Beyond Coincidence (27 page)

Two Chinese competitors in the 1995 Special Olympics World Games were clearly destined to work together. Their parallel lives began with tragedy but resulted in joint Olympic glory at the New Haven, Connecticut, games.

As a baby, Yong Xi had been seriously burned in a fire. It had destroyed his right hand and severely scarred the right side of his face. He was abandoned at Shanghai railroad station at the age of two.

A couple of months later, two-year-old Peng Kai was abandoned at a Shanghai orphanage. She had also lost her right hand in a fire and was left with just a thumb and a stump. It had also damaged her scalp leaving her unable to grow hair. Neither of the children's parents could be found, so they grew up in the same orphanage.

Both developed a love for table tennis, acquiring extraordinary skills despite their handicaps. When Yong serves, his right arm holds the paddle against his body while he throws the ball high with his left hand. Then he grabs the paddle with the left hand and serves with subtle spins. Peng is able to hold the ball between the thumb and stump of her right hand and throw it while her paddle stays in her left hand.

In New Haven, at the age of twenty-one, they played side by side to win the Special Olympic mixed doubles title. Yong also won gold in the men's doubles and silver in the singles competition. Peng won the gold in the women's singles competition.

12

GOOD LUCK

Bad luck is rather too easy to come by. All you have to do is break a mirror, walk under a ladder, or spill some salt. Actually it's much easier than that; you can just stand still—bad luck will find you.

Some psychologists argue that misfortune is the natural state of things. The pessimists, they say, have got it right.

But good luck is achievable. It requires a measure of blind faith, a huge amount of energy, and the ability to see the bad things that happen to you as challenges that will help you become a better person.

Or you could just rely on lucky coincidences like these:

L
UCK OF THE
A
USTRALIANS

Some people have all the luck.

Alec and Vivienne from Freemantle in Western Australia were able to afford a vacation in London after winning half a million dollars in the State Lottery. They had not long arrived when the news came through that they had won again. This time they'd scooped $876,000. The couple said they planned to continue their vacation. Presumably for ever.

Lottery officials said they had beaten odds of 64 million to 1 to win twice in six months.

T
HE
L
OST
M
APS THAT
W
ANTED TO
B
E
F
OUND

The biologist and coincidence researcher Paul Kammerer noticed that coincidences often come in clusters or series. So has every gambler that has ever lived. Professor C. E. Sherman, chairman of the Civil Engineering Department of the Ohio State University at Columbus, made the same discovery when ten years' worth of good luck landed on his head within twelve hours one day in 1909. Sherman wrote an account of this perfect day in his book,
Land of Kingdom Come,
from which these details are taken.

At the time Sherman was locked in the intractable task of compiling a road atlas of Ohio. The problem was that maps of the southwestern counties of the state were unavailable or nonexistent. The U.S. Geological Survey hadn't yet mapped the area and the only charts to be had were old county atlases. These were usually located in the counties themselves and had to be tracked down and retrieved by letter and parcel. Eventually he managed to secure the atlases for most counties, but there remained two, Pike and Highland, for which he had drawn a blank. Despite all his letter writing, Sherman couldn't be sure maps had ever been made of the regions. Without them it would be a huge task to make a proper road survey. Sherman was also missing a good map of the Ohio River.

The only thing for it was to search for data on the ground, homestead by homestead if necessary. Sherman packed his suitcase one Saturday and wearily boarded a train, telling friends not to expect to see him for two weeks. Incredibly, he found everything he needed in twelve hours.

The first stop was Cincinnati where, in the United States Engineering Office, he found an excellent map of the Ohio River. He then took a train to Highland County, but had to wait at Norwood for a connection to Hillsboro. When he mentioned his quest to the ticket agent he was told, “There's an old book like that in the rear room, I think.” Together they searched the old dusty stock room and there was the semilegendary
Highland County Atlas.

