When a Coincidental Photos occurs, most people fall into one of two categories: those who are inclined to dismiss such occurrences as mere coincidence, and those who see significance or a larger pattern behind them. Here is a list of the most incredible coincidences in human history. Continue reading to learn more about these astonishing coincidences, which will amaze even the most skeptic readers and prove that fate is real.
Halley’s Comet appears at Mark Twain’s birth and at his passing
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In the same year that Halley’s Comet first made an appearance, 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was born. The author famously predicted that the two events would coincide, according to the New York Times, and the comet made a second appearance in 1910, the year Twain passed away. The Almighty has undoubtedly said, “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together,” according to a quote from him.
Galileo and Einstein both had birthdays on the same day as Stephen Hawking
Famously, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking was born on Galileo’s 300th death anniversary and passed away on Einstein’s 139th birthday. The fact that Hawking lived to be 76 years old despite having Lou Gehrig’s Disease, however, raises a much more perplexing question of statistical improbability about his life.
Scientific American reports that most people with the disease live for about five years after their diagnosis, despite the fact that we still know very little about it. The fact that Hawking lived for more than five more decades allowed him to impart his invaluable knowledge and talents to the world, in addition to his renowned sense of humor.
On July 4, political rivals Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away within hours of one another
Former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’ relationship experienced a number of ups and downs throughout the years. They were initially allies who gradually turned into rivals as their political views diverged. They eventually made up and wrote to one another until their final years as the two surviving American revolutionaries from the British Empire. Famously, they passed away on the same day in 1826—the Fourth of July, no less—just hours apart.
The Commettes’ Residence Was Struck by a Meteor
According to National Geographic, the likelihood of being killed by a meteor is one in 1,600,000. Therefore, it would seem extremely unlikely that a meteor, which had been traveling through space for over 4.5 billion years without striking anything, would strike the residence of a family with the last name “Commette.” According to Time, one family in France experienced exactly that in a strange instance of cosmic synchronicity.
In a train station, Anthony Hopkins Found The Book He Was Looking For, Signed
Anthony Hopkins was supposed to play Kostya in a movie version of The Girl from Petrovka in the early 1970s. He set out to read the book in order to get ready for the part, but despite a thorough search, he was unable to locate a copy in any bookstore. When he opened it, he discovered that George Feifer, the book’s author, had also signed it.
The Brother of John Wilkes Booth prevented the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son
Long before Booth fatally shot Lincoln on that fateful day in April 1865, there was reportedly a coincidental family connection between John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln. Edwin Booth, a stage actor who achieved some notoriety during the Civil War, fervently backed the Union. Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, leaned up against a stopped train while in a New Jersey train station and almost fell onto the tracks when it started moving again. The younger Lincoln saw his hero and recorded the event in his journal, but Booth didn’t learn who he had saved until decades later.
The same Lincoln son also witnessed three presidential assassinations
Robert Todd Lincoln was somehow present for not one, not two, but three presidential assassinations, which is unusual to be present for the death of any president. He was rushed to his father’s bedside and sat by his side until the elder Lincoln passed away, despite the fact that he was not present at the theater when the tragic shooting occurred. He later witnessed the assassination of President James A. Garfield firsthand. President William McKinley had invited Lincoln to Buffalo, New York, where he was when the president was fatally shot in 1901.
An engaged couple learned that their parents were almost wed
In the NPR episode “No Coincidence, No Story,” Stephen and Helen Lee’s engagement unveiled an astonishing ancestral secret. As they perused family photos in New York, the couple learned that the groom’s deceased father and the bride’s mother nearly wed in 1960s Korea. Parental opposition led them to separate paths, only for destiny to intertwine their legacies once again. Remarkably, the distant loves now share grandchildren, bridging continents and time through an extraordinary twist of fate.
