional love, and perceiving things she couldn't possibly have perceived, something broke open inside me.

Not intellectually. Physically. A sudden, overwhelming euphoria. An instantaneous understanding of everything. I found myself sitting on my couch, muttering to my dog: "I know this. How do I know this?"

For three days, I lived in a state of absolute bliss. The world was saturated with love. Not metaphorical love. The real thing, as real as gravity. Some people call it a Shared NDE. Others call it a Spiritually Transformative Experience. Some might call it a breakdown.

Whatever you call it, it changed the direction of my life.

When a Seeker's Heart Meets a Tech Nerd's Brain

My inner analyst kicked in immediately. I didn't just want to marvel at the mystery. I needed to understand it. I needed to find the signal in the noise.

That impulse launched me on a four-year quest. I became a digital archaeologist of consciousness, immersing myself in over 5,000 NDE accounts. I documented the patterns: the tunnel, the life review, the encounters with beings of light, the messages of unconditional love. And I started building AI tools to analyze them at a scale no individual researcher could.

My hypothesis was simple: one story is an anecdote. Five thousand stories? That's data.

But the data pointed me toward a truth I never expected.

The most consistent pattern wasn't about what happens when we die. It was about what happens to people after their NDE. Almost universally, they came back transformed. Fear of death: gone. Desire for material wealth: diminished. In its place: an overwhelming urge to love more, connect more deeply, and live with purpose.

I realized I'd been chasing the wrong question. The real power of NDEs isn't proving the afterlife. It's providing a blueprint for how to live a better life, right now.

And Then... the UFOs.

Here's where the story gets strange. Or maybe it was always strange, and I just couldn't see it yet.

Even during my years in corporate America, through IBM, through management consulting, through building companies that had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, I'd always had this unusual pull toward the UFO phenomenon. I couldn't explain it. I didn't talk about it at work. But it was there, this quiet, persistent tug, like the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who can't stop sculpting that mountain he's never seen.

I'm not the only one. Millions of people feel this. That inexplicable draw toward a subject that mainstream culture tells you to laugh off.

In 2025, I attended the PSI Games International event with Chris Bledsoe, a man whose contact experiences have been investigated by NASA, the CIA, and multiple intelligence agencies. During that event, I personally witnessed three unidentified anamalous phenomena (UAP). Not lights, not airplanes, not helicopter. Objects/Orbs that defied the laws of physics and behaved in ways that no conventional aircraft can.

That experience didn't replace my NDE research. It deepened it.

Because here's what I started finding in the data: the people who report near-death experiences and the people who report UAP contact encounters describe strikingly similar phenomena. Entity encounters. Telepathic communication. Time distortion. Downloads of knowledge they can't explain. Lasting changes to their worldview that never fade.

These aren't two separate mysteries. They're two windows into the same one.

This Is Why We Built Project Profound

What started as a personal obsession has grown into something much bigger.

Project Profound is an independent research platform applying AI to 7,000+ first-person testimonies of consciousness at its boundaries. We've built the largest open archive of NDE and UAP contact experiences ever assembled, and we've created the tools to actually explore it.

This is infrastructure for a new kind of research:

Semantic Search Across 7,000+ Testimonies — Ask a question in plain language and instantly find the most relevant accounts across our entire corpus. Not keyword matching. Meaning matching. (available now)

AI Research Assistants — Conversational AI grounded in real testimony data. Ask questions, explore patterns, get answers sourced from actual accounts, not general web knowledge. (available now)

Structured AI Analysis — Every NDE is scored on the Greyson Scale, Veridical Perception Index, and Transformation Index. Every UAP encounter is analyzed across 22 research dimensions with a six-factor credibility framework. (available now)

Cross-Domain Discovery — Our original contribution: mapping the phenomenological overlaps between NDE and UAP contact. Entity encounters, telepathy, time distortion, and ontological shock appear in both. We're the first to quantify this at scale. (available now)

Transparent Methodology — Every score, every classification, every AI prompt is published. We don't ask you to trust us. We give you the tools to verify. (available now)

Compassionate AI Companion — A chatbot grounded in real NDE accounts for people processing their own experiences. Whether you're an experiencer or just curious, you can talk to someone who understands. (experimental)

Why I Walked Away from Everything Else

Since that night in 2020, I've completely changed the direction of my life. I left the world of consulting and entrepreneurship, the world that paid well and made sense on a resume. I no longer make a lot of money.

I don't care.

I love what I'm doing. Every single day, I wake up and work on understanding who we are, exploring the nature of consciousness, and building tools that make this research accessible to everyone: academics, experiencers, regular people.

My goal is simple: bring credible research, honest storytelling, and real techniques for exploring consciousness to as many people as possible. I believe we are at the beginning of a profound shift in how humanity understands itself. And I believe the data supports that.

But I can't do this alone.

What Your Support Makes Possible

Project Profound is independently funded. No government grants. No corporate sponsors. No institutional backing. Just a small, passionate team and people like you.

Your donation directly funds:

Server and database costs that grow as more people discover the platform

AI processing to analyze hundreds of new testimonies each month

Development time to build new research tools and improve existing ones

The cross-domain research that no institution is funding because it doesn't fit neatly into any one academic department

All developer time has been donated. Every dollar goes to keeping the lights on and expanding what we can offer to researchers, experiencers, and the public.

Why This Matters Right Now

In a world that often feels divided and fearful, the message emerging from these experiences, both NDE and UAP, is remarkably consistent:

We are more connected than we realize. Consciousness is more than we've been told. And there is far less to fear than we think.

By supporting Project Profound, you're not just funding technology. You're helping build the infrastructure for a new kind of understanding. One that bridges science and lived experience. One that takes extraordinary claims seriously enough to actually investigate them.

Every donation, no matter the size, is a vote for curiosity over fear. For connection over division. For asking the big questions instead of avoiding them.

Thank you for considering joining us on this journey.

With deep gratitude,

Tom Wood

Founder, Project Profound

P.S. — If you'd like to see our exact expenses or just want to talk, reach out through the website. I'm happy to share everything.