Dr. Kenneth Ring is one of the founding fathers of near-death experience research.

Ring's first book on NDEs, Life at Death, was a solid attempt to quantify various features of the NDE. While writing it, he gradually became more intimately acquainted with many of the people he was studying. This led to his second book Heading Toward Omega, written in a more personal vein and engaging in a variety of speculative ideas about the meaning of the NDE, which assumes they mean anything at all. Heading Toward Omega reached and apparently impacted various near-death experiencers around the world, evidenced by Ring's global correspondents.

Ring's third book on NDEs/EEs (Extraordinary Experiences), The Omega Project, was more about UFO encounters but did not completely leave behind the subject of near-death experiences.

Ring's fourth book on NDEs, Mindsight, focussed on blind experiencers and put in sharp contrast his disagreement with reductionists such as Susan Blackmore.

Ring's final book on NDEs, Lessons from the Light, focusses more on how the typical reader could benefit in a spiritual sense from the NDEs of other people.

Ring is also the coauthor of Methods of Madness: The Mental Hospital as a Last Resort, his first book.

Ring was also an early president of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS).

He says:

• "It may seem farfetched that near-death studies could make a direct contribution to world peace, but many researchers and scholars have been impressed deeply by the consistent pattern of value changes that near-death survivors express and manifest following a NDE. Recurrently and reliably, they speak of the values of unconditional love and acceptance, human brotherhood, compassion and tolerance, and tend to endorse a spiritual or religious point of view that ignores racial, national, or cultural distinctions." (source)

See: world peace, peace movement