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In my life there haven't been a lot of coincidences, but there is one of them I find curious.

I have been studying astronomy at the university of La Plata since 2014; here I become a friend of Julian. After a few months we were amazed to discovered that we had both competed in the same art tournament some time ago.

When I went to school I competed in an art tournament in different categories: murals, painting and singing.

My mural was the winner, and I won a trip to Mar del Plata. The mural that got the second place was Julian's.

Also, Julian competed in bands, he was the drummer, and I saw his show in different places. He's still playing with his band and I keep going to see him every time he plays.

Another coincidence with Julian was that we traveled to Bariloche, six years ago, and we stayed at the same hotel, in the same week! But at that time, we didn't know each other.

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Many years ago I went to a birthday party in Mar del Plata. I went with my cousin and we stayed at one of my friend's house.
At night, we dressed and went to a party. When we arrived, we met other friends.
They were wearing the same dresses as us. They looked like us.
At first, we were worried, but then we laughed at the coincidence.
Julieta P.

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This summer I travelled with some friends to Europe, it was an excellent experience.
One day, we were walking in Prague and we wanted to visit different places, so we decided to divide into two groups, the first group went to the new city and we went to the old city.
At 1pm  we wanted to eat, but we didn't have wifi to communicate with the other group. We were so hungry  that we decided to go to a restaurant and try to use the wifi there. When we were at the entrance, we saw our friends doing the same!! at the same hour, in the same restaurant, and we had not said anything about getting together to have lunch!
I think that was an amazing coincidence!
Tomas S.

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Seven years ago I went to a concert of The Strokes. I didn't know anyone who followed the same band, so I went to Capital Federal alone.
When I arrived there I took a bus to the arena. On that bus, a girl with a t-shirt of Muse (my favourite rock band) sat down by my side. I said, 'I love your t-shirt', and she replied, 'Thanks! It's my favourite band. I love it!' 'So do I,' I said. And then we started to talk.
She told me that she was going to the concert of The Strokes and I immediately said 'So am I', and the coincidences continued.
She told me that she was studying at the UNLP and I said: 'Really? So am I! I'm studying management, and you?' ' I'm studying law.' Well, that's not a coincidence... but it almost was. We enjoyed the concert together. Today, she is one of my best friends.
Paula G.

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Six years ago I decided to travel to the Caribbean in my summer holidays. I saw some pictures on the internet and the places were incredible, so I booked a beautiful hotel with a view of the beach. When the day arrived, I got a flight to Cancun and then I took a taxi to the hotel. When I was there, I checked-in but I noticed that there was a problem. The hotel was full! "Is there any problem?" I asked. “Yes, a person with the same name and ID as yours has occupied your room, I can`t believe it!” the receptionist said. “Neither can I,” I replied.
Juan G.

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Many years ago, I needed to move to a new house. I called a friend to help me. The next day she called me laughing, an asked me:"Don't you know where I am calling you from?" I didn't know what to say. I could never have imagined what was going on. "I'm calling you from your old house! Another friend of mine called me to help her moving house. When we arrive at her new house, I couldn't believe  that it was the same house!" she said. It was a really strange coincidence.

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Julia and Julio are friends. They met at school. Both of them were born in La Plata. They look alike. By coincidence, they were born on the same date, December 18th, in the same year!
Julia is my mother and Julio is her friend. They’ve been friends since they were at school, in La Plata. They both have three children. Julio called his third son Tomás, and so did Julia. He’s never been to Bali. Neither has my mother!
Tomás D.

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For some people money, success, fame and youth could be an ideal combination for their lives, for some others that combination would be lethal. Even more if you're turning 27 years old. In this edition of "Amazing Coincidences" I introduce you to "The 27 club", honoring actors, singers and rock stars who died at the age of 27. All the members of this exclusive club not only found death a very young age, but also being at the top of their careers: Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimmy Hendrix, are some of the names, and sadly, there are more. The connection between the members in this list will be remembered as another amazing coincidence in Hollywood history.
Ulises V.

