In short, a girl put her name and address on a sticker, tied it to a balloon, and let it go, hoping for a pen-pal (This is the bigges leap of faith - I doubt anyone would do that anymore, what with the current preoccupation with child kidnappers and criminals). The balloon lands in the yard of another girl, who has the exact same name as the girl, and share many other details, such as height, eyes, the pets they keep, hobbies and interests…
If I am not being whooshed, what are the odds of this happening?
Coincidences happen all the time. This one may be extraordinary, but that’s also why it was singled out for media distribution. And you also need to take note of the selective reporting. All the similarities are played up, but no mention is made of the dissimilarities, of which there are sure to be many.
The far end of the bell curve is by definition several standard deviations away from the norm. Events there have to exist even though they seem to be impossible. They’re not significant or strange or beyond the odds.
My junior high school did the balloon-release thing every year in an attempt to teach us what the prevailing wind patterns were. They missed the chance to actually teach us just how much open space there is on the freaking planet, because we never got any answers back…
Simon Clark writes, also from the UK, concerning the interesting Buxton co-incidences that were celebrated in the media there, and which we discussed on this page:
The claim is that on June 14th, a 10-year-old U.K. girl named Laura Buxton found a balloon in the garden of her home in Pewsey, Wiltshire. I saw this on TV here in the UK - with both Lauras and their parents present to explain the story. The balloon was not actually found by Laura but by a neighbor who saw the balloon with Laura’s name on it. The neighbor then returned it to the Laura he knew, thinking it belonged to her. This greatly increases the chances of the balloon ending up in the hands of a Laura Buxton. All other similarities between the girls were then picked out by hand after the first apparent coincidence. I also seem to recall - but then again I may have mis-remembered this bit - that the girls names were not identical but similar. Maybe they were different spellings but pronounced the same - I can’t remember as I haven’t seen a written version of the story.
(emphasis mine)
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I’ve found several references to this story using “google” (search on “Laura Buxton” and “Balloon”)and none mention anything about both sets of parents being married the same year. Sounds like Ripley’s may have been exagerating just a bit. In any event, both girls were 10 and if they were both first children, that makes the coincidence of their parents marriage (presuming it’s true) rather unremarkable.
[ January 24, 2002: Message edited by: LeftCoast ]</p>
This is one of the many instances when people mix up the odds of happening something to a given person with the odds of it happening to someone, somewhere.
There are currently 10.0 million girls of 5 to 9 years in the U.S. source).
Suppose 10 of them share the details (name, height, etc) mentioned. Then the chances of our girl hitting, by chance, her counterpart are one in a million. But suppose not only one girl launches her balloon, but many, say a thousand a year (a rather moderate percentage).
Then the odds of this not happening to a specific girl is (999,999/1,000,000), and the odds of this not happening to any girl is (999,999/1,000,000)[sup]1,000[/sup], or pretty much 99.9 per cent.
But imagine this experiment is repeated every year. After 50 years, the odds of it not happening becomes 0.999[sup]50[/sup], about 95.1 per cent, so the odds of it happening to anyone increased to nearly 5 per cent. Not impressive, but far from being impossible.
What I want to say is, that on the long run it becomes very likely that unlikely events happen someday to somebody. It’s like hitting the big prize in the lottery: Unlikely that you hit it, but you can bet that someday somebody will win.
Actually, I doubt it happened quite like that. There’s a popular fairground game we play here in little old England called a **baloon race. ** Kids buy a baloon, and put their names and contact details on a label, then release the baloon. Eventually, it comes down to Earth, and is found by some other kid. Finder sends the baloon back. If your baloon has travelled the greatest distance of all baloons, both sender and finder win a prize.
I suspect she was playing this game, hoping to win the prize, not really looking for a pen friend. Thousands of British kids play this game every year. I guess that sender and finder’s name matches, oh about three or four times a year. Very exciting if it happens to you but not that big a deal otherwise. Must have been a slow news day.
You have the odds all wrong.
The odds that something that has already happened can happen is 1. 100% True.
The fact that this seems like a long shot is that non-coincidences are never reported.
Of course it could be fake, but my daughter sent out many messages in bottles. A few were found, mostly just a few miles down the shoreline, and mostly by kids. Parents don’t seem to wonder if a bottle will hold a message.
What do you think the odds are that someone will hit a lottery jackpot two different times? A New Jersey woman did and the media calulated the odds a 1 in 17 trillion. In reality, the odds are better than 50-50 in a seven year period that it will happen to someone in the U.S. and will probably happen again in a few years.
The media’s mistake was that they assumed that they picked a certain person in advance, that person bought 1 ticket and won, then that person bought one ticket and won again. That’s not the way these things work. You start with the entire lottery ticket buying population first. Some will win, and then you calculate the chances of any one of the first-time winners winning again. The odds aren’t bad at all.
Children let balloons with notes go everyday. It only takes one to make a strange sounding news story.
On a recent Room 101, Paul Merton challenged Stephen Fry with “what about the phone ringing just as you’re thinking about someone, and then it turns out to be them… surely that must have happened to you?”
I say this as a confirmed believer in the heeby-jeebies, but Fry’s reply was as cool as mince: "Yes, but I probably think of hundreds of people every day, and lots of people ring me. In fact the odds are very much in favour of that happening. If it never happened you’d be saying “Isn’t that strange, whenever I think of someone they never phone me!”
This is true; balloon races are very popular at school fetes and other such events, however, I remember, way back in the late 70s/early 80s, solo balloon launches (and messages in bottles) being discussed as a cool way to find a penpal; I don’t doubt it’s something that people do all on their own, occasionally.
…and one day, their parents just happened to be driving to (unknowingly) each other’s cities, there was a collision…
Seriously, what nearly always happens in these tales of amazing coincidence is:
[ul][li]There are a few grains of truth - a handful of genuinely conspicuous similarities - that get exaggerated.[/li][li]A whole load of other trivial stuff is dug up and the importance of it is way overblown (“Oh wow! your mum used to feed you eggy toast when you were ill? Me too! Amazing!”)[/li][li]Conspicuous/significant differences between the two are simply and conveniently ignored.[/li][li]A generous helping of pure fiction is spread over the top; probably by people who don’t even know the individuals concerned[/li]— wide-eyed, they tell the amazing story to their office colleagues; someone laughs and pours scorn on their credulity and out of desperation to save face, they embellish the story with details that would make it amazing, if they were only true.
(Kind of unrelated, but I’ve seen people do this with stories about their visit to a clairvoyant; an account of the same even gets more and more amazing every time it its recounted).
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