MYSTERIES

COINCIDENCE

THE LINCOLN - KENNEDY COINCIDENCE

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.
President Lincoln was elected in 1860 and inaugurated in 1861.
President Kennedy was elected in 1960 and inaugurated in 1961.
Both men were elected from the Senate Committee.
Both their respective first ladies lost children due to miscarriage while in the White House.
Both men were concerned with civil rights problems.
Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln.
Both secretaries advised their respective employers not to go to the place of their deaths.
Both presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both were shot in the head.
Both were shot in the presence of their wives and the public.
Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.
Andrew Johnson was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.
The name Lincoln contains seven letters.
The name Kennedy contains seven letters.
The name Andrew Johnson contains thirteen letters.
The name Lyndon Johnson contains thirteen letters.
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939.
The name John Wilkes Booth contains fifteen letters.
The name Lee Harvey Oswald contains fifteen letters.
Lincoln was shot in a theatre named "Kennedy".
Kennedy was shot in a car named "Lincoln".
Booth ran from the theatre and was caught in a warehouse.
Oswald ran from the warehouse and was caught in a theatre.
Both alleged assassins themselves died by the bullet before standing trial.
Both also strongly proclaimed their innocence of the crimes, and with apparent good reason.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy were carried on the same caisson.

THE TWENTY YEAR CURSE

Another coincidence which once again concerns the Presidency, though lesser known than that concerning Lincoln and Kennedy, is that all of the Presidents who have been elected to power on every twentieth year since 1840 have died while in office:

1840 - William H. Harrison (1841 - 1841) was the first president to die while in office and apparently he started something of a craze. Harrison lasted for just one calendar month at the reigns and died on April 4th 1841 from pneumonia which wasn't helped by the stress that he was under in his new post.

1860 - Abraham Lincoln, "Honest Abe" (1861 - 1865) was the first president to be assassinated. He was shot on April 14th 1865 while watching a play called "Our American Cousin." His bodyguard had left the door in order to watch the play, thus allowing the gunman access. Lincoln was hit in the back of head and died without regaining consciousness the next day, April 15th 1865.

1880 - James A. Garfield (1881 - 1881) lasted five times longer than Harrison at five months. He was shot on July 2nd 1881 while entering Washington Railroad Station by a disgruntled office seeker who had been rejected despite constantly pestering Washington officials. Like Lincoln, Garfield clung to life but for far longer. To escape the coming hot Washington summer he was moved to a New Jersey cottage but died on September 19th 1881.

1900 - William Mckinley (1897 - 1901) continued the vogue of dying by the assassins bullet and he took two of them, one in the abdomen. They were fired by the extreme anarchist Leon Czolcosz who felt that all leaders should be shot as all forms of government were oppressive. He took it upon himself to rid the world of this particular leader and did it at the Pann-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, but despite hopes that Mckinley might survive, he collapsed and died eight days later.

1920 - Warren Harding (1921 - 1923) "was a bad president" who couldn't say no to his friends. He once said to a newsman "I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damned friends - They are the ones who keep me walking the floor nights." Newspapers reported him to be suffering from food poisoning, but he died from a stroke on August 2nd 1923 while in San Francisco. He was mourned until the details of malpractice and fraud carried out by himself and his "poker playing buddies" came to light. They would play, drink and smoke cigars until the early hours while organising bribes and corruption, including the looting of monies destined for the building of hospitals. The other thing for which Harding is noted is that in June 1923 he became the first president to broadcast on radio.

1940 - Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 - 1945) survived four elections, and in 1936 he was elected with the biggest winning margin in U.S. history. Commonly referred to as FDR he was struck by polio in 1921 and all but lost the use of his legs, only being able to walk but a few steps with the aid of leg braces and two canes. In his final year he attended the Yalta Conference along with Churchill and Stalin, and on his return, exhausted, he remained seated throughout his speech. This would be the first time he had alluded to his paralysis in a public speech. After twelve years in power FDR suffered a fatal massive cerebral haemorrhage on April 12th 1945.