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Five years ago, I met Ricardo at a party. Nowadays he is my boyfriend.
When I met him, he hold me that he loves horses and also said that he worked with them.
After a few months dating together, I told him that my grandfather was called Ricardo too. I don't usually talk about him because he died when I was five years old, so I don't have lot o memories of him.
Where is the coincidence? Maybe you think that it is the fact that both were called Ricardo, but that is not the most important coincidence... Here it is: one day my boyfriend and I went to Magdalena to visit some friends of his. When we were at his friends' house, there was an old man called Carlos and I said that my grandfather had a friend called like him. After a few minutes talking together we realised that he was my grandfather's friend. He showed me some pictures and I recognised him.
This is the most beautiful coincidence that has ever happened to me. In that moment I realised that a lot of memories that I thought I had forgotten were still there in my mind.
Gisela B.

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The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they're hinting at hidden truths, but they're really revealing the human mind at work.

Hein Nouwens / Shutterstock / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic

Towards the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which Midwestern middle school bands traveled. (I imagine it still is.) They had this indoor rollercoaster there, called the Disaster Transport. My friends and I were standing in line for this rollercoaster, winding up the dimly lit cement steps, when we turned a corner and came across a huge pile of money.

We picked it up and counted it; it was a very specific amount of money. I don't remember now exactly how much, but for the purposes of this retelling, let's say it was $134. That sounds close.

We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn it in before a group of older kids ahead of us snatched the cash wad out of our hands. They claimed it was theirs; it was not theirs-they counted it in front of us and exchanged "Whoa"s and high fives. We were hapless, gangly middle schoolers (I was growing out my bangs; it was a rough year). They were confident we would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. So that was the end of that.

Until, Part Two:

A little more than a year later, I went to a summer program at Michigan State University, a nerd camp where you take classes like genetics for fun. One evening, as we were sitting around in the common area, chatting and doing homework, I overheard a kid telling his friends how he'd lost a bunch of money last year at Cedar Point.

With very little attempt at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars.

Was he there on May whatever date I was also there? He was.

Did he lose the money in line for the Disaster Transport? In fact, he did.

How much money did he lose? $134, exactly.

* * *

Though "What are the odds?" is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled "coincidences" is packed with an amazing variety of experiences, and yet something more than rarity compels us to group them together. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

Some might say it's just because people don't understand probability. In their 1989 paper, Methods for Studying Coincidences, the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as "a rare event," but decided "this includes too much to permit careful study." Instead, they settled on, "A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection."

From a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, not meaningfully related, and they shouldn't be that surprising because they happen all the time. "Extremely improbable events are commonplace," as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans generally aren't great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives.

For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother's birthday, or your best friend's. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental.

And there are lots of people on this planet-more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, "with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen," Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it's surprising and miraculous, but the fact that someone won doesn't surprise the rest of us.

Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you'll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point. But it'll still seem like a coincidence when you do. When something surprising happens, we don't think about all the times it could have happened, but didn't. And when we include near-misses as coincidences (you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater.
"A coincidence is in the eye of the beholder."
To demonstrate how common unlikely-seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room before there's a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer is 23.

"Oh, those guys and their birthdays really get me mad," says Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and author of the forthcoming book Connecting With Coincidence. That's not the way the average person would frame that question, he says. When someone asks "What are the odds?" odds are they aren't asking "What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would have happened to anyone in the room?" but more like "What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and now?" And with anything more complicated than a birthday match, that becomes almost impossible to calculate.

It's true that people are fairly egocentric about their coincidences. The psychologist Ruma Falk found in a study that people rate their own coincidences as more surprising than other people's. They're like dreams-mine is more interesting than yours.

"A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder," says David Spiegelhalter, the Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge. If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it's not really a coincidence.

