Beyond Coincidence Read online

  There was Martin, out of his depth in scientific experiments into paranormal phenomena, specifically to test whether there is such a thing as telepathy. Early research was carried out in Russia by a scientist called Bechterer, who, afraid the authorities might consider his work too frivolous, disguised the telepathy part by calling it “biological radio.” No sooner had Martin read that phrase than in the other room Mickey Jupp sang the words “nature’s radio.” It was a song about telepathy between lovers: “You won’t have to tell me, because I’ll already know / I’ll have heard the news on Nature’s Radio.”

  Now, if Martin were an Ancient Greek he would have regarded this as a good omen. Actually he did anyway. It feels good when two pieces of like phenomena shake hands in your bathroom, particularly when they have judged your mood so well.

  Later Martin and Brian were conducting random street interviews. The sixth person stopped turned out to have devoted his life to the celebration and recording of coincidence. By this time it did not seem odd at all. Coincidences? We could call them up at will! Perhaps what we should have been doing was concentrating our powers on winning the lottery.

  So far so benign. We’ve tended to think of coincidences as having good intentions, though as neither random events nor the actions of gods (depending on your standpoint) are necessarily friendly, there’s no reason why they should be so restricted. Of course, unhappy coincidences happen all the time.

  If a woman were to urinate in your suitcase because it resembled her unfaithful husband’s (you snigger, but it has happened), you would feel as though you were trapped in a real-life Larry David routine.

  If all the passengers on a 747 jumbo jet happened to pack a small anvil in their hand luggage, the effect wouldn’t be beneficial to any of them and they probably wouldn’t be able to tell the story either, though the rest of us would be fascinated to read about it in a newspaper, or a novel, or watch it take place in a film. The pattern of coincidence engages us, even when it involves hardship or tragedy, and even victims of bad coincidence may experience a compensating sense of being included or chosen. Sometimes it is better to be noticed, even if we suffer by it, than to be ignored.

  We have included lucky stories and unlucky stories in this book, funny stories, sad stories, violent stories, and romantic stories. We love coincidence so much that a misguided assumption prevails, that if a story contains one then it is, by definition, interesting. Many coincidence books have been written with that lazy principle in mind. It may be true, but apart from revisiting a few classic stories such as the Titanic prediction and the Lincoln and Kennedy similarities (shiver) we’ve worked hard to find stories that are interesting in their own right. We threw away a lot of stories that went: “I traveled to Thailand for my summer holiday and I met a woman who used to go to school with my brother in Philadelphia.” On the other hand if we’ve left the odd one in, it’s because the woman wore purple lipstick or knew how to wolf whistle.

  Enjoy the book. You should, as we share an interest in coincidences. Maybe we’ll run into each other again one day.

  But then again, realistically speaking, maybe we won’t, because, despite all the shivering, we have to be realistic, otherwise we’d sit at home all day waiting for lucky gold bars to fall out of badly loaded planes onto our lawn. It’s all very well being one with the great cosmic YES! but everyday life has to go on. As comedian Steven Wright says: “It’s a small world, but you wouldn’t want to paint it.”

  2

  WHY WE LOVE COINCIDENCE

  Mrs. Willard Lovell locked herself out of her house in Berkeley, California. She had spent ten minutes trying to find a way back in when the postman arrived with a letter for her. In the letter was a key to her front door. It had been sent by her brother, Watson Wyman, who had stayed with her recently and taken the spare key home with him to Seattle, Washington.

  Most of us have locked ourselves out of our houses at some time or other. Many of us will have received a key through the post in a letter. Very few of us will have had them happen to us with such exquisite timing. How would you have felt if that had happened to you? Pretty special probably. There you are, trying to cope with an unwelcome and vexing predicament when suddenly, like magic, the solution is handed to you on a plate, or in this case, in a letter. The denouement is so neat and perfectly resolved it makes the anguish of the beginning worthwhile. And what a story to tell your friends!

  All the world loves coincidences. We are attracted to their pattern and order—their symmetry. We can even become addicted to them, seeking them out in the most unlikely places. The more unlikely a coincidence, the more we savor it.

  And the more remarkable the coincidence, the more the sense that it must have some sort of meaning. Coincidences suggest some sort of controlling, godlike hand is at work—smoothing out the chaos in our complicated lives.

  For many people these very personal experiences of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, can border on the religious. A major survey conducted in the United States in 1990 asked people to describe spiritual or religious-like experiences they had had. A large majority cited “extraordinary coincidences.”

  Stephen Hladkyj spent several years studying coincidences experienced by fellow students at the University of Manitoba. He found that first-year students at the university who scored “high on a measure of synchronicity,” or were alert to synchronicity or meaningful coincidences in their lives, also scored higher on a self-rated measure of psychological health and had generally adapted well to their first year of college life.

  He concluded that people who are alert to coincidence in their lives—particularly personal coincidence—tend to see the universe as a friendly, orderly, responsive place, and consequently develop a general sense of well-being. Coincidence, it seems, is good for us.

