Beyond Coincidence (29 page)

T
HE
B
IRTHDAY
C
ARD THAT
N
EVER
G
AVE
U
P

When Mrs. J. Robinson's mother died in 1989, she found among her possessions a birthday card she had sent to her niece in 1929. The card had been returned by the post office because her mother had got the address wrong. Though they were not in regular contact, Mrs. Robinson thought her cousin might still like to see the card, so she posted it to her again. She had no idea that it would arrive on her birthday, exactly sixty years late.

U
NDER
C
OVER

A picture Mrs. G. L. Kilsby inherited from her mother had started to get on her nerves, so on March 1, 1981, she decided to open it up. Inside was the cover of a magazine whose date—March 1, 1881—showed it to be exactly one hundred years old to the day. Mrs. Kilsby was so pleased with the coincidence that she threw away the picture and framed the magazine cover.

F
ATE OF
B
IRTH

Baby Emily Beard came into the world on the twelfth day of the twelfth month at twelve minutes past twelve. Her dad David was born on the fourth of the fourth at forty minutes past four. Mother Helen was born on the tenth of the tenth. Brother Harry, three, was born on the sixth of the sixth. Grandmother Sylvia Carpenter was born on the eleventh of the eleventh.

Emily nearly ruined the pattern. She was due two hours earlier but complications put the birth back. David, from Gosport, Hampshire, said. “It's quite spooky; like ‘You've entered the twilight zone.' It was only when I rang my mom to tell her about Emily that she told me I'd been born at 4:40. That's when we realized just how weird it all was.”

L
UCKY FOR
S
OME

The novelist David Ambrose has been dancing a tango with the number thirteen.

His uncanny association with the number considered by many to be unlucky began when he was writing a novel called
Superstition.
Working at a computer, he would check every day or so how many words he had written. The word-checker facility would also tell him how many lines and paragraphs he had written and the average number of words per sentence.

“I found that I was consistently writing an average of thirteen words per sentence,” says David. “I thought maybe I always wrote thirteen words per sentence; I found it hard to believe I was doing it only now, unconsciously, because I was writing a novel called
Superstition.
But when I checked the manuscripts of other novels and stories of mine, I found my average was fourteen to sixteen words per sentence, never thirteen.”

Much earlier, before he had begun properly writing the novel, he had sold the film rights on the strength of a thirteen-page outline. “I do not recall consciously registering the moment at which the deal was struck,” he says. “However, I saw in my diary shortly afterward that it had happened on the afternoon of Tuesday the thirteenth of February, 1996. The producers of the film asked me to meet them at the Cannes Festival in 1997. The only day we could all manage turned out to be Tuesday the thirteenth of May. In June they flew me out to L.A. for further meetings. Still nobody was actively thinking ‘thirteen.' I arrived on the eighth, planning to fly on to New York to see the American publishers of
Superstition
the following Friday—which turned out to be the thirteenth of June. While in L.A. I picked up from my agent a copy of the fully executed contract. The covering letter from the agency's legal department was dated the thirteenth of May—coincidentally the same day on which I had lunched with the producers in Cannes.”

Despite every effort to finish earlier, he eventually completed the screenplay version of
Superstition
on October 13. “In February 1998 I had to have a meeting with my London publishers to discuss the paperback edition of the book. The only date on which it turned out that everyone could be there was Friday the thirteenth of February.”

David stresses that he had been totally unaware of all these coincidences at the time. “If we had been making this happen even half consciously, we would surely have published the book on the thirteenth,” he says. “As it was, it came out on the tenth of July. However, my editor and I weren't able to have our planned celebratory lunch on that day, so it had to be moved to the following Monday. Which was the thirteenth.”

The final coincidence related to the number of radio and TV shows at which David was interviewed about the book. “Nobody gave any thought to the actual number of shows,” he says. “It was, as always, just a question of getting on as many as possible. At the end of the week, when I glanced through my schedule and counted up the number of broadcasts I'd done, I saw it was thirteen.”

T
WIN
N
UMBERS

The winning number in the evening drawing of the New York Lottery three-digit “numbers” game on September 11, 2002 was 911.

C
APTAIN
C
LARK'S
B
AD
D
AY

The novelist William Burroughs had a thing about the number twenty-three. It kept on cropping up in the coincidences he noticed. He met a Captain Clark, when living in Tangier, in 1958, who boasted he had been sailing twenty-three years without an accident. That day Captain Clark took his boat out and had an accident. Later Burroughs heard a news report on the radio about an airline crash. The flight number was twenty-three; the pilot's name was Captain Clark.

B
IBLE
N
UMBERS

Keen-eyed numerologists have spotted some interesting coincidences in the Bible.

They point out that Psalm 118 is the middle chapter of the entire Bible; that, just before it, Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter in the Bible and Psalm 119 is the longest chapter.

The Bible has 594 chapters before Psalm 118 and 594 chapters after Psalm 118. If you add up all the chapters except Psalm 118 you get 1,188 chapters. If you take the number 1,188 and interpret it as chapter 118 of Psalms, verse 8, you will find the middle verse of the entire Bible—“It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”

Some would say that this is the central message of the Bible—numerically speaking at least.

P
ASTOR
B
LASTER

Alicia Keys couldn't have been more inviting on her hit single, “Diary.” “Ooooh baby,” the singer crooned, “if there's anything that you fear … call 489-4608, and I'll be here.” The trouble was, she wasn't there. Fans in Georgia who dialed the number got an increasingly exasperated retired pastor instead.

While the song was high in the R&B/Hip-Hop charts, J.D. Turner, who happened to have the same telephone number, was getting twenty to twenty-five calls a day at his Statesboro home. Sometimes they'd drag the poor man out of bed. “They call at 4:30 a.m.,” he said, “and then say, ‘I want to talk to Alicia Keys.'”

