Beyond Coincidence (26 page)

By an extraordinary coincidence they ended up living just twenty-five miles apart, but their upbringings were entirely different. Tamara was adopted by a Jewish couple who lived close to Central Park in Manhattan; Adriana grew up in a Roman Catholic family, in the Long Island suburb of Valley Stream.

They were eventually brought together on their twentieth birthdays. Justin Latorre, a friend of Tamara's, happened to be invited to Adriana's party. She was startled by the resemblance between the two girls and decided it could not be mere coincidence. She insisted that the pair make contact.

Both girls knew that they had been born in Mexico and adopted, but knew nothing of each other's existence. Adriana sent Tamara a photograph of herself.

“I had seen her face every time I looked in a mirror,” said Tamara. “I just felt that I had known her all my life.” Both girls put some pointed questions to their adoptive parents, and the truth emerged.

A few days later, the young women met for the first time and spent the following weeks getting to know each other. They learned that both had lost their adoptive fathers to cancer. Adriana when she was eleven, and Tamara only the previous autumn. Both had crashed into plate glass doors in childhood and both were musical and loved to dance. Both even had photographs of themselves as infants wearing identical Minnie Mouse romper suits.

“Then we discovered that we both had the same recurring dream,” said Tamara. “It involves a very loud noise, then everything going quiet, and then very noisy again, and it was always very scary,” said Adriana. “It must have been something that happened to us when were together in our mother's womb,” said Tamara.

D
OUBLE
A
CT

Albert Rivers and Betty Cheetham shared a table with another couple for dinner at the Tourkhalf Hotel in Tunisia in early 1998. The other couple introduced themselves—Albert Cheetham and Betty Rivers. All were in their seventies. Other similarities emerged. Both couples were married on the same day and at the same time. Both had two sons, born in 1943 and 1945. Both had five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The Bettys had worked in post offices in their home towns while their husbands had been carriage bodybuilders in railway workshops. Neither woman could show her engagement ring as both had lost them, but they did have identical watch bracelets, which had repairs to the same links.

I
F THE
K
EY
F
ITS

Sales representative Robert Beame could certainly be forgiven for believing he had stepped into a parallel universe back in 1954 when he was traveling in Iowa.

Leaving his hotel one morning, he returned to his car and began his journey to his first business appointment of the day in a nearby town. A few miles out, he pulled over to look at some papers in his briefcase, which was still lying on the passenger seat where he had left it the previous evening.

Pulling out some documents, he found to his astonishment that they did not belong to him. Checking the contents of the briefcase more carefully he realized it was not his. Had someone swapped the briefcases? Nothing else seemed to be out of place in the car. It did not appear to have been broken into. He then checked the glove compartment and found other items that did not belong to him. Beame eventually drew the inevitable conclusion that he had somehow got into the wrong car.

He drove back to the spot where he had parked the previous night and standing there was a man in front of an identical car that proved to be his. The coincidences continued. The owner of the car he had taken in error was a man he had roomed with in college seven years earlier. They had not been in touch since. When the two men examined their cars they found they were identical down to the hood ornament that each had specially ordered.

“As I recall my key fitted his car but his key did not fit mine,” says Robert.

L
INCOLN AND
K
ENNEDY

A study of the lives and violent deaths of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy reveals some remarkable coincidences. Eminent mathematician Professor Ian Stewart is not convinced that the parallels amount to something “beyond coincidence,” but he concedes that not everything that happens in the universe can be understood or explained. The circumstances, he agrees, are certainly very compelling.

Many books, newspapers, and Internet sites have catalogued the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences. Most, in their enthusiasm, contain inaccuracies, distortions and exaggerations. But most agree on the following details:

• Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Exactly one hundred years later, in 1960, Kennedy was elected president.

• Both men were involved in civil rights.

• Both were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives.

• Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the head from behind.

• Lincoln was killed in Ford's Theater. Kennedy met his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company.

• Both men were succeeded by vice presidents named Johnson who were Southern Democrats and former senators.

• Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.

• Assassin John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839. Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939, one hundred years later.

• Both assassins were Southerners. Both were murdered before they could be brought to trial.

• Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a barn. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.

But even this consensus view contains at least one often-repeated glaring error—Booth was, in fact, born in 1838, not 1839.

The most detailed investigation into the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences has been conducted by Australian writer, Ken Anderson. In his book,
The Coincidence File,
he agrees that the coincidences involving the two presidents are often inaccurately reported, but says he believes he has uncovered parallels that more than compensate.

Among the points he makes are:

• Both Oswald and Booth shot their victims in the head. According to Anderson, assassins in public places tend to aim at the heart or other vulnerable body parts when using a gun. Examples include Charles Guiteau, whose bullet struck President James Garfield in the pancreas on July 2, 1881, and Arthur H. Bremner, who shot Alabama governor George Wallace five times in the body on May 15, 1972.

• Both Lincoln and Kennedy liked to be able to travel openly around the country and disliked being surrounded by guards. Kennedy had ordered the top to be removed from his Lincoln Continental so that he and his wife Jackie could be more easily seen during the cavalcade through Dallas. Lincoln had also been careless about his security. When Booth entered Ford's Theater, he found the presidential box unguarded. John Parker, the White House policeman charged with protecting the president, had left his side several times, once to get a drink and on another occasion to get a better view of the production.