1960 - John F. Kennedy (1961 - 1963) was assassinated on November 22nd 1963 allegedly by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man to take office since Teddy Roosevelt and he faced many problems throughout his presidency. Though he was adored by the public he made enemies at almost every turn including the Mafia, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Russians and Fidel Castro, all of whom have been credited with his death at one time or another. Kennedy's was perhaps the most brutal and shocking of all the presidential deaths, and a tearful Walter Kronkite broke the news to a stunned America.

1980 - Ronald Reagan was at 69 the oldest man to be elected as president, one "expert" when asked for his opinion on the Reagan Presidency said "He was a great actor." In truth he had made over fifty films, his most highly rated performance being in the 1942 Warner Brothers film "Kings Row" but for some strange reason he is most often remembered for his role in the 1951 B-Movie "Bedtime For Bonzo" in which he starred with Diana Lynn and a chimpanzee. As Reagan left a Washington Hotel on March 30th 1981, he was gunned down by a mentally disturbed John Hinkley who had performed the act to show his love for a girl that he had attended college with, a budding young actress named Jodie Foster. Despite his injuries, including a bullet lodged less than an inch from his heart after it had pierced a lung, Reagan had walked into the emergency room before collapsing. He was praised for his bravery and made a full recovery having cheated the "twenty year curse,"

Is it a curse? Is it a freak chance? Is it a coincidence? Has Reagan banished the curse for good or will it return in the future? If so it has clearly skipped a generation because despite Bill Clinton perhaps wishing he was dead at times during his presidency, he survived it unscathed, well, physically at least.

PLANE LUCKY

In 1985 while on a flight from Hong Kong to London Paula Dixon suddenly fell ill, she had suffered from a potentially fatal collapsed lung. The cabin crew asked for any doctors on board the aircraft to make themselves known and offer assistance. The two doctors who came forward were Professor Angus Wallace and Dr. Tom Wong.

Wallace was an accident and emergency specialist and had just completed a course on this very condition. Dr. Wong had on his person a book, it was the text book describing how to perform the necessary surgery in the case of a collapsed lung.

Following the book and Wallace's experience they performed the operation with a wire coat hanger sterilised in brandy, a roll of tape, a tube and a plastic bottle to catch the fluid pumped down the tube.

IT'S FOR YOU

In July 1992 Sue Hamilton was working in her office when her fax machine broke. Unable to fix it she decided to phone one of her colleagues, Jason Pegler, who had left for home a little earlier. Looking around the office for his home phone number she found one pinned to a notice board.

Thinking that it was his home number she rang it and waited for him to answer. When Jason did answer the phone she began to tell him about her problem at the office with the fax machine. Jason stopped her in mid sentence and told her that he wasn't at home, in fact he was still on his way home and had been walking past a telephone box which had been ringing and he had decided to answer it.

The number that Sue had found pinned to the office notice board had not been his telephone number, but his employee number. The number was the same as that of the telephone box he had been walking past.

TITANIC COINCIDENCE

In 1898 the writer Morgan Robertson had one of her books published, the book was called "The Wreck of the Titan" and it told the story of a brand new 46,000 ton ocean liner whose builders had described as "unsinkable."

In the book the Titan's maiden voyage was to take it from England to New York, a journey which it began in April. When the ship had reached the North Atlantic it collided with an enormous iceberg and the collision brought about its sinking. Due to the lack of sufficient lifeboats on board the Titan many of the passengers on board drowned.

Fourteen years later on April 15th 1912, the 45,000 ton "unsinkable" Titanic left the port of Southampton for New York on her maiden voyage. Whilst sailing through the North Atlantic she encountered bad weather and collided with a gigantic iceberg and began to sinkk. The ensuing mayhem on board was due to the lack of sufficient lifeboats, meaning that many hundreds of those on board drowned.

As well as the many unlucky passengers that travelled the 2 plus miles to the bottom of the ocean with her was a copy of Morgan Robertson's book in the ship's library."

Another coincidence concerning a book is one written by the notorious author Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote, in 1883, about three shipwrecked men who, to avoid starvation, were forced to eat the ships cabin boy, Richard Parker. In 1884 three shipwrecked sailors were rescued after they had eaten their cabin boy, Richard Parker.

