Beyond Coincidence

by Martin Plimmer

  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.”

  CATCH A FALLING STARFISH

  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.

  DO THE OKLAHOMA NUMBERS ADD UP?

  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.

  DOUGLAS ADAMS WAS (ALMOST) RIGHT

  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.

  DREAM WOMAN

  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.

  PAIN TRAVELS

  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.

  Very well, said the sister-in-law. Elaine had given birth to a little boy, Sean, during the night. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” said Susie.

  CALLING ESMERELDA

  The ring of a telephone very early in the morning woke Mrs. M. Rigby while she was staying at a friend’s apartment in 1976. Realizing that it wouldn’t be for her she went back to sleep and fell into a dream of telephone calls. She dreamed she was in the same bed, in the same apartment, but that when the telephone rang again she got up and went to the hall to answer it. The mournful voice of a woman asked if she could speak to Esmerelda. Mrs. Rigby said she was sorry, but there was nobody of that name in the apartment. Again the woman asked, and again Mrs. Rigby told her there was no Esmerelda there. In the dream she hung up and got back into bed.

  Later that morning, over breakfast in the kitchen, she asked her friends who had called so early. One of the friends, Johnny, said that it had been his mother. Mrs. Rigby then described her dream and Johnny went quiet. He said that before he was born his mother had gi
ven birth to a little girl who only lived three weeks. Before she died they had her baptized. Her name was Esmerelda.

  ATTACK OF WIND

  Nineteenth-century French occultist and astronomer Camille Flammarion was writing a chapter about wind in his book on the atmosphere, when a gust blew through his window, lifted the loose pages he’d just written from his desk, and sucked them back out of the window. Days later he received a routine parcel of his latest proofs from his publisher containing transcripts of the very pages that had gone missing. The porter, who acted as a regular messenger for Flammarion, solved the mystery. He had been passing the house by chance, saw the pages in the street, collected them up and took them to the publisher in the normal way.

  DOG DAYS IN COMORO

  Ali Soilih was a tin-pot dictator with a superstitious streak. Four weeks after the Comoro Islands, situated between Madagascar and the African mainland, gained independence from France in 1975, Soilih seized power with the help of French mercenary Colonel Bob Denard, and subjected the islanders to a tyrannical regime. A witch told him that he would meet his end at the hands of a man with a dog, so Soilih had all the dogs on the islands put to death. That was when Denard, now working for the other side, arrived to confront his former boss. He was leading an Alsatian. Whether Denard knew about the prophecy, which seems likely, and brought a dog with him deliberately to sow ominous fears, we don’t know.

  THE LITTLE BOOK

  In The Challenge of Chance, Arthur Koestler tells of a synchronistic episode concerning a book—an experience so dramatic that it converted him to a belief in psychic phenomena.

  The year was 1937 and Koestler was imprisoned in Spain by the Franco regime awaiting the order for his execution.

  “In such situations,” writes Koestler, “one tends to look for metaphysical comforts, and one day I suddenly remembered a certain episode in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks. One of the characters, Consul Thomas Buddenbrook, though only in his forties, knows he is about to die. He was never given to religious speculations but now falls under the spell of a ‘little book’ that for years had stood unread in his library, in which it is explained that death is not final, merely a transition to another, impersonal kind of existence, a reunion with a state of cosmic oneness. The book was Schopenhauer’s essay on death.”

  Koestler was exchanged for a hostage held by the other side and the day after his release he wrote to Thomas Mann to thank him for the comfort he had received from the passage reflecting on Schopenhauer’s essay. Mann replied that he had not read the essay for forty years, but a few minutes before the postman handed him Koestler’s letter he had had a sudden impulse to fetch the volume from his library.

  JUNG STRIKES BACK

  The writer and adventurer, Laurens van der Post, tells this story about his friend Carl Jung, in his book Carl Jung and the Story of Our Time.

  “I was making a film of the story of the life of Jung some years ago. The time schedule for the film had been determined nearly a year before we started filming. The final sequence on the last day of all was to be filmed in Jung’s old house. We had worked all morning in his home and all day long the cameraman, producer, and myself—without mentioning it to one another—had an indescribable feeling that Jung was near to us. I heard the cameraman saying to an assistant, half jokingly at the time, ‘You know I had a feeling as if Jung were looking over my shoulder all the time.’

  “It was a dry, hot, blazing afternoon and we left the house at lunchtime to do some background filming in the afternoon in the oldest section of Zurich, intending to return for the filming of the final scene by his home at sunset. On our way from Zurich to Kusnacht to do so, suddenly out of the hot blue sky the thunder clouds tumbled without forewarning, as if in a great hurry. By the time we reached Kusnacht the lightning was flashing, the thunder rumbling, and the rain pouring down.

  “When the moment came for me to speak direct to the camera about Jung’s death and I came to the description of how the lightning demolished Jung’s favorite tree (two hours after his death) the lightning struck in the garden again. The thunder crashed out so loud that I winced and to this day the thunder, wince, and the impediment of speech it caused are there in the film for all to see.”