* * *

I told Spiegelhalter my Cedar Point story on the phone-I couldn't help it. He collects coincidences, see. (A thriller novel called The Coincidence Authority has a professor character based on him.) He has a website where people can submit them, and says he's gotten about 4,000 or 5,000 stories since 2011. Unfortunately, he and his colleagues haven't done much with this treasure trove of information, mostly because a pile of freeform stories is a pretty hard dataset to measure. They're looking for someone to do text-mining on it, but so far all they've been able to analyze is how many coincidences fall into the different categories you can check off when you submit your story:

Common Types of Coincidences

David Spiegelhalter

He says he'd categorize mine as "finding a link with someone you meet." "But it's a very different sort of connection," he says, "not like having lived in the same house or something like that. And it's a very strong one, it's not just like you were both at the theme park. I love that. And you remember it after all this time."

And the craziest thing is not that I found someone's money and then that I was in a room with him a year later, but that I found out about it at all. What if he hadn't brought it up? Or "you might not have heard him if you'd been somewhere slightly away," Spiegelhalter says. "And yet the coincidence would have been there. You would have been six feet away from someone who lost their money. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was only because you were listening that you noticed it. And so that's why the amazing thing is not that these things occur, it's that we notice them."

"This is my big theory about coincidences," he continues, "that's why they happen to certain kinds of people."

Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences-people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

"Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never notice anything," Spiegelhalter says. "I never talk to anybody on trains. If I'm with a stranger, I don't try to find a connection with them, because I'm English."

Beitman, on the other hand, says, "My life is littered with coincidences." He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8 or 9 years old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen it; they hadn't. Then, "I was crying a lot and took the wrong way home, and there was the dog ... I got into [studying coincidences] just because, hey, look Bernie, what's going on here?"

For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. Because statistics can describe what happens, but can't explain it any further than chance. "I know there's something more going on than we pay attention to," he says. "Random is not enough of an explanation for me."

Random wasn't enough for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung either. So he came up with an alternative explanation. Coincidences were, to him, meaningful events that couldn't be explained by cause and effect, which, so far so good, but he also thought that there was another force, outside of causality, which could explain them. This he called "synchronicity," which in his 1952 book, he called an "acausal connecting principle."

Meaningful coincidences were produced by the force of synchronicity, and could be considered glimpses into another of Jung's ideas-the unus mundus, or one world. Unus mundus is the theory that there is an underlying order and structure to reality, a network that connects everything and everyone.

For Jung, synchronicity didn't just account for coincidences, but also ESP, telepathy, and ghosts. And to this day, research shows that people who experience more coincidences tend to be more likely to believe in the occult as well.

This is the trouble with trying to find a deeper explanation for coincidences than randomness-it can quickly veer into the paranormal.

* * *

* * *

Beitman, like Spiegelhalter, is interested in sorting and labeling different kinds of coincidences, to develop categories "like an early botanist," he says, though his categories are more expansive and include not only things that happen in the world but people's thoughts and feelings as well. In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories-environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-mind interactions.

Environment-environment are the most obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world. You're at a gin joint in Morocco and your long-lost love from Paris shows up. I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it.

A nurse named Violet Jessop was a stewardess for White Star Line and lived through three crashes of its ill-fated fleet of ocean liners. She was on the Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911. In 1912, she was there for the big one: the Titanic. And four years later, when White Star's Britannic, reportedly improved after its sister ship's disaster, also sank, Jessop was there. And she survived. That one, I guess, is an environment-environment-environment.

Mind-environment coincidences are premonition-esque-you're thinking of a friend and then they call you, for example. But unless you happen to write down "I am thinking of so-and-so [timestamp]" before the call happens, these are cool for the person they happen to, but not really measurable. "We banned premonitions from our site," Spiegelhalter says. "Because, where's the proof? Anybody could say anything."
The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us.
Another sort of mind-environment interaction is learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere. Or getting a song stuck in your head and hearing it everywhere you go, or wondering about something and then stumbling onto an article about it. The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us. But, though it makes them no less magical, life's motifs are created not by the world around us, but by humans, by our attention.

