Beyond Coincidence (28 page)

A
LL AT
S
EA

A schoolboy who got into difficulty while swimming in the sea, experienced two extraordinary coincidences in one day. The first was a one-in-a-million bad luck coincidence, the second an amazing stroke of good luck.

Observers spotted that twelve-year-old Chris Whaites, who was practicing on his bodyboard off the coast at Redcar in northeast England, was in trouble and called the emergency services. The lifeboat that was dispatched came across a windsurfer who by chance had got into trouble in the same area. Assuming the windsurfer was the subject of the alert, the boat returned to base after picking him up, unaware that Chris was struggling for his life nearby.

That would have been the end for Chris had not David Cammish, the launching authority for another lifeboat station, farther up the coast, happened to be listening to the rescue at home on his VHF radio. He realized that 999 calls were still being made after the first lifeboat had finished its rescue operation and immediately launched his lifeboat.

The crew found Chris lying facedown in the water. Mr Cammish said, “I would guess he was only two or three minutes from death. The lifeboat helmsman said when they reached him he was gurgling, lying flat on the surface of the water. He was very, very lucky. It was a million-to-one coincidence.”

C
HURCHILL'S
L
UCKY
C
HOICE

The event that made Winston Churchill a celebrity in 1899 at the age of twenty-four was escaping, with characteristic sangfroid and full expectation of success, from a Pretoria prison during the Boer War. If it hadn't been for an unlikely coincidence he'd have spent the rest of the war back in jail.

Churchill was in South Africa working as a special correspondent for the
Morning Post,
and in this role had been accompanying an armed train to Ladysmith when it was ambushed by Boer guerrillas. Churchill was taken prisoner but managed to escape by climbing out of a latrine window and walking straight out of the prison gate.

He jumped a coal train, hiding among the sacks of coal, but when he realized it wasn't going in the direction he wanted he jumped off again. He wandered about aimlessly for a long time undetected, but became increasingly hungry. Eventually he decided he had no alternative but to knock on a door and seek help. He was in Witbank, a Boer town seventy-five miles from Pretoria and still three hundred miles from the British border. His famous good luck held up. Churchill chose to knock on the front door of the only Englishman in the district, John Howard, a coalmine manager, who concealed him and arranged for him to be smuggled out of the country.

F
LIGHT OF
A
NGELS

A heart attack during a remote transatlantic flight might be considered extreme bad luck. It happened to sixty-seven-year-old Dorothy Fletcher on a trip to Florida, but on this occasion good luck swiftly came to the rescue. When the anxious flight attendant called for a doctor, fifteen cardiologists stepped up. They were all on their way to a cardiology conference in Canada.

Dorothy was in the best of hands and the attack was controlled with the help of an onboard medical kit. The plane was diverted to North Carolina, where Mrs. Fletcher recovered in the intensive care unit of a hospital. “The doctors were wonderful,” she said later. “They saved my life. I wish I could thank them but I have no idea who they were.”

G
ODS OF
C
HANCE

Gabriel García Márquez reveals in the first volume of his autobiography,
Living to Tell the Tale,
how, as a young adolescent, he embarked on an arduous journey across Columbia to Bogota in the hope of being allowed to take an examination for a school scholarship. He didn't rate his chances very highly. En route he happened upon another traveler who gave him the gift of a book in return for teaching him how to sing a romantic bolero.

Upon arriving in Bogota he was dismayed to find hundreds of students in line in the rain at the ministry of education. Joining the end of the line his spirits were very low.

Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he turned to face the man he had met on his journey, who asked him what he was doing there. When he explained, the man laughed and revealed that he was Dr. Adolfo Gomez Tamara, national director of scholarships for the Ministry of Education.

Marquez says, “It was the least plausible coincidence, and one of the most fortunate of my life.” Marquez was promptly registered for the scholarship examination with no further formalities. He adds, “They told me first that they were not showing contempt for application forms but paying tribute to the unfathomable gods of chance.”