TWO OF A KIND

In January 1979 James Edward Lewis of Lima, Ohio began searching for the identical twin whom he had not seen or contacted since they had been separated when only a few weeks old and been adopted into different families (the Lewis family and the Springer family). Lewis was encouraged by his adoptive mother, Lucille Lewis, and he contacted the childrens home they had spent a short time at and the court that had handled their adoption. After five or six weeks Lewis had managed to track down his identical twin and a meeting was arranged at the Springers' home. Springer sat chain smoking while Lewis was late after stopping on the way for some dutch courage, and when they saw each other they began laughing, and Lewis later said ".... I felt close, it wasn't like meeting a stranger."

Their Christian names were chosen by their adoptive families independently (The Springers for some reason were told that the other twin had died despite being willing to adopt them both) and this was just the first of many amazing coincidences in their lives.

Both were born prematurely on August 19th 1939.
Both had owned a dog as a boy and named it Toy.
Both had the same favourite subject at school, Mathematics.
Both hated spelling and were not good at it.
Both grew up with adoptive brothers named Larry.
Both put on 10 pounds in their teens for no apparent reason and later lost it again.
Both began at age 18 to suffer from "tension" headaches that start in the late afternoon and turn into migraines.
Both had worked part time as a Deputy Sheriff.
Both had worked for McDonalds (the hamburger chain).
Both had worked at a petrol station.
Both had holidayed at the same beach at St. Petersburg, Florida (a beach only 300yds long) and had driven there and back in the same type of Chevrolet car.
Both first married a Linda and then divorced.
Both then married a Betty.
Lewis named his first son James Alan and Springer named his first son James Allan.
Both drink Miller Lite beer.
Both chain smoke Salem's cigarettes.
Both bite their nails right down.
Both have had vasectomies.
Both have had two confirmed or suspected heart attacks.
Both suffer from haemorrhoids.
Both suffer from the same sleeping problems.
Both use the same slang words.
Both enjoy stock car racing and dislike baseball.
Both have basement workshops where they work in wood.
Both have built a white bench around the trunk of a tree in their garden.
Both enjoy doing household chores at the weekend.
Both leave love letters lying around the house.

TABLE FOR FOUR

Albert and Betty Cheetham found themselves sharing a dinner table one night while on holiday in Tunisia. They introduced themselves to the other couple who also turned out to be called Albert and Betty, but their surname was Rivers. The coincidence did not end with their Christian names, both couples were retired and in their seventies, both Alberts having worked in the railway coach business and both Bettys having worked for the Post Office.

Amazingly both couples had married at the same time on the same day, 2pm on August 15th 1942, and both had 2 sons born in 1943 and 1945 and both had 5 grandchildren. Both Bettys had lost their engagement rings and both were wearing the same type of 1930s watch bracelet which had been broken and repaired at the same point at the same time. Both couples had booked their Tunisian holiday on the same day and had flown in on the same day.

IS THERE ANY SUCH THING AS A COINCIDENCE?

Are so many people living on the same planet not bound to have similarities in their lives with at least one other person? If you roll a die enough times will you not eventually get one hundred sixes in a row, or would this be another amazing coincidence? Similarly, so the saying goes, if you place an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters one would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. If one did would this constitute a great coincidence or is it only to be expected?

Exactly what is a coincidence and how is it determined? Are the coincidences described here really coincidences or are they something else? Can they be looked at rationally and explained likewise?

For example, if you were to write a novel about a ship, then you wouldn't be likely to make it the smallest ship, it would be the biggest, so that if something were to happen to it, in your story it would be all the more shocking. Its name could well be derived from its size, such as Colossus, Gigantic, Titanic etc. The book would most likely feature the excitement of the ships maiden voyage, and there are few, if any, things more exciting and gripping on the Oceans than a sinking, and this can be made all the more exciting still if there are not enough lifeboats to go round. It was well known that icebergs held danger for passing ships and could easily sink them, as it had happened before; to the "SS Pacific" in 1856 and to "The Persia" also in 1856, and what's more, on its maiden voyage, so coincidences are not always what they first appear to be.