This is an effect that the Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky calls " the frequency illusion," and it's not the same as a premonition. It's just that once you've noticed something, your brain is primed to notice it again the next time you encounter it. A word or a concept you've just learned feels relevant to you-you may have seen it hundreds of times before and just never noticed. But now that you're paying attention, it's more likely to pop out at you the next time it whizzes by.

And then the final category, mind-mind, of course, is straight-up mystical. One example of this is simulpathity, a term Beitman coined to describe feeling the pain or emotion of someone else at a distance. His interest in this particular type of coincidence is deeply personal.

"In San Francisco, in 1973, February 26, I stood at a sink uncontrollably choking," he says, clarifying, "There was nothing in my throat that I knew [of]."

"It was around 11 o'clock in San Francisco. The next day my brother called, and told me my father had died at 2 a.m. in Wilmington, Delaware, which was 11 in San Francisco, and he had died by choking on blood in his throat. That was a dramatic experience for me, and I began to look to see if other people had experiences like this. And many people have."

* * *

This is where we start to leave the realm of science and enter the realm of belief. Coincidences are remarkable in how they straddle these worlds. People have surprising, connective experiences, and they either create meaning out of them, or they don't.

Leaving a coincidence as nothing more than a curiosity may be a more evidence-based mindset, but it's not fair to say that the people who make meaning from coincidences are irrational. The process by which we notice coincidences is "part of a general cognitive architecture which is designed to make sense of the world," says Magda Osman, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Queen Mary University of London. It's the same rational process we use to learn cause and effect. This is one way to scientifically explain how coincidences happen- as byproducts of the brain's meaning-making system.

People like patterns. We look for them everywhere, and by noticing and analyzing them we can understand our world and, to some small degree, control it. If every time you flick a switch, a lamp across the room turns on, you come to understand that that switch controls that lamp.

When someone sees a pattern in a coincidence, "there's no way I can say 'Yes, that was definitely a chance event,' or 'There was an actual causal mechanism for it,' because I'd have to know the world perfectly to be able to say that," Osman says.

Instead what we do is weigh whether it seems likelier that the event was caused by chance, or by something else. If chance is the winner, we dismiss it. If not, we've got a new hypothesis about how the world works.

Take the case of two twins, who were adopted by different families when they were four weeks old. When they were later reunited, their lives had ... a lot of similarities. They were both named James by their adoptive families, were both married to a Betty and had divorced a Linda. One twin's first son's name was James Alan, the other's was James Allan. They both had adoptive brothers named Larry and pet dogs named Toy. They both suffered from tension headaches, and both vacationed in Florida within three blocks of each other.
"To me, that's a key part of what makes something a coincidence-that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is false and being certain that something is true."
You could hypothesize from this that the power of genetics is so strong, that even when identical twins are separated, their lives play out the same way. In fact, the twins were part of a University of Minnesota study on twins reared apart that was asking just that question, though it didn't suggest that there was any gene that would make someone attracted to a Betty, or likely to name a dog Toy.

Drawing inferences from patterns like this is an advantageous thing to do, even when the pattern isn't 100 percent consistent. Take learning language as an example. There isn't going to be a dog, or even a picture of a dog, nearby every time a child hears the word "dog." But if dad points at the family Fido enough times while saying "dog," the kid will learn what the word means anyway.

"Small children are justified in being conspiracy theorists, since their world is run by an inscrutable and all-powerful organization possessing secret communications and mysterious powers-a world of adults, who act by a system of rules that children gradually master as they grow up," write the cognitive scientists Thomas Griffiths and Joshua Tenenbaum in a 2006 study on coincidences.