O
UR
R
EGULAR
R
OBBER

The secret of success in life, more often than not, is to find a winning formula and stick to it. In the case of bank robbery however, it is prudent to vary your strategy in order to avoid being caught. Unless that is, you have coincidence on your side.

One who certainly had more than his fair share of luck took a liking to a bank in Detroit. Entering the bank, he walked up to the teller at the first window and passed a note under the window that read: “I have a gun. Give me all your 100s, 50s, and 20s. Don't give me the bait money or the dye pack or you'll be sorry.” The teller placed the money in a big brown envelope and gave it to the robber. He picked it up, walked right out past the guard onto the main thoroughfare, and disappeared into the crowd.

As soon as he had left the teller pushed the alarm button. The closed-circuit cameras TV had been running but no images were captured because the recorder had run out of tape two days earlier and no one had replaced it with a new one.

A few weeks later, the same robber entered the same bank and approached the same teller and passed the same note. Once again the teller filled a brown envelope with money and the robber took it and left the bank. There was no guard on the door this time. He and the manager were in the back office reviewing films of the past three weeks in the hope of getting a glimpse of the robber casing the bank on a day when the cameras were recording. Because they were using the equipment, there were again no closed-circuit TV pictures of the robbery.

E
LECTRIC
P
ERFORMANCE

During the making of Mel Gibson's biblical epic,
The Passion of Christ,
Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Jesus, was struck by lightning as he hung from the cross. The devout Gibson rejected coincidence as an explanation, preferring, as Caviezel was unharmed, to see the incident as a sign of heavenly endorsement. It seems a funny way to say good job, though it's certainly true that the fundamentalist God Gibson recognizes would have fried the actor had He been displeased. A skeptic would point out that it can be dangerous hanging from crosses on hilltops in inclement weather.

13

DATES, NUMBERS, AND WRONG NUMBERS

Our lives are full of numbers—from addresses to telephone numbers and bank account numbers to house alarm codes. We have the ability to remember a vast amount of digits and the capacity to spot when the numbers emerge in some surprising and coincidental ways.

For example, the address of Howard Trent of Fresno, California, ends with the digits 742, as do his telephone number and bank account number. The number of a compensation check he received after an injury was 99742, which matched the last five digits of his telephone number. The serial numbers of a set of new tires he bought ended in 742 and the number of his car license plate is FDC742.

Some numbers are loaded with cultural significance. Our birth date is particularly special to many of us, tied as it is to beliefs that our entire fate is determined by it. Other numbers are thought to relate to bad luck or danger. The number 666, for example, is considered the “mark of the beast” and for millions of people the number 13 is a certain harbinger of ill-fortune.

Engineers working on India's Hassan-Mangalore railway line back in the late 1970s may well have suffered from triskaidekaphobia—fear of the number 13. They reported major problems with the construction of tunnel number 13. A series of five major rockfalls held up work for months. According to the
Rail Gazette International
of April 1979, “The tunnel was renamed No. 12-A and suddenly all was well.”

Astronauts are no greater fans of the number 13, since the explosion of an oxygen tank prevented the ill-fated
Apollo 13
from reaching the moon, and almost cost the lives of its crew.

Nature is full of numerical coincidences. Mathematician Ian Stewart points out that many flowers have five or eight petals, but very few have six or seven. As seemingly random a thing as a snowflake always has “six-fold symmetry.” Our entire universe is full of mathematical coincidences—most of them not yet fully understood.

H
OW TO
L
OSE
S
EVEN
S
HILLINGS

The following memoir, sent to Arthur Koestler after the publication of his book
The Roots of Coincidence
in 1973, ought perhaps to be in the apocrypha section of this book.

The author of the letter, Anthony S. Clancy of Dublin, Ireland, writes, “I was born on the seventh day of the week, seventh day of the month, seventh month of the year, seventh year of the century. I was the seventh child of a seventh child, and I have seven brothers; that makes seven sevens. On my twenty-seventh birthday, at a horserace, when I looked at the racecard to pick a winner in the seventh race, the horse numbered seven was called Seventh Heaven, with a handicap of seven stone (ninety-eight pounds). The odds were seven to one. I put seven shillings on this horse. It finished seventh.”