  It gives us a delicious frisson of pleasure to know that a balloon released by ten-year-old Laura Buxton in her garden landed 140 miles away in the garden of another Laura Buxton aged ten. When coincidences like these occur it is as if people and places, times and events have been choreographed in a way that defies the law of probability.

  If we were distant observers from Mars, the story would have no significance whatsoever. A little girl releases a balloon. Some time later it comes down in a garden somewhere else and is picked up by another little girl. Nothing exceptional here. Children are attracted to balloons after all, and balloons do go up and come down again. But seen from an Earth-bound point of view, and particularly from the perspective of the two Lauras, it takes on an entirely different meaning. It sends a shiver down the spine. Because it’s personal, you see. It’s so personal.

  The fact that the principals in this story are little girls adds poignancy, but the coincidence would have been just as extraordinary had they been old men, or millionairesses, or even Martians. Coincidence makes no distinction between class, religion, or creed. It happens to us all, whoever we are, whatever we believe. We all are subject to its weblike embrace. To the axiom that only two things are certain in life, death and taxes, must be added a third—coincidence.

  Even after death, coincidence can strike.

  Charles Francis Coghlan, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his time, was born on Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada in 1841.

  Coghlan died suddenly on November 27, 1899, after a short illness while performing in the port town of Galveston, Texas, in the southwest of the United States. The distance was too great to send the body back home, so it was interred in a lead-lined coffin in a granite vault in a local cemetery.

  On September 8, 1900, a great hurricane struck Galveston—hurling huge waves against the cemetery and shattering vaults. Coghlan’s coffin was washed out to sea.

  It floated into the Gulf of Mexico, then drifted along the Florida coastline and out into the Atlantic where the Gulf Stream took over and carried it north.

  In October 1908, fishermen on Prince Edward Island saw a long, weather-beaten box floating ashore. After
nine years and three thousand five hundred miles, Charles Coghlan’s body had come home. His fellow islanders reburied him in the graveyard of the church where he had been baptized.

  Coincidences of the kind that befell Charles Coghlan, or the lucky key lady, Mrs. Lovell, are immensely attractive to us. They appeal to our innate need for order and pattern. They make us seem less small and insignificant and the universe less terrifying and aimless. Even the most hard-bitten skeptic can find comfort in the most modest of coincidences. Our preference, naturally enough, tends to be for benign coincidences—particularly when we are the recipient of the good fortune. But malign coincidences are also interesting to us—as long as they are viewed from a distance:

  Jabez Spicer, of Leyden, Massachusetts, was killed by two bullets in an attack on an arsenal on January 25, 1787, during Shays’ Rebellion. He was wearing the coat his brother Daniel wore when he, too, was killed by two bullets on March 5, 1784.

  The bullets that killed Jabez Spicer passed through the holes made by the bullets that had killed his brother Daniel three years earlier.

  When coincidence does dump misfortune on our doorstep, we at least have the compensation of feeling that we have been singled out by fate for special attention. Most commonly, however, coincidences are modest, unthreatening, and cheering. When we take our dog for a walk in the park and meet a fellow dog walker with an identical dog—with the same name—it brightens our day a little.

  How often have you been thinking about someone when the phone rings, and it is that person? Does it not create a frisson of pleasure, a warm feeling? When such things happen we often conclude that we are blessed with the gift of extrasensory perception or are party to some sort of psychic connectedness. We don’t like to think it is simply the laws of chance and probability at work. We see such events as transcending physical laws, as being beyond coincidence, beyond the normal—paranormal, in fact. A more rational explanation would be too dull, too meaningless.

  It is much more interesting to believe coincidences, particularly the more unlikely events, are predetermined in some inexplicable way, guided by a universal unifying force we cannot yet comprehend. If not God, then perhaps we, ourselves, have the power to bring like and like together. Are coincidences, perhaps, a glimpse of our latent psychic powers, akin to telepathy, clairvoyance, and premonition?

  Our fascination with both coincidence and the paranormal come together neatly in our passion for horoscopes. Even people who profess to be devout skeptics have been spotted surreptitiously checking their horoscopes.

  It began thousands of years ago when our distant ancestors failed to understand that a solar eclipse—during which day turned dramatically into night—was nothing more than the coincidental alignment of a ball of gas and a ball of rock.

  These events also, inevitably, coincided with events on Earth. Chroniclers down the ages have recorded how eclipses and planetary conjunctions have coincided with famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, major military defeats, or victories and the deaths of emperors and kings.

  Fascination with these coincidences eventually formalized into the prediction business. Most famously, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician Nostradamus translated his study of the stars and horoscopes into a catalogue of dramatic, if inscrutable, prophecies. Some credit him with anticipating the French Revolution and the First World War. More recent claims that Nostradamus accurately foretold the September 11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York have been exposed as an urban myth.

  In 1987, journalist and astrologer Dennis Elwell hit the headlines after he warned of a possible disaster at sea—just days before 188 people died when a car ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise capsized off the coast of Holland.

