Impossible Coincidences
Did you ever wonder about a coincidence, one which the odds were so much against there should have been no way it could have happened? There are some really strange ones out there. Let me tell you about one I have personal knowledge of. A person I worked with decided to take a vacation and booked a trip to Indonesia. One day he decided to go into a bar in Java one of the islands. He sat at the bar and ordered a drink and that is when he heard a voice coming from behind him. He turned around and there was someone he worked with back in New York asking him what he was doing there. Now I ask you, what were the odds of that happening?
It was in the 1930s. A man who lived in the City of Detroit was walking down the street. A family lived in a high apartment in one of the apartment buildings he had to pass and as he was walking by, a baby fell from that high window and landed on the man. The baby was unhurt and so was the man. You cannot imagine how grateful the parents of the baby were. At this point you are probably wondering what does this have to do with coincidences so I will tell you the rest of the story. It was about a year later when the man was walking down the same street when the same baby fell out of the same window and landed on him again and neither people were hurt.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not contains an incredible story about the painter Joseph Aigner who lived in Austria in the 19th century. It is not known if he had a mental problem or was extremely depressed, but he tried to kill himself at the age of 18, but was interrupted by a Capuchin monk. When he was 22 years old he decided to hang himself and again the same monk appeared and stopped him. When he was 30 years old he was sentenced to death for his political activities and the same monk intervened and saved him. When he was 68 years old he finally succeeded at killing himself and that same monk who was now very elderly conducted the funeral service. Aiger never found out who the monk was.
I think everyone has heard that one of the reasons World War I started was because of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand was shot while he was in his car. The license plate of the car was A111118. When an armistice was reached which ended the war it was reached on 11/11/18.
There is an incredible story about King Umberto I of Italy. The king went into a restaurant in the city of Monza on July 28th, 1900. To his astonishment the owner of the restaurant looked just like him. The king called him over and spoke with him and found out his name was also Umberto and both their wives had the same first names. The restaurant owner Umberto opened his restaurant the same day king Umberto had his coronation. The next day both Umbertos were shot dead and killed.
Sometimes the coincidences are so incredible as to see some paranormal force is behind them. Take the case of two identical brothers who never knew each existed until they finally met. The identical twins were separated at birth and adopted by different families. The two families knew nothing of each other. Each of them went into law enforcement. Both had boys and one named his James Alan and the other named his son James Allan. Both married women named Linda and both got divorced and then both married women named Betty. Both had dogs named Toy. It seems there were just too many coincidences to be accidental.
John Wilkes Booth is infamous for killing Lincoln. His brother Edwin Booth was the most famous actor of his time, even more famous than his brother and his statue is still in Gramercy Park in New York. One day Edwin Booth was on a crowded train when a young man fell into the space between the train and platform only to be pulled up by Edwin Booth. That young man was Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln.
Karaoke is very popular in the Philippines, but there is a problem and it is the song “My Way” originally sung by Frank Sinatra is being banned in many places in that country. It seems many people who have sung that song have been killed. No one knows why that particular song incites people to murder other people. A term has been invented called “videoke rage” to describe this. One man who was singing the song was shot and killed by a security guard who told him to stop and when he wouldn’t he got blasted. The song has caused riots in some places.
Some people believe at least some of these coincidence occur because our DNA and maybe the DNA of others is programmed so this will happen in a certain way at a certain time. The term for this is synchronicities. This term is not defined the same way by everyone, but it certainly has to do with coincidences and their causes. Are we programmed for certain things to happen? This is exactly what some believe is true. It does stretch credulity when we see impossibly complex streams of coincidences with the same people. Sometimes these coincidences involve one person and what we would call luck. This is the kind of thing when the same person wins the lottery several times. Then there are even more complicated coincidences where two or more people have incredible interactions over their lifetimes. We may never truly understand what causes these thing.
