Beyond Coincidence (31 page)

It is not possible to guarantee the absolute authenticity of every story in this book. Coincidence stories are often exaggerated, distorted and—God help us—invented.

For example, coincidence fans take great delight in pointing out that there was a tornado in Kansas the day Judy Garland died.

Well that's not such a remarkable thing. Kansas does have the third highest incidence of tornadoes of all the states in America, sometimes experiencing more than one hundred a year. As it happens, tornadoes were comparatively rare in 1969—only seventeen of them. But that still makes it quite likely that a tornado might have come along to blow the spirit of Judy Garland somewhere over the rainbow.

Such is our love of coincidence that we often feel compelled to embellish the facts. We can't help ourselves. But it does make it very difficult to distinguish between true stories of incredible coincidence and those that are a touch apocryphal. Take, for example, the many accounts in circulation of precious items that turn up in the stomachs of fish. Stories like these:

Norwegian fisherman, Waldemar Andersen, made an amazing discovery as he gutted a cod he had just caught in the North Sea. Inside its stomach was the gold earring his wife had lost the previous week.

Here's another version:

In the summer of 1979, fifteen-year-old Robert Johansen caught a ten-pound cod in a Norwegian fjord. He gave it to his mother to prepare for dinner. Inside its stomach she found a diamond ring—a family heirloom she had lost while fishing in the fjord ten years ago.

And another:

Joseph Cross of Newport News, Virginia, lost his ring in floodwaters during a storm in 1980. In February 1982 a restaurateur in Charlottesville, Virginia, found the ring—inside a fish.

The original ring in the fish's stomach story probably goes back to the days of ancient Egypt.

Herodotus tells how the Pharaoh Amasis advised his ally Polykrates to throw a precious ring into the sea as a gift to the Gods. Polykrates did this, but a few days later a fisherman brought him a gift of a large fish he had just caught. Inside its stomach was the ring. It was a bad omen. Hearing what had happened, Amasis ended their alliance and shortly afterward Polykrates was murdered.

That ancient tale sounds more likely than this story reported, as true, in
Ripley's Giant Book of Believe It or Not:

The wife of Howard Ramage lost her wedding ring in a drain in 1918 and a Vancouver man found it thirty-six years later in the stomach of a fish and returned it to Mr. Ramage.

These stories crop up all over the place—sometimes from fairly respectable sources. The stomach involved is not always that of a fish:

On March 28, 1982, both the Sunday Express and the News of the World reported that two years after farmer Ferdi Parker lost an antique wedding ring, a vet found it in a cow's stomach while performing an autopsy.

There's a clear lesson here: if you lose your ring, look in the stomachs of animals. Here's another example:

Evelyn Noestmo lost her wedding ring in 1993, pushing her car out of a ditch. It turned up in the stomach of a moose shot by her husband in 1996.

And how likely is this?

An American fisherman severed his thumb in a boating accident. The missing digit was eventually recovered from the stomach of a fish.

Doesn't sound very likely, does it? But according to coincidence expert Ken Anderson, it is quite true. Anderson reports that the accident-prone fisherman was tracked down and the “facts” verified beyond dispute.

The man was thirty-two-year-old American, Robert Lindsey, a welder with the Union Pacific railroad. He'd gone out fishing on a friend's boat at the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming when the wake from passing cabin cruisers washed him overboard. He was swept under the boat where the propeller blades severely cut his leg, severed his thumb and nearly removed two fingers.

Some six months later, after he had more or less recovered from his injuries, his wife showed him an article in a newspaper. Lindsey takes up the story himself, “The article was about a man out fishing who'd found a human thumb inside a fish he had caught, five miles from where I had my accident. I figured it was probably my thumb so I called up the coroner, who thought I was joking at first. But then I went to see him and the thumb. It looked like my thumb. It was in good shape considering.”

Further X-ray tests confirmed it was Robert's thumb. He now keeps it in a jar of formaldehyde.

One of the more truth-resistant of apocryphal stories insists that Clint Eastwood is the son of Stan Laurel. The story derives from a coincidental facial similarity in the two men. Probably nobody would have ever noticed this had not an Italian newspaper pointed it out, printing adjacent portrait photographs of the two smiling men. Then a British children's magazine published a photograph of Eastwood with his hair sticking up on end, suggesting he could be Laurel's son. The rumor spread like wildfire, aided by Eastwood's notorious reticence to discuss details of his private life, which made reliable information about him rarer than unicorns. Then there is the second coincidence that Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, the same year and month that Stan Laurel's wife Lois gave birth to a son, who died nine days later. The most imaginative urban-mythtellers like to claim that the baby in fact survived and went on to an illustrious career in Spaghetti Westerns, totally ignoring the fact that there is no mystery about Clint Eastwood's parentage at all. He was born in San Francisco, of Clinton Eastwood Sr. and Margaret Eastwood.

One oh-my-God story circulating widely since the al-Qaeda train bombings in Madrid asserts that there were exactly 911 days between the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Madrid bombs on March 11, 2004. Well there would be exactly 911 days if it wasn't for the fact that there are exactly 912 days. A miscalculation perhaps? Forgot the 2004 leap year? No, say proponents of this creepy but meaningless assertion, all you have to do to arrive at the exact number is to not count March 11 itself. Ah, almost exactly 911.

We leave you with a selection of stories that have the glitter of make-believe about them. That, of course—as we now know—isn't proof that they couldn't, or didn't, occur. Are they fact or fiction, incredible coincidence or something beyond coincidence? You decide.

