Beyond Coincidence (23 page)

The series of fires began during the previous year's Fourth of July festivities. Hunziker called firefighters in the early morning hours to report a blaze in a trash container in front of his home. During the following few weeks Hunziker was closely associated with another nine fires. These included a blaze at a four-car garage at the home of his ex-girlfriend, shortly after the couple had broken up. Another fire broke out at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, where Hunziker was working, and two days later the club was struck by arson that forced the evacuation of more than two hundred people. Apparently Hunziker took an active part in the evacuation. Shortly afterward a blaze broke out at a local driving school that the defendant attended.

Hunziker was eventually arrested and charged with starting all ten fires. Remarkable coincidences do happen, but to find the defendant innocent of arson in this case, the jury would have had to believe in one of the most unlikely.

E
RIC
W
ILLIAMS
S
TRIKES
A
GAIN

On July 6, 2003, Eric Williams blacked out at the wheel of his car, which left the road, ploughing through the front garden of sixty-two-year-old Gordon White and into his front living room.

The car was recovered, it took nine weeks to repair the house and almost a year later Mr. White added the final touches to the decorating.

Then on July 6, 2004, the same driver had another blackout on the same stretch of road and ploughed once again into Mr. White's living room. The same recovery man arrived to pull the car out for a second time.

“I'm going to make sure I'm not watching the TV this time next year,” said Mr. White. “They say bad luck comes in threes.”

9

ECHOES

Coincidence experiences can sneak up like ghosts, insinuating themselves into the thought process, and surreptitiously shifting you to a different place altogether. These strange and eerie reverberations, or echoes, can bring sadness, joy, and often bewilderment. Or they can bring understanding. Such an experience happened to Stephen Osborne, editor of the Canadian cultural and literary magazine
Geist.

Osborne was relaxing in a bar with friends when the conversation turned to a man named Richard Simmins, a curator, art critic, and writer who had been an important force in Osborne's life twenty-five years before. Osborne regarded Simmins as his mentor, but hadn't seen him for seventeen years.

After a while the friends realized that the music in the bar had become very somber, and when they mentioned it to the bartender he shrugged and made a crack about it being a funeral parlor.

Later, in a reflective mood, Osborne arrived home and picked up a magazine to read from a pile in his bathroom. It fell open to a poem written in memory of Richard Simmins. “I understood at that moment that he was no longer alive,” said Osborne. “The magazine was six months old; the poem, written by his daughter, would be how much older than that? I lit a candle to honor the man whom I had loved but had not seen since 1986.”

L
YRIC
S
UBSTANCE
D
ISPUTED

It was conventional wisdom among both the rebellious young of the swinging sixties and their shocked elders, that John Lennon wrote the psychedelic song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” as a knowing reference to the drug LSD.

Lennon has always denied this, claiming the LSD association was a fluke coincidence. He said he had taken the title verbatim from a line written on a fantastic drawing by his four-year-old son Julian of his schoolmate Lucy O'Donnell. It had not occurred to him that the initials were the same as those of a mind-expanding drug much in the news at the time, until someone pointed it out to him after the release of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
the record containing the song.

“‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'Š… I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea spelled LSD,” he told
Rolling Stone
magazine.

Needless to say his explanation was widely disbelieved. In fact the song caused something of a scandal at the time. Old people thought he was trying to pull the wool over their eyes and young people thought he was being frivolous. It was well known in 1967 that the Beatles were experimenting with drugs and shortly after the release of
Sgt. Pepper
they admitted to taking LSD. Also, the song contained a lot of what appeared to be hallucinatory acid trip imagery. Something like that just couldn't be an accident.

But in their excellent urban myth-debunking Internet site
Snopes.com
,
Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, make a convincing argument for believing that Lennon's coincidence explanation was honest.

“He did not merely claim that the title was a coincidental invention of his own but offered a specific, external explanation of its origins; he provided this explanation at the time the song was released; he maintained the same explanation for the rest of his life; and his explanation is corroborated by others.” Also the child picture stimulus is typical of Lennon's song writing muse. Other
Sgt. Pepper
songs by him were inspired by a Victorian carnival poster, a TV cornflake commercial, and a newspaper clipping about holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

This was a man who had always been candid, sometimes too candid. Besides, what did he have to hide? He didn't deny his involvement with drugs. Why should he lie about the title of a song? Coincidence strikes again.

J
IGSAW
P
UZZLE
M
EMORIAL

Stuart Spencer had been a widower for three years in January 2000 when his daughter gave him a present of a one thousand-piece jigsaw. She had found one of a paddle steamer on a lake, where Stuart and his late wife, Anne, had enjoyed many holidays. As he placed a piece to complete a figure in a wheelchair at the boat's stern, he saw it was his wife.

P
IECING
T
OGETHER THE
P
AST

A similar puzzling coincidence was experienced by Jean Jones.

“My friend, who I have known since our school days, saw a jigsaw in a thrift shop and decided to buy it—it was a picture of a lovely garden.

“She took it home and started to do the puzzle. As she fitted the last piece, she recognized me and my late husband, Cyril walking past the garden.