Cosmologists have based theories on coincidence, for example in the 1930s Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac took the age of the universe and divided it by the time needed for a ray of light to cross a subatomic particle. The answer he got was 1038. He then took the strength of the electromagnetic force in a hydrogen atom and divided it by the strength of gravity inside the atom. The answer was again 1038. Some think that this is a bizarre coincidence, but others think that it is evidence of a bizarre link between the cosmos and the subatomic world, and is possibly the basis of a link between many other things on a larger scale.

Another man who looked at coincidence on a larger scale was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung who was fascinated by all aspects of the paranormal, and he studied astrology and the I-Ching, and followed the experiments of J. B. Rhine very closely. For much of his life Jung thought that psychic phenomena were purely psychological manifestations or "unconscious autonomic complexes that are being projected." By the age of 72 he no longer felt that a single cause could account for such a wide variety of paranormal effects. Jung felt that the explanation had to lie in something beyond what is normally defined as cause and effect, and he believed that this something lay in the phenomenon of coincidence. With the help of Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1952, Jung published a theory suggesting that an unknown principle might be responsible for what he termed "synchronicity" or "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state." He felt that although most people could understand cause and effect only in terms of their day to day experiences, it was possible that other forms of space and time might exist, and if so, then apparent coincidences might be related in unknown ways.

As a psychiatrist Jung was interested in synchronicity mainly because it related to psychic states and events, and he cited the case of a patient who he found to be "psychologically inaccessible." He wrote that "the difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything" as she had a "highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical idea of reality" and this prevented her from being able to accept the existence of the subconscious.

Jung hoped that something would occur which would cause her to drop this armour. He felt that it needed something "unexpected and irrational" and his prayers were answered one day when she reported to him that she had had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. Jung wrote;

"While she was still telling me this dream I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window.... I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.... I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle... whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism... The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results."

A theory put forward by former Cambridge University researcher Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is that of "Morphic Resonance" where, he says, we, that is all living creatures, are linked by a "morphic field" which we use to share, and benefit from, the experience of others. He suggests that a group of people in one place may discover, or conquer, a problem at the same time or shortly after the same problem is conquered by somebody else in the same place, but what about other apparent coincidences on a more domestic scale, such as seeing two people at a party who share the same birthday?

This is not as surprising as it may seem at first, as to get odds of 50-50 you would need a room with only 23 people, as you are not matching a specific date but any date out of 365, and this reduces the number drastically. If you were to match a specific date you would need a room with over 250 people to achieve the same odds of 50-50.

Likewise the chances of meeting somebody at a party with whom you share a mutual friend are far from obscure if we consider that a typical party will be attended usually by people from the same social standing, and possibly field of work. Sociologists' research has shown that an average individual will have around 150 friends that they consider to be close, so we can describe a "friend of a friend" as any one of 23,000 people, but for each friend we have, we know more than one of their acquaintances, so then the number of "friends of a friend" rockets to 600,000 people. Hardly surprising then that we share a mutual friend at a party.

Maybe it isn't such a small world, but what about if we share more than a mutual friend with somebody? What if there are many details in our lives that are similar? Is it just purely down to chance or is it something stranger? The Lincoln - Kennedy coincidence seems to be beyond belief, and even when it is looked at rationally it seems uncanny that two men can have so much in common. The very laws of coincidence are that there are no laws, but some of the links can be explained rationally. For example, to be elected from the senate is not unusual, nor is being concerned with civil rights, or perhaps the stress associated with being first lady resulting in a miscarriage Perhaps though, the two presidents birth dates, their successors birth dates and their killers birth dates must surely be nothing more than a remarkable coincidence.

