I just wanted to see if anyone knew any particularly interesting stories of coincedence. Interesting stories about famous people, historical figures, or personal stories. I know it seems vague, but I know there are really interesting stories out there. They amuse me, so I figured I’d ask y’all.
Robert Anton Wilson’s book Coincidance is a treasure trove of this kind of material. Especially the article “The Physics of Synchronicity.”
A couple examples:
While the Allies were planning the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, the following code words were used (and were among the best-kept secrets of the war): Utah and Omaha, the beaches where the American troops would land; Mulberry, the artificial harbor to be used after the landing; Neptune, the naval operations plan; Overlord, the entire invasion. On May 3, 1944, the first code word, Utah, appeared as an answer to the London Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle. On May 23, Omaha appeared in an answer to a Telegraph puzzle. On May 31, Mulberry appeared. And on June 2, four days before the invasion, Neptune and Overlord both appeared.
British Intelligence investigated this matter extensively. They found that the man who created the crosswords was innocent of espionage, had no knowledge of the invasion and was a puzzled as they were. Verdict: mere coincidence.
Jung had a patient who was telling about a dream in which an Egyptian scarab beetle appeared. This was of great interest to Jung, since he believed dreams often contain images from the collective unconscious, and the scarab beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. At that point, something banging against the window caught Jung’s attention. It was a scarab beetle, a species rather rare in Zurich where Jung lived.
One interesting coincidence happened to me (Jomo) as my first wife and I were reading books to each other. I was reading aloud Harlan Ellion’s story “The Deathbird.” When I reached the exact point in the story where the Deathbird destroys the planet Earth, the Apollo Earth-seen-from-space photograph poster we had hanging on the wall suddenly came loose and crashed to the floor. :eek:
I meant Harlan Ellison.
You’ve reminded me of a coincidence story I remember reading about the disappearance of some girl a few years ago, and the disappearance of some girl in the 1800s. In both cases they were meeting men with a certain name, and both stopped to change their clothes at a friend’s house, and they had the same name, and other weird stuff. My memory is so bad though. I thought it might have been Suzy Lamplugh but I can’t find anything.
There’s also a weird one about a boat called the Titan hitting an iceberg right before the Titanic. May be an UL though.
You’re probably thinking about the 1898 novel “Futility” by Morgan Robertson which describes the sinking of the ocean liner Titan. There’s some information here. The similarity in details are indeed uncanny.
When I was in college, I wrote for the school newspaper. I was asked to do a feature article about an older man who played in a Dixie Land jazz band with a bunch of other old geezers. They called themselves the “Medicare Dixie Land Band.”
When I met the man, he asked me to spell my name for him. Then he asked me if I knew a man named X. (I’ll refrain from using real names for privacy reasons).
I said, yes…X is my grandfather or my father. Depends on whether it’s Sr. or Jr.
“Oh,” he said. “Your grandfather saved my life in World War II.”
They got together after that and had a nice long chat.
Best coincidence of my life, I think.
L
General Questions is for questions with factual answers.
IMHO is for opinions and polls.
I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Have you seen the movie Magnolia?
Very long film, but i think at least the introduction would interest you 
One of my friends at school has a coincidence story. The real story is much cooler than my retelling because I don’t recall it that much.
He was in an apartment building with his friend when he was 11; his cousin, also 11, was with another friend, right above his apartment. At the same time they both got a scratch from the respective friends’ dogs on the same spot on their face, in the same room, as they were both playing a video game.
There are more coincidences in the story too, and my friend was in one of the Ripley’s books, so I’ve always kept an eye out for that book so I’ll know the entire story.
Years ago, when living in NYC, my brother was in the Navy…unexpectedly, they docked in NYC and he had two days off but he didn’t have my address or phone number. I didn’t know he was in town.
On the first day of his leave, he was crossing the street in mid-town Manhattan, and so was I from the other direction. You can imagine our surprise when we looked up and saw each other in the middle of the street.
I have actually seen Magnolia, and I was so interested in those three stories that I started this to see if there were anymore stories like that out there. So please keep them coming.
Also, if anyone knows if those stories at the beginning of Magnolia are true please tell me. Thanks.
This requires a good bit of background information, but I found it pretty funny at the time.
First, you have to keep in mind a person who I’ll call K. K is a male stripper who dated a friend of mine, P. From P we found out that K once slipped off of the (freshly waxed) stage during his dance to the Britney Spears song “I’m a Slave 4 U.” It was an elevated stage, and he fell far enough to crack his tailbone. He was temporarily paralyzed and had to be taken to the emergency room in his oh-so-fab purple sequined thong. (It had to be cut off, incidentally) Fortunately for the rest of the population, K is now fully recovered. Until recently, I had never met K in person, but he’d become quite the legend with my friends. Really, you can get endless jokes out of something like that.
Next, consider E. E is a gorgeous specimen of a human being who caught the eye of a good friend of mine. He works in a certain retail store (rhymes with Mold Cavey), and everytime we came anywhere near this store I was forced to stop and go in so my friend could “browse.” She could never quite get up the courage to ask him out, so she had to content herself with window shopping.
A few weeks ago, I went out with this friend to a small karaoke night in a restaurant so we could see P sing. We got there late and slipped in at a table near the stage and watched the acts.
Shortly after, two men came in and sat down at the table next to ours. P moved to our table and explained in James Bond-like whispers that K was one of the men, so we could -finally- put a face with the myth.
As our eyes adjusted to the light, we realized that E was at the table WITH K! We were amazed that, with all of the time that we’d spent laughing about these two separate people, they managed to find each other. My poor friend’s dreams were crushed, however.