S
TOCK
M
ARKET
S
CAM

The rise and fall of stock market prices is notoriously difficult to predict. Playing the market can be a fast road to penury, so when one particular stockbroker started to demonstrate an almost superhuman capacity to detect market trends, he found his prediction services in great demand. Was it down to pure chance, coincidence—or something else?

In fact, in his particular case, it was something beyond coincidence … though nothing of a paranormal or supernatural order. This publisher of a stock newsletter would send out sixty-four thousand letters extolling his state-of-the-art database, his inside contacts, and his sophisticated econometric models. In thirty-two thousand of these letters he would predict a rise in some stock index for the following week—and in the other thirty-two thousand he'd predict a decline.

Whatever happened to the stock market that week, he'd send a follow-up letter—but only to those thirty-two thousand people to whom he'd made a correct “prediction.” To sixteen thousand of these he'd predict a rise for the next week and to sixteen thousand a decline. Whatever happened he would have sent two consecutive correct predictions to sixteen thousand people. And so on. In this way he built the illusion that he knew what he was talking about.

His purpose was to boil the database down to the 1,000 people who had received six straight correct predictions (by coincidence) in a row. These would think they had a good reason to cough up the $1,000 the newsletter publisher requested for further “oracular” tip-offs.

D
OPPLEBANGER

When Ernest Halton parked his car outside his church he noticed that the car next to his was the same make and color. That was unusual but not extraordinary. However the next thing he noticed was incredible: the car had the same license plate number. Halton asked among the church congregation for the owner, who turned out to be Tony Gowers, a man he knew, who was as surprised as he had been. Gowers had bought the car second-hand four weeks before. Gowers's car's license number was actually one numeral different to Halton's, but Gower had reconditioned the car when he bought it, and as part of the process had ordered fresh plates. A slipup at the plate makers resulted in one of the numerals being printed wrongly.

W
RONG
N
UMBER
, R
IGHT
C
HOICE

Like many teenagers who've fought with their parents, Julia Tant walked out of her parents' house in a fury, vowing never to return, with her suitcase in her hand. She went first to her local youth club to cool off and there a good friend persuaded her to phone her mother, if only to let her know where she was going.

In her agitation, without realizing it, she dialed the wrong number. A woman who sounded like her mother answered. “It's me,” Julia said.

“Where are you?” said the woman.

Julia told her she was at the youth club and that she was going to her grandmother's. At this point the woman started swearing at her and shouting, “Julia, get home here!”

Despite the fact that she had used her name, Julia was beginning to realize that something wasn't quite right. “Why are you swearing?” she said. “You never swear.”

By this time the woman too was realizing this Julia was not her daughter. She composed herself, explaining that her daughter Julia had walked out on her and disappeared.

Julia had stumbled on a situation more serious and extreme than her own, yet alarmingly similar in many respects. The telephone call sobered her and after it she returned home to be reunited with her parents. Now, years later, she says, “I felt it was a kind of omen so I went back home. If it wasn't an omen it certainly seemed like one.”

L
AST
P
UTT

In December 1991 golfer Tony Wright died on the fourteenth green of his local golf course, fourteen months after his father Les collapsed and died at the same spot. Both men had been lining up for putts when they suffered heart attacks.

L
AST
S
YMPHONY

Beethoven, Schubert, Dvo
ř
ák, and Vaughan Williams (among others) all died after composing a ninth symphony. Mahler, superstitious about his ninth, urgently commenced his tenth as soon as he'd finished his ninth, but not quickly enough to avert his death. Bruckner went to elaborate lengths to delay the syndrome, numbering his first two symphonies 00 and 0. To no avail: he died while composing his ninth. Sibelius stopped after his eighth and lived another thirty-three years.