The Olympic, Britannic, and Titanic shipwrecks were all survived by one woman
The nickname “Miss Unsinkable” was given to nurse and ocean liner stewardess Violet Jessop after she survived both the Titanic disaster in 1912 and the sinking of its sister ship, the HMHS Britannic, in 1916. Jessup reportedly was also on the RMS Olympic when it collided with a warship; fortunately, the Olympic managed to stay afloat.
The first and last battles of the Civil War took place in different towns, but right next to the same man’s property
The First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 signaled the start of the American Civil War. The song “Bull Run” is named after a stream that ran through the farm of a 46-year-old grocery store owner named Wilmer McLean in Manassas, Virginia. After the battle’s destruction, McLean and his wife moved to Appomattox, Virginia, in search of safety. For roughly four years, he was safe as the bloody war ravaged the country. At the Appottomax Courthouse, a short distance from McLean’s new home, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, bringing the war to an end.
The first and last World War I soldiers are interred next to one another
An estimated million British lives had been lost by the time World War I ended. The last recorded English casualty of the war, 30-year-old George Edwin Ellison, and the first English casualty of the war, 17-year-old soldier John Parr, are said to have graves in the Saint Symphorien Military Cemetery that are only 15 feet apart and face one another.
Two Malaysian Air flights that crashed were missed by one man Coincidental Photos
Two tragic aircraft accidents involving Malaysian Air flights occurred in 2014.
The first airplane was shot down over Ukraine, and the second one vanished over the Indian Ocean. This made a big mystery in aviation history. A cyclist named Maarten de Jonge from the Netherlands was supposed to be on both flights. But luckily, he changed his mind at the last moment and chose cheaper tickets, which saved him from being on those planes.
The first and last victims of the Hoover Dam construction occurred 14 years apart; they were a father and a son
Out of the estimated 21,000 people who worked on the construction of the Hoover Dam, 96 people died on the job, according to the United States Bureau of Reclamation. J.G. Tierney was one of the first; he and a colleague perished in the water on December 20, 1922, while conducting a geological survey before construction. The final death of the project was documented 14 years later, on the precise day of Tierney’s passing. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his son Patrick Tierney was the one who fell from the electrical tower.
Her husband came across a dollar she had written on in an effort to find a husband Coincidental Photos
Paul Grachan asked Esther to be his girlfriend after only a brief period of dating, as detailed in an episode of NPR’s This American Life.
The framed dollar reappeared in their home after some time had passed, they got engaged, and then they got married. Evidently, Esther had, following a breakup, written her name on a dollar and a few other coins, vowing to wed the man who would return it to her. She didn’t explain to him why she was so speechless because she believed that discussing marriage at this early stage in their relationship would turn him off. But at the time, she thought he was “the one.”
Another 10-year-old Laura Buxton found the red balloon that 10-year-old Laura Buxton had released
In 2001, a 10-year-old girl named Laura Buxton stood in her front yard holding a red balloon, according to a story told on the WYNC podcast Radiolab. She had written her address and the words, “Please return to Laura Buxton,” on the side of the balloon. She then let it go into a powerful wind.
Before descending, the balloon traveled approximately 140 miles south before coming to rest in the yard of a second 10-year-old girl. Who is the second female? Laura Buxton, too! The girls decided to meet after communicating and explaining the coincidence. While there, they found numerous strange similarities. In addition to having identical looks and clothing, both girls also had three-year-old chocolate labs, a grey rabbit, and a guinea pig.
Joan Ginther won four scratch-off lottery prizes totaling more than $20 million Coincidental Photos
The “coincidence” that Joan Ginther won the lottery four times over should be viewed with some skepticism, according to Business Insider. Not because it smacks of urban legend like so many of these tales do, but rather because the Stanford Ph.D. holder may have stacked the deck in her favor by studying statistics. The likelihood of pulling off a four-time win, even with the aid of a strategy, is still slim. Ginther won more than $20 million in total after scoring multiple million-dollar scratch-off tickets four times.
