Stafford Betty earned his Ph.D. from Fordham University, where he specialised in Asian religious thought and Sanskrit. Today he is a professor of world religions at California State University, Bakersfield, and has evolved as one of the United States’s most acclaimed experts on the afterlife. In 2011 he published The Afterlife Unveiled, his most popular book. A more recent publication, Heaven and Hell Unveiled (2014), is an in-depth description of spirit life, with an emphasis on how spirits progress from lower to higher planes. His tenth book, When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? Afterlife: The Evidence, appeared in 2016. He has published three novels, most recently The Severed Breast (2016), a historical saga about Thomas the Apostle’s failed attempt to convert India to Christianity.