  Elwell explains the astrological evidence that prompted his warning. “Technically the March 1987 solar eclipse was raising the temperature of a square between Jupiter and Neptune, planets which, when working together, indicate both sea travel and big ships. Eclipses bring the matters signified into high profile, and tend to be associated with misfortunes, although positive outcomes are also possible.”

  Elwell sent identical letters to two shipping companies, alerting them to the potential hazard. The letter said, “The emphasis is on the sudden and disruptive. While I am not in the prediction business, it would be no surprise to find that, at the very least, sailing schedules were upset for some unexpected reason. But there has to be a possibility of rather more dramatic eventualities, such as explosions.”

  Only nine days after the car ferry company replied that their procedures were designed “to deal with the unexpected from whatever quarter,” their ship, the Herald of Free Enterprise, capsized.

  Elwell’s prediction was dramatically and tragically accurate. But was this just coincidence? We never hear about all the psychic predictions that turn out to be wrong, the foretold disasters that stubbornly fail to happen. Perhaps there aren’t any; though that seems a little unlikely. Perhaps the mistakes are quietly swept under the carpet. And how many amazing predictions are only revealed after the events they heralded? Predictions by hindsight!

  Less spectacular predictions pour out of our newspapers and magazines every day in the horoscopes. But how likely is it that the celebrity astrologers responsible will be able to anticipate fortune or misfortune in our lives?

  Whether we “believe” in astrology or not, most of us can take pleasure from horoscopes. When the predictions appear to come true, it is hard not to pause and wonder.

  On August 25, 2003, three different national newspaper horoscopes offered a variety of advice for people born between March 21 and April 19 under the sign of Aries. The first promised the arrival of long-awaited money, a new kind of inner strength that would help with “love choices” and the solution of a family mystery; the second predicted the discovery and unleashing of “real hidden power” that would open up wonderful possibilities; and the third advised that the alignment of Jupiter and Uranus could force changes regarding a commitment that had become a burden. He warned, “You’re letting imaginary fears force you to try so hard to make everything perfect that there’s no time for things you like best. Do something about it.”

  What does it all mean? And what were Arians to conclude if any of those predictions came to pass? Those who believe in the prophetic power of horoscopes use them to guide themselves through crises in their lives. Others dismiss any apparent correlations between prediction and events as simple coincidence. Should we dismiss accurate predictions as the product of pure chance or is something more interesting going on? Are our lives already written down for us in the stars? Is there a template for our lives in the planets?

  Our historical fascination with horoscopes would be legitimate if it were possible to prove scientifically that from the moment of birth our lives are bound inextricably with the movement and interactions of the planets and, therefore, that coincidences between predictions and subsequent events are meaningful. Astrologers say they are, but then it pays their wages. What about an astrologer turned scientist? Pat Harris is running a research project at Southampton University looking at, among other things, the possible impact of the planets on pregnancy and childbirth. She stresses that she doesn’t “believe” in astrology, she is simply interested in studying it scientifically to establish whether coincidences associated with the juxtaposition of the planets can be attributed to anything other than pure chance.

  After studying the star signs of a number of mothers-to-be she is able to say that there is a strong correlation between the influence of Jupiter and successful pregnancies and healthy births.

  But how could Jupiter cause the successful birth of a baby?

  “I can’t say that it does. At this stage we can only talk about correlation—or synchronicity, as Jung would call it. When something goes on in the heavens, something goes on down on Earth. They appear to be connected, but we don’t know if one causes the other.”

  Astrophysicist Pet
er Seymour has gone further, and has attempted to come up with a theory of how the planets might have a physical impact on human destiny.

  Seymour sees the solar system as an intricate web of magnetic fields and resonances. The Sun, Moon, and planets transmit their effects to us via magnetic signals. Magnetism, he points out, is known to affect the biological cycles of numerous creatures here on Earth, including humans.

  The planets, he suggests, raise tides in the gases of the Sun, creating sunspots. Particle emissions then travel across interplanetary space, striking the Earth’s magnetosphere, ringing it like a bell. He believes the various magnetic signals are then perceived by the neural network of the fetus inside the mother’s womb, “heralding the child’s birth.”

  French psychologist Michel Gauquelin devoted his life to trying to find out if there was a scientific basis for astrology. He conducted major studies exploring statistical links between the births of eminent doctors or politicians or soldiers and particular conjunctions of the planets. He discovered, for example, that an unlikely percentage of French professors of medicine had been born when Mars and Saturn were dominant. Mars was also shown to be particularly significant in the birth charts of more than two thousand leading athletes.

  He found many other similar correlations:

  Sportsmen

  Mars, lack of Moon

  Military

  Mars or Jupiter

  Actors

  Jupiter

  Doctors

  Mars or Saturn, lack of Jupiter

  Politicians

  Moon or Jupiter

  Executives

  Mars or Jupiter

  Scientists

  Mars or Saturn, lack of Jupiter

  Writers

  Moon, lack of Mars or Saturn