The number in the song is genuine. It used to be Keys's own number when she lived in New York. Used with the 347 area code it connects to an answering service where fans can record a message. But used with a 912 area code it merely means extra nuisance for Mr. Turner in Statesboro.

“I don't want to change my number,” said Turner, who would face a lifetime of sleepless nights if the song achieves all-time-great status. “I've had the same number for fourteen years.”

C
ATCH A
F
ALLING
S
TARFISH

In 1996 an Englishwoman named Ellen was vacationing on the north coast of France with two friends. She had heard that starfish were often to be found on a local beach and hoping to see one, spent a morning walking the beach with her friends. But it was a disappointing outing. It was cold, wet, and windy and not a single starfish was to be seen.

Eventually the three gave up and drove to the coastal town of Calais. They parked their car in the main square and as they got out Ellen remarked what a shame it was she hadn't found a starfish. At that moment, as though her words were a signal, a single starfish fell from the sky and landed at her feet. Unseen by Ellen, but spotted by her friends, two seagulls had been fighting over the starfish above their heads and dropped it in the squabble.

D
O THE
O
KLAHOMA
N
UMBERS
A
DD
U
P
?

Great tragic events linger long in the public imagination. The facts are dissected, analyzed, and subjected to such a concentration of sometimes lurid imagination that extraordinary theories are gleaned from them.

The so-called “significance” of the dates of the bombing of the Murrah Building, Oklahoma, in 1995 and the subsequent execution of the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, is an example of numerology, in which sensationalists have selectively manipulated numbers to promote, in this case, a sinister mystic resonance. Consider the following figures:

04—The month of the Oklahoma City Bombing (April 19, 1995)

19—The day

95—The year

09—The hour the bomb went off

02—The minute

06—The month McVeigh was executed

11—The day

01—The year

07—The hour he was pronounced dead

14—The minute

The total, 168 equals the number of people killed.

Is this coincidence or some dark force at work? Discounting the dark force that motivates a human mind to seek such naive significance in distressing events, it is certainly coincidence. This is the same thinking that lies behind the Bible codes: take all the many numbers relating to an event—dates, casualties, distances traveled, etc.—fiddle around with them for days (adding, subtracting, multiplying, matching, eliminating …) until you hit on a pattern, then pronounce the result meaningful. As with all such meaningful combinations, the meaning itself cannot be discerned.

D
OUGLAS
A
DAMS
W
AS
(A
LMOST
) R
IGHT

Scientists at Cambridge University were amazed when, after three years calculating one of the fundamental keys to the universe—The Hubble Constant—they came up with the number forty-two. This is the same number that a computer called Deep Thought in Douglas Adams's famously hilarious science fiction novel
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
decides after seven million years of calculations, is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In Adams's hands, of course, the figure sounded suitably absurd, but coming from august Cambridge scientists it has super-enhanced gravitas. The Hubble Constant is the velocity at which a typical galaxy is receding from Earth, divided by its distance from Earth. This is no trivial concern, for the figure determines the age of the universe. It should be added, for those who think this is all too easy, that the number refers to kilometers per second per megaparsec (a unit of distance used in astronomy).

It would have been an extraordinary coincidence, but alas, it was too good to be true, for the figure is hotly debated. Recent estimates range between fifty and one hundred, showing those original scientists to be off the mark. Or was it just wishful thinking on their part?

“It caused quite a few laughs when we arrived at the figure forty-two,” said Dr. Keith Grange, “because we're all great fans of
The Hitchhiker's Guide.
”

14

PSYCHIC COINCIDENCES?

If you dismiss the possibility that a great many, if not all, of the stories in this book are the result of simple coincidence, then you have to look for another explanation.

As we have learned, great minds such as those of Arthur Koestler, Wolfgang Pauli, and Carl Jung have attempted to find evidence, theoretical or otherwise, of some sort of universal unifying force that explains the kind of phenomena that are so often dismissed as pure chance.

In his book
Incredible Coincidence
Alan Vaughan writes:

I dreamed I was talking with the parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler about synchronicity. She asked, “But where does synchronicity end and chance begin?”

“But don't you see,” I exclaimed. “Everything is synchronicity. Nothing happens by chance.” As I said these words in my dream, a tremendous energy flooded my brain and shocked me awake, forcing me to consider this intuitive answer.

What if it were true? What if, moment by moment, we create our own realities through our consciousness? Literally.

Well, that might explain some of the following stories.

D
REAM
W
OMAN

Pat Swain was on her honeymoon in Bled, Slovenia, when she dreamed she saw her best friend's cousin walking with her sister. In the dream Pat was looking out of a window and looked down on the two women below. The odd thing about her dream was why it had featured those particular women, as she hadn't seen Hilda, her friend's cousin, for twenty-five years, and the sister, Stella, she barely knew. They were certainly not on her mind at the time.

Two days later Pat and her husband visited the castle on the cliffs above Bled. She was looking out over a wall when she spotted the two women of her dream walking along the tier below. They went down to greet them and Hilda told her they had come to Bled on a day trip from their resort on the coast. “A split second either way and we would have missed one another,” said Pat.

P
AIN
T
RAVELS

Susie Court dreamed her friend Elaine Hudson was in terrible pain in a hospital bed. She hadn't spoken to her for months but this dream was very vivid. Her friend was writhing in agony in the dream and Susie tried to comfort her. It was the night of August 1, 1988.

Susie woke up worried for her friend and tried to phone her. But Elaine had moved and her number was unlisted. It took her several hours phoning mutual friends before she managed to track down Elaine's sister-in-law. Was Elaine okay? she wanted to know.