Sherman then took a train to Pike and in the short stop for a connection in Chillicothe he strolled up the street to make an unannounced call on an old friend. No sooner had he set off than he saw his friend walking toward him, as though he had arranged to meet him at the station. They had a chat and then Sherman returned to catch his train. As he was boarding he was hailed by a man who had sent him a letter the day before about some matter, who said he could save Sherman some trouble if he would answer his question on the spot.

Sherman knew only two people at Waverly, the Pike county seat. One was a mechanical engineering student, the other a civil engineering student. He had no idea whether either of them would be there, but spotted the mechanical engineer getting out of the carriage in front of his at Waverly. As they walked toward the hotel together, he said he would send the other man round if he was at home. Sherman had just finished his dinner when the civil engineer turned up. He didn't know of any Pike County map, he said, but his father might. “Here he comes now!”

When asked about the map, the father said he thought the county auditor might have one. At that moment they spotted the auditor walking down the street. It was Saturday night but the auditor invited them straight away to his office in the courthouse across the street and there, behind his desk, hung a fine old map of Pike County.

At this point in his account, afraid that an unleavened diet of good luck might strain credulity, Sherman apologized. “Even the smallest incident seemed to fit perfectly into the harmonious whole,” he wrote, before casting doubt on his own impartiality, due to his psychological state at the time. “I had for months been on the quest for all the data and when this last, hardest problem began to unravel so easily, it put me in a humor to notice only favoring circumstances.”

But there were an awful lot of those circumstances. For example, the Norwood ticket agent hadn't wanted to sell his atlas, but was happy to lend it; the friend he met in Chillicothe was on his way to the station to catch the train out of town after Sherman's; the tracing paper he took with him at random from a pile that morning just fitted the Pike County wall map; and the civil engineer, who could have been anywhere he wanted in the world, was on hand to help him with the tracing. And who would expect to get into a locked courthouse on a Saturday night to find a map that up till that point he had no idea existed?

“I retired that night,” wrote Sherman, “with the sensation of having experienced a perfect day.”

O
N A
W
ING AND A
S
PARE

A rare biplane owned by
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
author Richard Bach was upended in 1966 while coming in to land in Palmyra, Wisconsin. The pilots were able to put the plane back together but an essential strut had broken irreparably. The plane, a 1929 Detroit-Parks P-2A Speedster, was one of only eight ever built, so the likelihood of getting another part for it seemed hopeless.

But the owner of a nearby hangar, seeing the broken plane, came over and told them he had lots of plane parts in the hangar to which they were welcome. There, in a pile of parts in the hangar, was the strut they needed to make the plane complete.

In his book,
Nothing by Chance,
Richard Bach writes, “The odds against our breaking the biplane in a little town that happened to be home to a man with the forty-year-old part to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the event happened; the odds that we'd push the plane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the part we needed—the odds were so high that coincidence was a foolish answer.”

D
OUBLE
J
EOPARDY

Lift operator Betty Lou Oliver had the most miraculous escape when a B52 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in thick fog back on July 28, 1945.

At 9:40 a.m., the aircraft ploughed into the seventy-fourth floor of what was then the world's tallest building. Betty was caught in the ensuing fireball that roared up the elevator shaft, and was severely burned.

She was given first aid treatment for her injuries and then put into a second elevator, which appeared not to have been damaged, to be taken down to meet the ambulance waiting at the bottom.

But, unknown to the rescuers, the second elevator had been damaged by the impact of the aircraft. An engine and part of the bomber's undercarriage had fallen down the shaft and weakened the cables.

As the elevator doors closed, rescue workers heard what sounded like a gunshot as the cables snapped. The elevator hurtled down the one thousand feet from the seventy-fifth floor to the basement.

Incredibly, Betty survived. The severed cables hanging beneath the elevator piled up and acted as a coiled spring, which slowed it down. The descent had also been decelerated by trapped air forming an air cushion at the bottom of the shaft.

