This is an oldie, but when we'd never seen before: Daily Cognition's list of the 20 Most Amazing Coincidences. Some of them have to be hoaxes, as a few of these stink worse than a dumpster at the Pike Place Market, but the rest will blow your cynical little minds...
It's an epic story, requiring at least 45 minutes of your time to pore through, but here are the highlights:
1) James Dean's car went on to kill at least 2 more people and injure several others over the years. Parts of it went into other cars and the rest of it collapsed and eventually broke into nearly a dozen different pieces.
2) A man saved a falling baby on two different occasions. Same baby, same man's head that broke the fall. This one we can't seem to believe-- but the world used to be a smaller place...
3) A guy almost got shot in the face by his scorned lover's crazed brother. Instead of killing him, the bullet nicked his face and lodged itself in a tree. Years later-- and this is the part we don't believe-- the survivor decided to destroy that same tree... with dynamite. You see where this is going, don't you? Indeed, he blew up the goddamn tree-- causing the bullet to fire out, hitting the guy in the face, killing him instantly.
4) Two twins are separated at birth, both are eventually named James, grow up to enter "law enforcement" (a vague enough description to qualify as a coincidence), marry women named Linda, have sons named James Alan (or James Allan), get divorced, and remarry women named Betty. Also, they had dogs named-- what the hell-- Toy. We're guessing it might be true that our lives are preordained, although the fact that this story was published by Reader's Digest calls the whole truth of it into question.
5) Our favorite: when Norman Mailer was writing his widely panned novel Barbary Shore, he decided to randomly work in a Russian spy character. Upon the book's completion, the Feds conducted a major raid on his upstairs neighbor's apartment, arresting the top Russian spy working in America. Mailer must've known, damn it...
Check out the rest, including the book that predicted the Titanic up to and including the reason it would sink and the woman who discovered her childhood favorite book-- and her own copy of it-- half a world away...
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