We retain this capability, even when we're older and have figured out most of these more obvious patterns. It can still be very useful, especially for scientists who are working on unsolved questions, but for most adults in their daily lives, any new coincidental connection is likely to be specious. From a scientific perspective, anyway. If we realize that, then we wave it off as "just a coincidence," or what Griffiths, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a "mere coincidence."

On the flip side, for someone who believes in ESP, thinking of a friend right before she calls may not be a coincidence to them at all, but just more evidence to support what they already believe. The same goes for someone who believes in divine intervention-a chance meeting with a long-lost lover may be, to them, a sign from God, not a coincidence at all.

"You really come across a question of just what belief system you have about how reality works," Beitman says. "Are you a person who believes the universe is random or are you a person who believes there's something going on here that maybe we gotta pay more attention to? On the continuum of explanation, on the left-hand side we've got random, on the right-hand side we've got God. In the middle we've got little Bernie Beitman did something here, I did it but I didn't know how I did it."

In the middle zone lie what Griffiths calls "suspicious coincidences."

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"To me, that's a key part of what makes something a coincidence-that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is false and being certain that something is true," he says. If enough suspicious coincidences of a certain nature pile up, someone's uncertainty can cross over into belief. People can stumble into scientific discoveries this way-"Hmm, all these people with cholera seem to be getting their water from the same well -or into superstition-"Every time I wear mismatched socks, my meetings go well."

But you can stay in that in-between zone for a long time-suspicious, but unsure. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the coincidences that present as evidence for some kind of hidden but as-yet undiscovered ordering principle for reality, be that synchronicity or a sort of David Mitchell-esque "Everything Is Connected" web that ensnares us in its pattern. Meaningful connections can seem created by design-things are "meant to be," they're happening for a reason, even if the reason is elusive. Or as Beitman puts it, "Coincidences alert us to the mysterious hiding in plain sight."

I suppose no one can prove there isn't such a thing, but it's definitely impossible to prove that there is. So you're left with ... not much. Where you fall on the continuum of explanation probably says more about you than it does about reality.

* * *

In The Improbability Principle, Hand cites a 1988 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report which concluded that there was "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena."

"One hundred thirty years!" Hand writes. The fact that people kept trying to find proof for the paranormal was "A testament to the power of hope over experience if there ever was one."

But I disagree. It may be that researching the paranormal is partly an act of hope that you'll find something where no one has found anything before. But it seems like often, experiences are the building blocks of belief in the paranormal, or in an underlying force that organizes reality. Even if they're not doing formal research, people are seeking explanations for their experiences. And structure is a much more appealing explanation than chance.

Where you fall on the chance-structure continuum may have a lot to do with what you think chance looks like in the first place. Research shows that while most people are pretty bad at generating a random string of numbers, people who believe in ESP are even worse. Even more so than skeptics, believers tend to think that repetitions in a sequence are less likely to be random-that a coin flip sequence that went "heads, heads, heads, heads, tails" would be less likely to come up randomly than one that went "heads, tails, heads, tails, heads," even though they're equally probable.

So we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why we want to make meaning from them, and we have probability to explain why they seem to happen so often. But to explain why any individual coincidence happened involves a snarl of threads, of decisions and circumstances and chains of events that, even if one could untangle it, wouldn't tell you anything about any other coincidence.

Jung seems to have been annoyed by this. "To grasp these unique or rare events at all, we seem to be dependent on equally "unique" and individual descriptions," he writes, despairing of the lack of a unifying theory offered by science for these strange happenings. "This would result in a chaotic collection of curiosities, rather like those old natural-history cabinets where one finds, cheek by jowl with fossils and anatomical monsters in bottles, the horn of a unicorn, a mandragora manikin, and a dried mermaid."

This is supposed to be unappealing (surely these things should be put in order!), but I rather like the image of coincidences as a curio cabinet full of odds and ends we couldn't find anywhere else to put. It may not be what we're most comfortable with, but a "chaotic collection of curiosities" is what we've got.