Betty had to be cut from the mangled wreckage, but by amazing good fortune, she was alive.

H
OCKEY
C
LUE

Police trying to identify the victims of Fred and Rosemary West faced a massive task. The bodies were all severely decomposed and officers were working with a list of more than ten thousand missing girls. Their only hope was to rely on forensic science, dental records, and in one extraordinary instance, sheer good luck.

Professor David Whittaker, who identified all twelve victims, worked closely with police for a year and a half. He said, “Almost every Tuesday I would speak to all the detectives and help keep up morale.

“One night I put up a photo of a set of remains of a girl who had two temporary crowns on her front teeth. Crowns are made of porcelain and usually take some time to make so dentists fit temporary crowns, often made from plastic.

“She probably had the crowns because she had suffered an injury of some sort or damaged her teeth. I told the detectives she had probably been hit in the mouth or fallen from her bike, had these temporary crowns put on, and was then murdered.”

One of the women detectives put her hand up and said she had played hockey against a girl who had been hit by a hockey stick and damaged two front teeth and had them fixed.

“It was a 1 in 10,000 chance but I turned to the detective who was leading the case and said it would have to be investigated as it was a possibility,” said Professor Whittaker.

The detective's hunch was investigated and it turned out to be the same girl. Another of the Wests' victims had been identified.

Professor Whittaker added, “However much science we have, and we have a lot in forensic dentistry, the thing we really need is luck and that's what happened in this case.”

G
UARDIAN
A
NGEL AT
F
IVE
O'
CLOCK

Royal Air Force pilot Derek Sharp is convinced that his amazing escapes from death were more than just coincidence.

Derek's uncle, a Second World War pilot, also called Derek Sharp, led a charmed life as well, experiencing many a close aeronautical shave. Derek sometimes wonders if his uncle has become his guardian angel.

Derek Junior's first dice with death happened back in February 1983. While on a flight with a trainee navigator, his RAF Hawk jet collided head-on with a Mallard duck. The bird smashed through the aircraft cockpit and hit Derek full in the face. It knocked his left eye out of its socket, broke bones in his neck, and smashed bones and nerves in his face. Death seemed certain and imminent.

He still can't really explain how he managed to land the plane. He'd blacked out for several minutes, coming round to discover that the engine had stalled. Almost blind, he somehow managed to restart the engine and land the aircraft at a nearby RAF base.

It was the first of a series of almost unbelievable escapes. On one occasion he was piloting a transport aircraft carrying thirty-five thousand pounds of high-explosive shells in Skopje, Macedonia, during the 1992 Balkans conflict, when a lightning bolt hit the plane right on the nose. It sent a huge fireball along the aisle and out of the tail. Somehow it avoided detonating the explosives.

And during the first Gulf War an American patriot missile accidentally locked its sights onto his plane. “At the last minute they realized that it was aiming at a lumbering old RAF jet instead of an Iraqi scud missile and they aborted it,” said Derek. “Strangely I wasn't worried at all as it came toward us. I somehow knew that I was going to be all right.”

Derek believes his survival has been the result of more than just chance. His uncle Derek had also defied death on many occasions. During the Second World War he'd been learning to fly in a two-seater Stearman plane when the instructor threw the joystick forward, plunging the nose of the plane down and catapulting Derek Sharp senior, who had failed to fasten his seatbelt, out into the sky, hundreds of feet above the ground. He sailed through the air for several seconds before landing, by incredible chance, on the plane's tail. Somehow the instructor managed to land with Sharp still wrapped around the tail.

Two years later, after several more near-death experiences, Uncle Derek's nine lives ran out when his Lancaster bomber was shot down during a raid over Germany.

His nephew believes the similarities between the two are more than just coincidence. “We had the same name, we look alike, were both pilots, and both had a lot of narrow escapes. He died on the night I was conceived. It's nice to think that if there are such things as guardian angels, maybe Uncle Derek was looking after me.”