The other coincidence associated with the White House is the twenty year curse and it appears to have been broken by Ronald Reagan, who had a near brush with death when he was shot, but continued his presidency. Was this a curse or was there something more serious behind it? It is believed that what does lie behind it is the ancient Shawnee curse. This is also known as the Indian's revenge, and it is said to have begun in the early 19th Century when the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh died in battle with the then Governor of Indiana, William Harrison. The Shawnee then placed a curse on Harrison, and said that Harrison would become President in a year that ended with zero, but that he would die in office, and any President who was elected in a year divisible by twenty would also die in office, Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt and Kennedy. It is well known that Reagan had used astrology to help him make certain decisions and announcements at certain times, so, could he have enlisted the help of somebody to lift the curse or help him survive it?

We've seen that two people can have amazing similarities in their lives with others, but are we, to some extent destined to live a certain type of life, is our life pattern or the way we will think and react to various situations already decided, and perhaps somehow pre-programmed into our genes? If not the how do we possibly explain the extraordinary similarities in the lives of the Jim twins? When they were reunited they attracted a great deal of media attention, including an appearance on the Johnny Carson show, and one of those who saw the case was a psychologist, Tom Bouchard, who, along with colleagues, raised a few thousand dollars from University funds and tracked the twins down. Since then Bouchard and his team have seen, or are due to see over thirty other twin pairs who were separated before the age of three. Of the first sixteen tested, all but one were separated before the age of six months, and the tests are carried out by professional testers who are not told the purpose of the tests so that there can be no bias in the results.

What we have to ask ourselves is what constitutes a coincidence, for example, if twins independently turn up at an airport wearing the same shirt, then that would be quite something, but if they both turn up and neither of them is wearing a tie, does that still constitute a coincidence? Possibly it would do if they would both normally be wearing a tie but had chosen not to do so on that particular occasion. What about the Jim twins both marrying and divorcing a Linda and then marrying a Betty, truly a bizarre coincidence, but does the fact that Jim Springer is still married to Betty but Jim Lewis is engaged to a woman named Sandy detract at all from the coincidence? One would think so yes.

This goes to show that it is very difficult to spot a genuine coincidence. For example, there were once four people playing cards and they were dealt the full pack of fifty two cards, thirteen each, and each was dealt a perfect suit in number order. On first glance this appears to be a bizarre feat, but in all of the card games dealt in the world every day, surely it should happen more often because mathematically speaking it is destined to happen, so is it still such a bizarre coincidence? Is any event which is mathematically predestined to occur able to be considered as a coincidence, such as that which happened to the actor Sean Connery?

In 1963 Connery walked into the St. Vincent casino in Italy and played the roulette wheel. He backed seventeen and won, he then backed seventeen again and won again. He backed it a third time and won again, in total netting himself £10,000. The odds of this happening are 50,652-1. As there are tens of thousands of people betting in casinos all over the world every day and night, this must happen every few days at least in one or other casino, so even the rarest of events based on the most extreme of odds, if given a long enough period of time to occur will do so.

These are statistically calculated possibilities, not really true coincidences, but every so often we do get what surely must be pure coincidences, such as the taxi driver who in 1974 was driving along a busy street with his passenger, seventeen year old Neville Ebin, when he collided with a motorcycle, knocked the rider from it and killed him. One year later the same driver was again driving the same passenger, Neville Ebin, in the same taxi along the same street, when again he collided with the same motorcycle, again knocking the rider from it and killing him. The two dead riders had been brothers.

Again is it possible to analyse this case? For example how many times had the driver driven his taxi along that street and not collided with either of the two men? How many times had he carried that same passenger along that same route on what would appear to be his commute? How many times had either rider been knocked off their motorcycle by other cars?

In the case of the two Alberts and Bettys, are their lives really all that similar, after all Albert and Betty were once very popular names, and the fact that their sons were born in the same years, does this still constitute a coincidence because they were given different names, or if they were born in different months in those years ? How many women called Betty have lost their engagement ring? How many women called Betty have a 1930s watch bracelet? The two bracelets had broken in the same place, could this have been a common fault with that type of bracelet? The two couples were of a similar, but not the same age and from similar but not the same backgrounds, so the same type of holiday resort is likely to have appealed to them, and possibly also the same time of year.

So, is anything that happens really a coincidence, or can everything be broken down and analysed rationally? Or, perhaps as has been suggested before, "coincidences actually happen all of the time, but we are just too busy to notice."