When “My Seven Minutes in Eternity”—William Dudley Pelley’s account of his out-of-body/near-death experience—was first published in the March 1929 edition of The American Magazine, it caused a sensation. The issue sold out almost immediately, and so high was the demand that back-issue vendors throughout the country were fetching as high as ten dollars a copy.
As Pelley himself tells it in the “Aftermath”:
“So when an American Magazine could not be procured with the article in it, other pub...