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The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they're hinting at hidden truths, but they're really revealing the human mind at work. Towards the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which Midwestern middle school bands traveled.

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A falling baby, saved two times by the same man. Twin brothers, killed in along the same road, two hours apart. The world is filled with astonishing occurrences of coincidence and synchronicity that defy explanation. Are these incredible true stories of mere coincidence... or the hand of fate?

1James Dean's car curse

In September 1955, James Dean was killed in a horrific car accident whilst he was driving his Porsche sports car. After the crash the car was seen as very unlucky.
a) When the car was towed away from accident scene and taken to a garage, the engine slipped out and fell onto a mechanic, shattering both of his legs.
b) Eventually the engine was bought by a doctor, who put it into his racing car and was killed shortly afterwards, during a race. Another racing driver, in the same race, was killed in his car, which had James Dean's driveshaft fitted to it.
c) When James Dean's Porsche was later repaired, the garage it was in was destroyed by fire.
d) Later the car was displayed in Sacramento, but it fell off it's mount and broke a teenager's hip.
e) In Oregon, the trailer that the car was mounted on slipped from it's towbar and smashed through the front of a shop.
f) Finally, in 1959, the car mysteriously broke into 11 pieces while it was sitting on steel supports.

2A falling baby, saved twice by the same man

In Detroit sometime in the 1930s, a young (if incredibly careless) mother must have been eternally grateful to a man named Joseph Figlock. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother's baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby's fall was broken and both man and baby were unharmed. A stroke of luck on its own, but a year later, the very same baby fell from the very same window onto poor, unsuspecting Joseph Figlock as he was again passing beneath. And again, they both survived the event. (Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained)

3A bullet that reached its destiny years later

Henry Ziegland thought he had dodged fate. In 1883, he broke off a relationship with his girlfriend who, out of distress, committed suicide. The girl's brother was so enraged that he hunted down Ziegland and shot him. The brother, believing he had killed Ziegland, then turned his gun on himself and took his own life. But Ziegland had not been killed. The bullet, in fact, had only grazed his face and then lodged in a tree. Ziegland surely thought himself a lucky man. Some years later, however, Ziegland decided to cut down the large tree, which still had the bullet in it. The task seemed so formidable that he decided to blow it up with a few sticks of dynamite. The explosion propelled the bullet into Ziegland's head, killing him. (Source: Ripley's Believe It or Not!)

4Twin Boys, twin lives

The stories of identical twins' nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of identical twins born in Ohio. The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys James. And here the coincidences just begin. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women - both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy. Forty years after their childhood separation, the two men were reunited to share their amazingly similar lives. (Source: Reader's Digest, January 1980)

5Just like Edgar Allan Poe's book

In the 19th century, the famous horror writer, Egdar Allan Poe, wrote a book called 'The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'. It was about four survivors of a shipwreck who were in an open boat for many days before they decided to kill and eat the cabin boy whose name was Richard Parker.Some years later, in 1884, the yawl, Mignonette, foundered, with only four survivors, who were in an open boat for many days. Eventully the three senior members of the crew, killed and ate the cabin boy. The name of the cabin boy was Richard Parker.

6Twin brothers, killed on the same road, two hours apart

On 2002, Seventy-year-old twin brothers have died within hours of one another after separate accidents on the same road in northern Finland. The first of the twins died when he was hit by a lorry while riding his bike in Raahe, 600 kilometres north of the capital, Helsinki. He died just 1.5km from the spot where his brother was killed. "This is simply a historic coincidence. Although the road is a busy one, accidents don't occur every day," police officer Marja-Leena Huhtala told Reuters. "It made my hair stand on end when I heard the two were brothers, and identical twins at that. It came to mind that perhaps someone from upstairs had a say in this," she said. (Source: BBC News)
NOTE: our reader Linus wrote us after reading local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat: "Your story about the Finnish twins is missing some details:The first brother was killed by a lorry while riding his bike and crossing highway 8. He apparently didn't notice the lorry in the snow blizzard. The second brother was killed by a lorry only two hours later while riding his bike and crossing highway 8. The second brother couldn't have been aware of the first brother's death, as the police was still trying to identify the victim."