• At the time of their assassinations, both presidents were accompanied by their wives and another couple. In each case the other man was wounded by the killer. John Connally, the governor of Texas, and his wife were traveling in the car with President Kennedy. A bullet passed through Connally's body and emerged to hit him in the wrist, before entering his thigh. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Miss Clara Harris were in the box at the theater with President Lincoln. Rathbone attempted to tackle Booth after the shooting and was stabbed in the arm with a hunting knife.

• Both presidents were sitting beside their wives at the time of the shootings. Neither woman was injured. Both women cradled their dying husbands' heads in their hands. Each had to wait while doctors made desperate but unsuccessful attempts to save their husbands. Both women had married at the age of twenty-four. Both had three children and both had a child die while they were in the White House.

• Shortly after the shootings, both Oswald and Booth were stopped and questioned but allowed to proceed.

• Oswald and Booth were murdered in similar circumstances. Both were surrounded by their captors under a blaze of lights. Their assassins, Jack Ruby and Boston Corbett, each used a Colt revolver and fired a single bullet.

So what accounts for this quite extraordinary catalog of similarities? If you remove errors, distortions, and exaggerations, and make allowance for the fact that similarities can be found in the lives of any two human beings, the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences still take some explaining.

M
ORE
P
RESIDENTIAL
C
OINCIDENCES

In 1992, the
Skeptical Inquirer
held a “Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest,” asking readers to compile lists of coincidences between other pairs of presidents. One of the joint winners, Chris Fishel, a student at the University of Virginia, came up with many coincidences relating to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both men served two full terms; both their wives died before they became president; each had six-letter first names; both were in debt at the time of their deaths; each had a state capital named after him, and both their predecessors refused to attend their inaugurations.

J
ULY
4 C
OMMISERATIONS

In what may have been more than just coincidence, three early U.S. presidents died on July 4. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, in 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of their signing the Declaration of Independence. Adams's final words, that his long-time rival and correspondent Jefferson “still lives,” were mistaken, as Jefferson had died earlier that same day. James Monroe died on the same date five years later. Historians suggest that Adams and Jefferson made an effort to hang on till July 4. James Madison rejected stimulants that might have prolonged his life, and he died six days earlier on June 28, 1836. Only one president, Calvin Coolidge, was born on July 4.

I
DENTICAL
T
WINS

Twin boys, born in Ohio, were adopted by different families shortly after birth. In 1979, after thirty-nine years apart, they were reunited. It was discovered that each had been named James; that each had had law-enforcement training; that each liked mechanical drawing and carpentry. Each married a woman named Linda and had a son—one named James Alan and the other James Allan. Each had divorced, and then married a second wife, named Betty. Both had had dogs named Toy. Also, both favored the same St. Petersburg, Florida, vacation beach.

A S
INGLE
L
IFE

Bachelor twins, Bill and John Bloomfield, died as they had lived—inseparably. They lived together throughout their lives, dressed alike, wore the same kind of glasses and kept their hair cut in the same short style. As they grew older, they both had hip replacement operations and took to carrying identical walking sticks. In May 1996 the twins, then aged sixty-one, attended a body building competition. Suddenly one of them collapsed. Officials called an ambulance. The call was logged at 12:14 a.m. At 12:16 a.m. the emergency phone rang again. The other twin had collapsed. Neither man recovered.

T
HE
G
IGGLE
T
WINS

They are known as the “Giggle Twins,” but it's not just their identical ringing laughter that has led scientists to study the lives of fifty-eight year olds Barbara and Daphne Goodship.

The twins were separated at birth and had no contact until forty years later when Barbara set out to find her real mother … and discovered that she was a twin. “When I met Daphne,” says Barbara, “we didn't hug and we didn't kiss. There was no need. It was like meeting an old friend. We just walked off chatting together. The funny thing is we were both wearing a beige dress and brown jacket.”

Their identical taste in clothes turned out to be just the first of a remarkable sequence of coincidences linking the twins.

Both met their husbands at a Christmas town hall dance. Both wore blue wedding dresses covered in white lace. Both their first pregnancies ended in a miscarriage in the same month of the same year. Both went on to have two sons and a daughter. Both had their second son in the same month of the same year.

The list of similarities continues. Both, oddly, drink their coffee black and cold with no sugar, both hate heights, both tint their graying hair the same shade of auburn.

At school both hated games and mathematics and read exactly the same books. “Now Daphne rings me and says I've just bought such-and-such a book to stop me buying it,” says Barbara.

Geneticists in America, fascinated by the extraordinary coincidences, have been running a variety of behavioral tests on Barbara and Daphne. They found remarkable similarities in their responses to a variety of questions. In one test Barbara was asked to write a sentence. Carelessly she wrote “The Cas Sat On The Mat.” When Daphne was presented with the same task she wrote precisely the same sentence, right down to the spelling mistake.

“That sort of thing happens all the time,” says Barbara. “Once Daphne rang for a chat when I was cooking and we discovered we were doing the same recipe.”

“We aren't surprised about anything anymore,” says Daphne. “I always seem to get illnesses first. I then ring Barbara to tell her what she is going to get!”

U
NITED IN
D
EATH

Twins John and Arthur Mowforth came into the world together, and that was how they left. On the evening of May 22, 1975, the brothers, who lived about eighty miles apart, both suffered severe chest pains and were rushed to separate hospitals. The families of both men were unaware of the other's illness. Both twins died from heart attacks shortly after arrival at the hospital.

P
ENG AND
Y
ONG'S
P
ING
-P
ONG
M
EDALS