Tsutomo Yamaguchi lived through the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima Coincidental Photos
Depending on how you look at it, Tsutomo Yamaguchi is either incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky. He was unlucky in that he just so happened to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the same time as their devastating atomic bombings, but lucky in that he miraculously survived both. Yamaguchi reportedly ran away from Hiroshima in search of safety, arriving in Nagasaki only to witness a second white light flash that would cause burns from radioactive ash to cover more than half of his body. The Japanese government only acknowledges Yamaguchi as having survived both bombings. He sadly passed away from cancer in 2010.
Dog is “dog” in the extinct Mbabaram language Coincidental Photos
Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram is on the verge of extinction, and it couldn’t sound more unlike English. Thus, it came as quite a shock to linguists studying Mbabaram when they discovered that the tribe’s word for “dog” is simply “dog,” with no connection to or derivation from the English word.
Every time a French poet consumed plum pudding, he thought of the person who first introduced him to it
According to mathematician Joseph Mazur’s book Fluke, French poet Émile Deschamps had an extraordinary coincidence happen to him in the 19th century. When Deschamps was a teen, he met an Englishman by the name of Mr. de Fortgibu, who gave him his first taste of plum pudding. About ten years later, Deschamps ordered plum pudding after spotting it on the menu. However, the waiter informed him that they had sold the last one to a patron in the back of the establishment and then addressed Mr. de Fortgibu by name. Deschamps attended a dinner party with plum pudding after a further ten years had passed. Then, mysteriously, Mr. de Fortgibu appeared at the door as he was making his joke about the party being for him! He had stumbled upon him.
The same day they were married, a couple discovered their wedding vows in a bottle Coincidental Photos
The Dubendorfs were shocked to learn that the wedding date on the note was the same as their own beach wedding date. The note also contained the couple’s address. They saw it as a positive sign that both of their marriages were “meant to be,” and much to their shock, they wrote them a letter to congratulate the newlyweds.
Solar eclipses are nearly impossible because they need such unique circumstances Coincidental Photos
Our solar system experiences amazing coincidences in the same way that we do. The sun is about 400 times wider than the moon, but it is also 400 times farther away, making the two appear to be the same size, which allows the phenomenon to occur even though the sun and moon are very different sizes. We probably wouldn’t ever witness a total solar eclipse because the moon wouldn’t appear large enough to block our view, according to Live Science, if the sun were any bigger or the moon were any farther away.
On Friday the 13th, flight 666 landed at HEL Coincidental Photos
There are numerous “coincidences” (read: far-fetched conspiracy theories) involving the number 666 on the internet, but this tale is real. On Friday the 13th, Finnair flight 666 departed from Copenhagen and touched down in Helsinki (HEL). Yes, you read correctly: On the darkest of days, Flight 666 made a direct flight to HEL. Fortunately for the passengers, the coincidence came to an end there because they arrived safely at their intended location.
Following their separation at birth, two sets of twins were reunited Coincidental Photos
The remarkable tale of two sets of identical twins who were divided at birth and raised as two sets of fraternal twins in Bogota, Colombia, was published in 2015 by The New York Times Magazine.
The tale started when Jorge, one of the twins, ran into William, his biological twin, by accident in the butcher shop where William worked. When she showed Jorge a photo of the man in the butcher shop, they went to his Facebook page only to find that he was frequently pictured with Carlos, Jorge’s brother, who looked exactly like him. Eventually, the two sets of twins crossed paths and are still in touch.
They were both in the same childhood photograph
Aimee Maiden and Nick Wheeler were looking through old family photos in preparation for their wedding when they stumbled upon a startling coincidence: they had unintentionally taken their first photo together as kids, 11 years before they had met. The photo of the two shows Aimee and her family sitting just feet behind Nick, both of them playing in the sand, despite the fact that the two of them grew up more than 300 miles apart in different parts of England. Nick and his family had been on a beach vacation in Aimee’s hometown.