7Three suicide attempts, all stopped by the same Monk

Joseph Aigner was a fairlly well-known portrait painter in 19th century Austria who, apparently, was quite an unhappy fellow: he several times attempted suicide. His first attempt was at the young age of 18 when he tried to hang himself, but was interrupted by the mysterious appearance of a Capuchin monk. At age 22 he again tried to hang himself, but was again saved from the act by the very same monk. Eight years later, his death was ordained by others who sentenced him to the gallows for his political activities. Once again, his life was saved by the intervention of the same monk. At age 68, Aiger finally succeeded in suicide, a pistol doing the trick. His funeral ceremony was conducted by the same Capuchin monk - a man whose name Aiger never even knew. (Source: Ripley's Giant Book of Believe It or Not!)

8Poker winnings, to the unsuspected son

In 1858, Robert Fallon was shot dead, an act of vengeance by those with whom he was playing poker. Fallon, they claimed, had won the $600 pot through cheating. With Fallon's seat empty and none of the other players willing to take the now-unlucky $600, they found a new player to take Fallon's place and staked him with the dead man's $600. By the time the police had arrived to investigate the killing, the new player had turned the $600 into $2,200 in winnings. The police demanded the original $600 to pass on to Fallon's next of kin - only to discover that the new player turned out to be Fallon's son, who had not seen his father in seven years! (Source: Ripley's Giant Book of Believe It or Not!)

9A novel that unsuspectedly described the spy next door

When Norman Mailer began his novel Barbary Shore, there was no plan to have a Russian spy as a character. As he worked on it, he introduced a Russian spy in the U.S. as a minor character. As the work progressed, the spy became the dominant character in the novel. After the novel was completed, the U.S. Immigration Service arrested a man who lived just one floor above Mailer in the same apartment building. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel, alleged to be the top Russian spy working in the U.S. at that time. (Source: Science Digest)

10Mark Twain and Halley's Comet

Mark Twain was born on the day of the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, and died on the day of its next appearance in 1910. He himself predicted this in 1909, when he said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it."

11Three strangers on a Train, with complementary last names

In the 1920s, three Englishman were traveling separately by train through Peru. At the time of their introduction, they were the only three men in the railroad car. Their introductions were more surprising than they could have imagined. One man's last name was Bingham, and the second man's last name was Powell. The third man announced that his last name was Bingham-Powell. None were related in any way. (Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained)

12Two brothers killed by the same taxi driver, one year apart

In 1975, while riding a moped in Bermuda, a man was accidentally struck and killed by a taxi. One year later, this man's bother was killed in the very same way. In fact, he was riding the very same moped. And to stretch the odds even further, he was struck by the very same taxi driven by the same driver - and even carrying the very same passenger! (Source: Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, John Michell and Robert J. M. Rickard)

13Swapped Hotel Findings

In 1953, television reporter Irv Kupcinet was in London to cover the coronation of Ellizabeth II. In one of the drawers in his room at the Savoy he found found some items that, by their identification, belonged to a man named Harry Hannin. Coincidentally, Harry Hannin - a basketball star with the famed Harlem Globetrotters - was a good friend of Kupcinet's. But the story has yet another twist. Just two days later, and before he could tell Hannin of his lucky discovery, Kupcinet received a letter from Hannin. In the letter, Hannin told Kucinet that while staying at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, he found in a drawer a tie - with Kupcinet's name on it! (Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained)