  15

  BOUNCING BABIES AND GOLF BALLS

  Some coincidence stories defy classification.…

  THE INSTANT GRANDAD

  Texan Ron Thompson’s family grew by four in less than twenty-four hours in 1990, when three of his daughters, Mary, Joan, and Carol, gave birth to four boys.

  First in line was Mary, aged twenty-eight, who was driven to the hospital by her nineteen-year-old sister Joan (also nine months pregnant). Five hours later, Mary gave birth to Shane. Seven hours after that, Joan was herself driven to hospital, by her pregnant sister Carol, and gave birth to a boy, Jeremy, a minute after midnight. Then twenty-four-year-old Carol went into labor, delivering twin boys just before 3 a.m.

  HOLE IN ONE

  American golfer Scott Palmer claims to have hit nineteen holes in one. The chances of getting one are about 43,000 to 1. Scott, who has rounded up sixty-five witnesses to verify his claims, says he hit four of them on consecutive days in October 1983.

  Palmer says his method is to conjure up a mental image of a faceless woman pouring a glass of milk at the moment he hits the drive. Sounds simple enough.

  DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY

  In 1946 Mildred West decided to take a week’s vacation. She was the obituary writer of the Alton Evening Telegraph, New York. For the first time in the memory of anyone on the newspaper, during the seven days she was away, there were no deaths recorded in Alton, a city of thirty-two thousand. Normally they averaged ten a week.

  ONE GIANT HOME RUN FOR MANKIND

  San Fransisco Giants’ baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry recalls how his former manager once rather pessimistically predicted that “they’ll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run.”

  The unflattering assessment, made by manager Alvin Dark in 1964, was a bit unfair, as Perry had a fairly respectable batting average for a pitcher, but it turned out to be uncannily accurate.

  Six years later, on July 20, 1969, during a home game against the Dodgers, Gaylord Perry finally hit his first home run—but he was nipped at the wire by Apollo II’s lunar module that had touched down on the moon just minutes earlier.

  NOISY NEIGHBORS

  Two commemorative blue plaques in a London street reveal that Jimi Hendrix and George Frederick Handel lived next door to each other.

  Handel (1685–1759) lived and died at number 25 Brook Street; Hendrix (1942–70) lived for one year at number 23.

  MONK TO THE RESCUE

  The nineteenth-century Austrian portrait painter Joseph Aigner had a death wish, but thanks to repeated interventions by a Capuchin monk, it took him fifty years to realize his ambition. He first attempted to kill himself when he was only eighteen. His clumsy efforts to hang himself were interrupted by the arrival of the mysterious monk. Four years later he made a second attempt to hang himself, but was again thwarted by the same monk. At the age of thirty it looked like his death wish would be fulfilled when he was sentenced to be hanged for his political activities. Once again he was saved by the intervention of the monk.

  Aigner was sixty-eight before he finally succeeded in ending his life. He shot himself with a pistol. His funeral ceremony was conducted by the same Capuchin monk—a man whose name Aigner never even knew.

  THE FOUR TOWERS

  In the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy on September 11, 2001, a group calling itself The Two Towers Protest Organization began a campaign to prevent the second film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy being named The Two Towers. Although the film is named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s book, written and titled more than fifty years ago, the protest organization rejected the argument that the title was merely an innocent coincidence.

  The organization, which described itself as being made up of “like-minded individuals who were
greatly affected” by 9/11, issued a statement that read: “We believe that Peter Jackson [the film’s producer] and New Line Cinema’s actions are in fact hate speech. The movie is intentionally being named The Two Towers in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11. Clearly, you cannot deny the fact that this falls under hate speech. We believe that if they will not willingly change the name, the government should step in to stop the movie’s production or to force a name change.”

  The Two Towers film project was named long before the tragedy in keeping with the second book of Tolkien’s trilogy. Immediately after the September 11 crisis Jackson did briefly consider renaming it, but decided against it because it would upset Tolkien enthusiasts, and also the book bearing the name is permanently in mass publication. Another fact that everybody seemed to overlook in the controversy is that the World Trade Center was never referred to as the Two Towers, it was always the Twin Towers.

  THE UNFORTUNATE ANAGRAM

  Naturalist Sir Peter Scott was an enthusiastic believer in the Loch Ness monster. So great, in fact, was his confidence in the creature’s existence that he promoted the use of the Greek name for it: Nessiteras rhombopteryx. This name, which he and underwater photographer Robert Rines coined in December 1975, may be roughly translated as “the Ness monster with diamond-shaped fin.” As London newspapers quickly pointed out, the name is also an anagram for the words “Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S.”

  HERE A MOO

  The postal code of a Canadian farmer called MacDonald contained the letter sequence EIEIO.

  POOR TOSSER

  In an attempt to demonstrate a fifty-fifty probability in his first lecture at a new university, a professor of statistics tossed a coin that landed on a smooth floor on its edge. The likelihood of this happening has been estimated at approximately 1 billion to 1.

  DUDLEY DANGER

  The comedian Peter Cook once wrote about how his “minute seaweed-eating partner” Dudley Moore had an irrational fear about one of their more surreal sketches. The particular routine involved a graphic, if somewhat scatological, account of lobsters crawling up the bottom of the late actress Jayne Mansfield.