W
RITING
W
RONGS

A handwriting expert offered to do readings from samples sent to her. A woman sent a note written by her boyfriend and asked if he would make a good husband. The graphologist replied that this was very unlikely as he had been “a terrible husband to me for the past three years.” And in a postscript she thanked her for the “evidence.”

L
OVER'S
L
EAP

After discovering that her husband had been unfaithful, Vera Czermak of Prague threw herself from her third-floor balcony, only to land, by extraordinary chance, on her husband as he walked directly below. She killed him, but escaped with minor injuries herself.

T
HE
W
RONG
T
AXI

An Athenian taxi driver was astonished when the customer he picked up gave his own address as his destination. Arriving at his home, the driver watched as the man took out a key and let himself in. Using his own key the driver followed and interrupted the man as he was about to make love to his wife.

I
T'S
R
AINING
B
ABIES

In Detroit in the 1930s, a man named Joseph Figlock was walking down the street when he was struck by a baby that had fallen out of a high window. The baby's fall was broken and both man and baby were unharmed. A year later, the same baby fell from the same window onto the unsuspecting Figlock as he was again passing beneath. Again both survived the experience.

P
OKER
F
ACE

When Robert Fallon was shot dead at the table of San Francisco's Bella Union Saloon in 1858 for cheating at poker, a call was put out on the street for a man to take his place. It was considered unlucky to take winnings—$600 in this case—acquired by cheating. A young man took the dead player's chair, but far from being the pushover he looked, he turned the $600 into $2,200. When the police asked him for $600 to give to the dead man's next of kin, the young man coolly replied that he was the next of kin. He hadn't seen his father for seven years and just happened to be walking past the bar at the time.

And finally this much recorded story. Wouldn't it be neat if it were true? Though not, of course, for Henry Ziegland:

T
HE
W
ORLD'S
S
LOWEST
B
ULLET

A bullet fired at Henry Ziegland didn't strike and kill him until twenty years later.

In 1893, Ziegland broke off a relationship with a girlfriend who, distraught, committed suicide. In revenge, the girl's brother tracked down Ziegland and fired at him in the garden of his home. The brother, believing he had killed Ziegland, turned his gun on himself and took his own life. But Ziegland survived. The bullet had merely grazed his face and embedded itself in a tree. In 1913 Ziegland decided to use dynamite to uproot and remove the tree, which still had the bullet embedded in it. The explosion propelled the bullet into Ziegland's head—killing him outright.

THE ULTIMATE COINCIDENCE

Perhaps we should call it the First Coincidence. Or the Last Coincidence. Either would suit, but “ultimate” most fits its superlative significance. It's the most important coincidence in our life, in everybody's life; in the life of our planet, our solar system and our universe. To begin with, it brought us all together. It's the reason we are. And if ever its felicitous consonance should alter, we won't be around to speculate whether it was a happy accident or part of a grand unified design. Nothing will be around.

We're talking about fundamentals here; the fundamental physical laws pertaining to the day-to-day running of the universe. Physicists call them the fundamental constants—things like the masses of atomic particles, the speed of light, the electric charges of electrons, the strength of gravitational force.… They're beginning to realize just how finely balanced they are. One flip of a decimal point either way and things would start to go seriously wrong. Matter wouldn't form, stars wouldn't twinkle, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist and, if we insist on taking the selfish point of view in the face of such spectacular, epic, almighty destruction, nor would we.

The cosmic harmony that made life possible exists at the mercy of what appear, on the face of it, to be unlikely odds.

Who or what decided at the time of the Big Bang that the number of particles created would be 1 in 1 billion more than the number of antiparticles, thus rescuing us by the width of a whisker from annihilation long before we even existed (because when matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out)? Who or what decided that the number of matter particles left behind after this oversize game of cosmic swapping would be exactly the right number to create a gravitational force that balanced the force of expansion and didn't collapse the universe like a popped balloon? Who decided that the mass of the neutron should be just enough to make the formation of atoms possible? That the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, in the face of their natural electromagnetic desire to repulse each other, should be just strong enough to achieve this, thus enabling the universe to move beyond a state of almost pure hydrogen?

Who made the charge on the proton exactly right for the stars to turn into supernovas? Who fine-tuned the nuclear resonance level for carbon to just delicate enough a degree that it could form, making life, all of which is built on a framework of carbon, possible?

The list goes on. And on. And as it goes on—as each particularly arrayed and significantly defined property, against all the odds, and in spite of billions of alternative possibilities, combines exquisitely, in the right time sequence, at the right speed, weight, mass, and ratio, and with every mathematical quality precisely equivalent to a stable universe in which life can exist at all—it adds incrementally in the human mind to a growing sense, depending on which of two antithetical philosophies it chooses to follow, of either supreme and buoyant confidence, or humble terror.

The first philosophy says this perfect pattern shows that the universe is not random; that it is designed and tuned, from the atom up, by some supreme intelligence,
especially
for the purpose of supporting life.

The other says it's a one in a trillion coincidence.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abduction: Fiction Before Fact
(Rusk Jr.)

Abel, Rudolf

accidental deaths

coincidences concerning

accidents

coincidences concerning

risk of being killed

Adams, Douglas

Adams, Evelyn Marie

Adams, John

Adele, Jan

Aigner, Joseph

air disasters

avoiding

Air and Angels
(Hill)

alien abduction

Alton Evening Telegraph

Alton (NY)

death takes a holiday

Alyn, Kirk

Amadeo, Duke d'Aosta

Ambrose, David

Americans

superstitions of

Amis, Martin

Andersen, Waldemar

Anderson, Ken

Anderson, Peter

Andersson, Martin

Apollo 13

Archer, Jeffrey

Armitage, Simon

Arquette, Rosanna