“She didn't tell me about this amazing coincidence until she had stuck it all together on a board for me to hang as a picture. At first I couldn't believe it, and even now, after my husband has been dead more than five years, I still think this is a chance in a million. Since then my friend and I have seen many puzzles with the same picture but without my husband and me in it.”

D
OUBLE
E
XPOSURE

Just before the outbreak of the First World War, a German mother took a photograph of her small son. She left the single-plate film to be developed in Strasbourg in France, but the start of the war made it impossible for her to collect it. Two years later, in Frankfurt, she bought another film to photograph her newborn daughter. When the film was developed it turned out to be a double exposure. The picture underneath was that of her small son, taken in 1914.

A C
ARPENTER'S
R
EQUIEM

A guitar being played by Andrés Segovia split apart during a Berlin performance at the same time as his friend, the craftsman who had made the instrument, died in Madrid.

S
CHOOL
S
IGN

Objects and associations sometimes come together with such apparent perspicacity you feel sure they must be trying to say something to you. Just what they're trying to say, though, is not so clear.

This happened to Martin Plimmer when he and his eleven-year-old son were visiting secondary schools that the boy might attend. They were looking around the geography department of one particular school when Martin picked up one of the textbooks and said, “Geography was one of the few subjects I liked at my school. It's straightforward and covers a lot of interesting ground.” Opening the book at random he realized he was looking at a page showing a large-scale map of a town with the secondary school he had attended there nearly forty years before clearly marked.

The effect of this sudden correlation of idea and image was to produce a pang of emotion and some confusion in Martin. His own education all those years ago, his son's about to start, and all their associated hopes and worries, seemed to be suddenly condensed into this one symbolic moment. What was this, if not a sign? And if a sign, what did it mean?

Could it signify that the school was ideally suited to his son, or conversely, as he had such a miserable time at the school, that it was the wrong school for his son? Opposite notions they might be, but both ideas were oddly compelling. That was until Martin recovered his senses a few seconds later by concluding that this wasn't an omen at all. There could be no answer to the question of the coincidence's significance. It was merely a demonstration of how even the most skeptical of us can be rendered momentarily gullible when the paranormal appears to nudge us in the ribs.

“Y
ELLOW
B
IRD
” D
UET

There was a big round control knob on the side of Tom's parents' record player/radio (the knob toggled between the two) that just begged to be turned. The year was 1961 and eleven-year-old Tom was at home in Illinois listening to one of his first vinyl records, the Arthur Lyman Group's instrumental version of “Yellow Bird,” which at the time was riding high in the charts.

Tom was slightly worried that the player might be damaged if the control was turned in the middle of a track, but he risked a turn anyway. To his alarm there was no change in the sound. He thought he'd broken the player.

In fact the song was being broadcast simultaneously by a radio station his parents' set happened to be tuned into. Tom switched back and forth in panic for a while and eventually detected a slight time difference appearing between the two. This was due to minute differences of speed between the two turntables—his parents' and the one at the radio station.

T
ORNADO

A tornado that wrought havoc in East St. Louis, Illinois, on May 27, 1896, seems to have been hell-bent on destroying the memory of the great engineer James B. Eades.

Eades had built the bridge over the Mississippi River that bore his name. A memorial window in the local Mount Calvary Episcopal Church has the inscription: “In memory of James B. Eades. Born May 23, 1820. Died March 8, 1887.”

The 1896 tornado tore down the east section of the Eades Bridge at precisely the same moment it blew in the memorial window. It was the only window in the church to be damaged.

S
IMULATED
C
OINCIDENCE

A U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise simulating an aircraft crashing into a tower building, on the very morning of the September 11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Officials at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia, had scheduled an exercise in which a small corporate jet would “crash” into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building. Terrorism was not a factor in the scenario. The aircraft was to have developed mechanical failure.

The NRO building is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport. Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster. No actual plane was to be involved. To simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building. “It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility,” said spokesman Art Haubold. “As soon as the real-world events began, we canceled the exercise.”

American Airlines Flight 77—the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon—took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on September 11, less than an hour before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.

In another extraordinary twist, the pilot of Flight 77, Charles Burlingame, a former navy flyer, had, as his last navy mission, helped prepare Pentagon response plans in the event of a commercial airliner hitting the building.

M
OON
R
IDDLE

Obscure evidence leads to imaginative interpretation, often wildly contradictory to the facts. A good example of this process is a story from the early history of science. In 1610 Galileo thought he had detected two moons orbiting Saturn (they were actually the planet's rings).

He conveyed this information by letter to his contemporary, the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, but in order to keep the information as secret as possible he couched the crucial sentence as an anagram: smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras. Taking two of the Medieval “U”s to be Latin “V”s, the unscrambled message reads
Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi,
which translates as “I have observed the highest of the planets—Saturn—three-formed.”

Incredibly, Kepler managed to interpret the anagram another way, which also made perfect sense. Kepler read Galileo's inscrutable message as
Salve umbisteneum geminatum Martia proles
(“Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars”), a prediction that Mars has two moons. This was a conclusion Kepler had come to himself so Galileo's message would have endorsed his own calculations.

Despite the most rigorous standards our minds see everything through the filter that preoccupies them most. It is interesting to note that Kepler's interpretation wasn't quite a perfect coincidence; his phrase requires an extra letter. He must have thought that too small a flaw to spoil a desired result.