I was in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home. I met someone who had spent time in the States, and they were showing me some photos of their travels.
They pull out one photo of a trip to the beach. In the background was my boat.
If you want improbable coincidences. A man came up to my son who happened to be wearing a McGill jacket in the Japanese Garden in Seattle and asked if was a McGill students. “No, but my father’s a professor there.” So the man comes up to me and announces that his son is a student at McGill. Yawn, one of 40,000. “A grad student”, he adds. “Oh, in what department?” “Math”. “Hey, that’s my department. What’s his name?” I figured there was some chance I actually knew him. He tells me his name. He is my PhD student! The man didn’t even live in Seattle. He was visiting his daughter and I my son, who both do. The coincidence is perhaps not as improbable as all that, but the chances we would actually connect certainly is.
Lewis and Clark, accompanied by their Indian guide, are in the middle of nowhere trying to bargain with some natives for horses. Their negotiations prove successful when the guide realizes that the native chief is her long-lost brother, since she had been abducted as a small child.
Not a fact, just a common misunderstanding. The moon’s orbit is elliptical and there is quite a lot of variance in the angular size of the moon’s vs sun’s disc. Eclipses are rarely ‘perfect’.
Wiki Annular Eclipse
Reminded me of this story: basically, a father is searching for his estranged daughter, Liza, whom he hasn’t seen in ten years. He poses with his other daughters in the street for a photo to go in the local paper. They are reunited, and then they realize: Liza was in the background of the picture that was published in the newspaper, standing just across the street.
You think that’s just coincidence? Ha!
Not only was the Moon Landing faked, the moon itself is a fake.
I actually read an SF short story with that idea as the premise. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the title.
The first astronauts to visit the moon orbit around to the hidden side for the very first time – and they find out, to their horror, that it’s basically a movie-set false front. They can see scaffolding and braces on the back side.
One night I was in the checkout lane of a Bangkok supermarket. I happened to be holding a copy of my hometown newspaper (a large Midwestern city in the USA). A man in front of me commented on the paper so I asked him if he lived in said Midwestern city. Indeed he did.
Hmmm… small world. Which was about to get even smaller.
We talked some more and I asked him what he did there, he told me he owned a brew pub. I said “Really? Well, that’s gotta be in (hip night-district of that city), right?”
It was in fact located there. “Wow”, I said. I went to (hip night-district) High School."
“Really?” he replied, “My partner at the brew pub went there too.”
“Huh. The guy who was the goalkeeper on my H.S. soccer team has a brew pub in (hip night-district). Are you partners with Joe Blow (not his real name)?”
“Yup!”
It was quite a tickle running into this guy 8,000 miles (or whatever) from home.
ETA: One night, years earlier, I ran into my old next door neighbor who I hadn’t seen in years at a restaurant in a city 1,000 miles from where we grew up.
Edwin Booth, John Wilk Booth’s cousin saved Todd Lincoln’s life.
I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s still a neat story:
Frank Morgan the actor who played the Wizard of Oz was looking through some old clothing trying to find the perfect costume for his character. He finally picks out an old coat and puts it on. In the pocket of the coat he finds a letter written by L. Frank Baum.
Violet Jessop, who died in 1971 at the age of 84, worked as a stewardess aboard the Olympic, a ship severely damaged by another vessel called Hawke. The ship managed to limp back to port.
In 1912 Violet, still working for the White Star line, took a position as stewardess on the Titanic. She survived the sinking. and later worked as a nurse on the Britannic. It was struck by a German mine in the Aegean, and sank. Again, Violet survived.
And she still went back to work on ships, retiring at 61.
My high school sweetheart lived in an adjacent town about 30 miles away from where I grew up. She was nine days older than me and perhaps this means the coincidence is not so great.
Years before, as my mother was nearing the end of her pregnancy carrying me, she had changed to a different OB/GYN and I was born in the hospital in that nearby city.
As my sweetheart and me got to know each other her mother pulled out a photo album including baby photos. And there in the back corner of their picture of the hospital nursery was me.
Sweetheart was a preemie and stayed in the hospital for longer than normal. I was two weeks late and was born huge, so I looked like the baby that had spent ten days in the hospital already.
Someone actually wrote a short story along those lines. I’m fairly sure it was written by a woman (I’m thinking James Tiptree Jr., but can’t find it if it is). But I remember the story:
A family is visiting a small town in Montana (which would probably mean this was written after and as a result of the 1979 eclipse). The father of the family is the one mainly interested in the eclipse; the mother (the viewpoint character) is mostly doing parenting things. But while doing so, she notices some odd things, mostly having to do with a certain group of the other eclipse viewers. She eventually figures out they’re aliens from another world.
My father was walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago when he literally bumped into his brother. Neither one of them lived in Chicago nor knew the other one was there.
The weirdest coincidence that ever happened to me: I was driving across country. I stopped at a CD store in New Jersey and bought some used CD’s. One of them was a David Cross comedy performance. Keep in mind this wasn’t some popular recently released CD.
A few hours later I was driving along, listening to that David Cross CD. I saw a bookstore and I decided to stop and check it out. I parked my car, turned it off, and walked into the store - and they were playing the same track of the same David Cross CD I had just been listening to in my car.
It was Robert Lincoln not Todd.
Another Robert Lincoln coincidence: He was not present when his father was assassinated. But he was present at the assassinations of both James Garfield and William McKinley.
I remember that story - it might have been a comic strip or Bande Dessinee - except the twist was that the astronauts were in a test mission, not the real thing and the last frames are of two scientists monitoring the experiment.
If you knew somebody whose real name was Joe Blow, now that would be improbable.
I actually went to high school with a Mike Hunt.
The life and times of that young lad from the ghetto who became a sports superstar and ended up in serious trouble with the law. TWICE.
You couldn’t make up OJ’s life in a million years.