14Two Mr. Brysons, same hotel room

While on a business trip sometime in the late 1950s, Mr. George D. Bryson stopped and registered at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. After signing the register and being given his key to room 307, he stopped by the mail desk to see if any letters had arrived for him. Indeed there was a letter, the mail girl told him, and handed him an envelope addressed to Mr. George D. Bryson, room 307. This wouldn't be so odd, except the letter was not for him, but for room 307's just-previous occupant - another man named George D. Bryson. (Source: Incredible Coincidence, Alan Vaughan)

15Twins brothers, same heart attack

John and Arthur Mowforth were twins who lived about 80 miles apart in Great Britain. On the evening of May 22, 1975, both fell severely ill from chest pains. The families of both men were completely unaware of the other's illness. Both men were rushed to separate hospitals at approximately the same time. And both died of heart attacks shortly after arrival. (Source: Chronogenetics: The Inheretance of Biological Time, Luigi Gedda and Gianni Brenci)

16A novel that predicted the Titanic's destiny, and another ship that almost followed

Morgan Robertson, in 1898, wrote "Futility". It described the maiden voyage of a transatlantic luxury liner named the Titan. Although it was touted as being unsinkable, it strikes an iceberg and sinks with much loss of life. In 1912 the Titanic, a transatlantic luxury liner widely touted as unsinkable strikes an iceberg and sinks with great loss of life on her maiden voyage. In the Book, the Month of the Wreck was April, same as in the real event. There were 3,000 passengers on the book; in reality, 2,207. In the Book, there were 24 Lifeboats; in reality, 20.
Months after the Titanic sank, a tramp steamer was traveling through the foggy Atlantic with only a young boy on watch. It came into his head that it had been thereabouts that the Titanic had sunk, and he was suddenly terrified by the thought of the name of his ship - the Titanian. Panic-stricken, he sounded the warning. The ship stopped, just in time: a huge iceberg loomed out of the fog directly in their path. The Titanian was saved.

17A writer, found the book of her childhood

While American novelist Anne Parrish was browsing bookstores in Paris in the 1920s, she came upon a book that was one of her childhood favorites - Jack Frost and Other Stories. She picked up the old book and showed it to her husband, telling him of the book she fondly remembered as a child. Her husband took the book, opened it, and on the flyleaf found the inscription: "Anne Parrish, 209 N. Weber Street, Colorado Springs." It was Anne's very own book. (Source: While Rome Burns, Alexander Wollcott)

18A writer's plum pudding

In 1805, French writer Émile Deschamps was treated to some plum pudding by the stranger Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Many years later in 1832 Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the setting complete - and in the same instant the now senile de Fortgibu entered the room.

19King Umberto I' double

In Monza, Italy, King Umberto I, went to a small restaurant fordinner, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, General Emilio Ponzia-Vaglia. When the owner took King Umberto's order, the King noticedthat he and the restaurant owner were virtual doubles, in face andin build. Both men began discussing the striking resemblancesbetween each other and found many more similarities.
a) Both men were born on the same day, of the same year, (March14th, 1844).
b) Both men had been born in the same town.
c) Both men married a woman with same name, Margherita.
d) The restauranteur opened his restaurant on the same day that KingUmberto was crowned King of Italy.
e) On the 29th July 1900, King Umberto was informed that therestauranteur had died that day in a mysterious shooting accident,and as he expressed his regret, he was then assassinated by ananarchist in the crowd.

20The 21st, a bad day for King Louis XVI

When King Louis XVI of France was a child, he was warned by an astrologer to always be on his guard on the 21st day of each month. Louis ws so terrified by this that he never did business on this day.Unfortunately Louis was not always on his guard. On June 21st 1791, following the French revolution, Louis and his queen were arrested in Varennes, whist trying to escape France. On September 21st 1791, France abolished the institution of Royalty and proclaimed itself a republic. Finally on January 21st 1793, King Louis XVI was executed by guillotine.

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A falling baby, saved two times by the same man. Twin brothers, killed in along the same road, two hours apart. The world is filled with astonishing occurrences of coincidence and synchronicity that defy explanation. Are these incredible true stories of mere coincidence... or the hand of fate?