She couldn’t help but laugh through the tears.
I was reading a book in an airport, and the author killed off one of my favorite characters from an earlier novel. The combination of a non-smoking airport, a flight delay, and not nearly enough sleep the night before slammed into this senseless killing, and the terminal was pretty much empty, so I tossed the book to the ground.
Just then, some guy came walking around the corner, and the book bounced into his ankle. He picked it up and handed it back to me, then said, “Wow. I haven’t had one of my own books thrown at me in years.” I explained to him that had I known he was there, I’d have sworn at him first for killing off the character. He laughed and signed the book, we chatted for a while and went our separate ways.
Two years later, I strike up a relationship with a woman I’d met a few times before. A year after that, I get married. A year after that, my wife is going through my books, sees that one and says, “Oh, he’s one of my favorite authors. I once ran into him at an airport and got my copy of this signed, and he said some guy had just thrown it at him because he killed off his favorite character.” She then reads the inscription, Sorry I killed him. Please don’t throw anything else at me.
Oooh. Mine isn’t anywhere near as good as stankow’s, but this thread made me remember this one, so I’ll bite:
In about 9th grade CCD class, our teacher was talking about the devil. He said something along the lines of “The devil is a tricky fellow–he’ll always show up where he isn’t expected if you don’t keep your guard” and blah blah blah stuff like that. Anyway, at that moment, he places his fist down on the table for emphasis, and at the same time the crucifix hanging on the wall behind him spontaneously falls off the wall and clatters on the floor. Gave us dumb kids quite a case of the heebie-jeebies.
Back when I was a sophomore in high school, our band and choir took a trip by bus to Toronto from Iowa. We were at the border in Windsor waiting to be allowed through, when I looked over and saw a semi with the logo of the same company my uncle drove for at the time. I turned to the peson next to me and said, “hey, wouldn’t it be weird if that were my uncle Darren? He drives for that company.” So, several days later, I arrived home, and Darren happened to be visiting our house and I told him about how I saw that truck and he asked me what day it was and what time, and it turns out, it actually was him.
The summer of my 18th birthday, I went mountain climbing in Colorado. On top of Mt. Elbert (14 thousand some-odd feet), I met a guy named Garon. We started talking, and it turned out that when he lived in Singapore, he dated a girl there that I dated in Houston a few years later!
While going through the stacks at a local used-book store, Microbug found a hardcover copy of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, by Douglas Adams (she’d never read it before, and I didn’t already have a copy- as a matter of fact, it was the only book in the series I didn’t already have). Anyway, on the first page was enscribed: “To Lightnin’, best wishes, Douglas Adams”. (A few years later, he had a book signing here in Austin. We handed him that book, and when he opened it, he gave us a very confused look. We explained the story behind the book, and he then signed it again: “And again, Douglas Adams”. What a great guy.)
This one is hard to explain, so bear with me. It was in wood shop class in ninth grade, in an old and somewhat run-down school. One project involved building a tabletop shuffleboard game; you would place a quarter on the surface and flick it with your finger, aiming toward a hole at the other end. Class was about to end and everyone had stopped working. Some of us were playing the shuffleboard game. At the same instant that one of my classmates flicked his quarter, the bell rang to end the class.
This wasn’t one of those new-fangled electronic buzzers; it was an actual bell mounted on the wall next to an electronically-controlled clapper. The bell had probably been there for over thirty years, but it picked this moment to break. The bell,which was only about two inches in diameter, felll from the wall and landed on the shuffleboard table, just in the right spot to completely cover the moving quarter. If we had played that game over and over for a thousand years, and thrown the bell at the table on every shot, we couldn’t have aimed it that well even once.
Another coincidence, described to me by a college roommate: His high school English class was watching a video of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Just as one character said a line to the effect of “Today is the anniversary of the day I was born”, the class next door began singing “Happy Birthday to You”.
This just happened yesterday, so it belongs here.
A couple of weeks ago I was the high ebay bidder on a flyer from the show “Jeeves.” The logo is a hand in a white glove holding a tray with the “Jeeves” title on it. The show was a horrible flop, playing only 38 performances, and damn near ending ALW’s composing career. Anything connected with it is worth something.
I e-mailed the seller and told him I was looking for a Phantom of the Opera flyer with the original logo: A rose being held by a hand in a white glove. Only a few flyers and posters were made of this first logo before it was discarded for being too much like the failed Jeeves logo. Turns out the guy had one, so I send him a money order.
About a month ago, I had sent in a couple to get an uncirculated Ohio state quarter. Yesterday in the mail, I get the two “white glove flyers” and a large envelope with the quarter encased in plastic and, to avoid tainting it while handling it, they included a pair of white gloves! How weird is that?
P.S. My best e-fried was the high bidder on a Jeeves preview poster on ebay yesterday. $148!
I had a lot of fun compiling this page. It’s filled with words from different languages all over the world that are the same and have the same meaning — even though they’re not related or borrowed. Pure coincidence. There’s also a collection of words that are the same but have the opposite meaning. Hope you have as much fun reading it as I had making it.
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/yahyam/page/coincidence.html
Several years ago, my parents had a small above-ground pool in our backyard. It was twilight, the streetlamps were just coming on. A rather large friend of mine jumped into the pool, and the filter dies.
My (so sweet) sister : “Chris, you fat jerk. Your dive knocked
out the filter.”
Me: “That was SOME dive. He knocked out the streetlights…”
Just as he hit a power outage cut in.