Coincidentally …

One more dive into routine miracles

“Flame Nebula,” by Alanna S. Graboyes (asgraboyesart.com)

Rare occurrences are remarkably common. This paradox has been the subject of two of my recent essays, and here’s one more for the stack. In this one, I’ll round out the trilogy with more tales of the likely-unlikely—the Wizard of Oz’s coat, the Bulgarian lottery, a Brit-com and a book, the mobster who “won” the lottery, a scholar who found a spiritual side to coincidence in the death of his father, and—for me at least—the most unlikely and spiritual of all astronomical events.

On October 1, I posted “Impossible Things before Breakfast: Why Rarities are a Dime a Dozen.” That piece began with a Chinese married couple who recently discovered that the two of them, standing some distance apart, had been photographed together at the same moment, ten years before they met, standing before a monument—and that both still had the original photos to prove it. The piece continued with stories of an unlikely meeting on an airplane, of Kevin Bacon’s degrees of separation, of an observation in the film Local Hero, and a bit of friendly mathematics. It also alluded to a book I had not yet read: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by statistician David J. Hand. On December 3, I posted a brief follow-up (“The Improbable Book: Or, How Anthony Hopkins Defied the Odds”) describing a mind-boggling anecdote from Dr. Hand’s book. Now, here are a few more mind-bogglers.

Before launching into those anecdotes, though, I’ll highly recommend Dr. Hand’s book to any lover of coincidences and life’s mysteries. His book imparts both mathematical precision and a sense of wonder at the coincidences that surprise us all. He explores the connections between superstitions, prophecy, miracles, and strange occurrences of all sorts. His book is scattered about with a couple who survived separate train crashes, holes-in-one, methodologies of suicide, ESP, butterflies, the universe, thoughts on human cognition, the search for four-leaf clovers, and people who win the lottery twice—and people who are strike by lightning more than once. There’s plenty of math, but it’s offered up so gently that even those with a distaste for things quantitative can make it through the book intact. There’s even generous advice on how to make practical use of all of this knowledge.

And now, on to my list of coincidental anecdotes. (All accompanying graphics below are public domain images from Wikimedia Commons.)

Professor Marvel’s Coat

Actor Frank Morgan played the Wizard of Oz in the eponymous 1939 film. He also played a number of other characters, including Professor Marvel, a traveling soothsayer on the plains of Kansas. According to a story told by various members of the production crew, they wanted Professor Marvel decked out in attire that was once grand, but now worn-out. He ended up with a frayed great coat purchased from a Hollywood second-hand store.

One day, the story goes, Morgan turned one of the coat pockets inside-out and discovered a label bearing the name “L. Frank Baum.” Baum, the author of the Oz books, had died 20 years earlier. Assuming the story is accurate, the film crew received written, notarized confirmation of authenticity from Baum’s tailor and later presented the coat to Baum’s widow. Some accused the film crew of staging a publicity stunt with a fake story, but the crew insisted that the whole thing was a great coincidence. Fact-checking site Snopes.com investigated and rated the story as an unconfirmable legend.  

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Bulgarian Lottery

A few days after writing my December 3 piece, I was reading Professor Hand’s book and began a section of book on wild coincidences that show up in lotteries. Before I got too far into that section, I closed my Kindle so my wife and I could watch a pleasant little British comedy/drama called The Outlaws, about an oddball group of seven people in Bristol doing community service (“community payback” in Britain) after committing petty crimes. One character is an aspiring Oxford scholarship student arrested for shoplifting.

In one scene, a policewoman asks the would-be Oxonian why she was spotted near the scene of a wee-hours drug robbery involving one of the other members of her community-payback crew. She says, “Coincidence?” (Which it wasn’t.) The police detective said (I paraphrase), “That would be a rather shocking coincidence, wouldn’t it?” The young woman then says (again, paraphrasing), “Oh no, extremely rare events are quite common, actually. In 2009, the same numbers came up in the Bulgarian lottery on two successive draws. You can look it up on Google.”

My wife looked at me and said, “That sounds like it could be in the book you’re reading.” The next morning, I opened the book, and right away, I was reading Professor Hand’s description of the 2009 Bulgarian lottery. It seems that the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42 came up on September 6, 2009 and then did so again four days later. Dr. Hand also described this case in a 2014 Scientific American article.

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Bulgerian Lottery

In 1991, another remarkable-lottery-coincidence had made the headlines, this time in Boston. Whitey Bulger, a notorious gangster (and FBI informant) whose brother was a high-ranking politician, won the state lottery at an unusually propitious moment. The authorities were closing in on his illegal operations and he desperately needed a legitimate stream of income. Suddenly, Bulger and three associates came into possession of a winning ticket, purchased from a store owned by Bulger. The four men shared a prize of around $14,000,000.

What ensued was a great public debate over whether this was a coincidence or something nefarious. (It was likely something of a combination of the two.) Most likely, one of his associates had won the ticket, and Bulger strong-armed him into sharing the earnings as a means of money-laundering. Bulger had a lot of associates, so the possibility that one would win the lottery someday was a lot greater than just the possibility that Bulger would win. Assuming that Bulger did, in fact, force the actual winner to share his ticket further reduces the improbability of a famous thug lucking out in this manner.

Bulger’s apparent winnings launched a thousand debates on questions moral, philosophical, jurisprudential, and even theological. The story became even more complex when Bulger went into hiding for 16 years, raising questions about whether he could receive his portion of the payout via proxy. The website Crimereads.com has a nice writeup on the story. At the very least, there was some karma in that Bulger’s winnings were instrumental into bringing down some of his associates. At any rate, the Bulger story involves some measure of serendipity, but it wasn’t quite as unlikely as it seemed when the story first broke. As a coda, Bulger was eventually murdered in the most horrific manner in prison, so “lottery-winner” is not the first term that comes to mind when his name is mentioned.

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Theology and Coincidences

After reading my December 1 essay on coincidences, an esteemed colleague in New England wrote me to note one more coincidence. Two days before my piece appeared, Deborah Netburn, who writes on “faith, spirituality and joy” for the Los Angeles Times, had written an article on similar territory: “Strange coincidences: Are they fluke events or acts of God?” Netburn did a nice job in presenting alternative viewpoints on the nature of coincidences. She cites Professor Hand as representing the rationalist end, of interpreting coincidences; Hand, she says, finds that “most coincidences are fairly easy to explain, and he specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.”

She also explores more spiritual interpretations of the nature of coincidence. Her archetype for that view is Dr. Bernard Beitman, who, in 1973, had an inexplicable choking incident (when he wasn’t eating or drinking), only to learn that somewhere around that time, his father, 3,000 miles away, was choking to death on his own blood. As Netburn writes:

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

By the way (coincidentally?) the colleague who sent me Netburn’s article had written long ago about Whitey Bulger.

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Sun and Moon

If Professor Beitman represents a view closer to the spiritual end of the spectrum on coincidences and Professor Hand represents the rationalist end, I fall considerably closer to Hand’s rationalist, mathematical terrain. But witnessing what is perhaps the greatest coincidence of all gave me one of the two most spiritual moments of my life. One of those moments, in 1986, was witnessing the birth of my son. The other, on March 7, 1970, was witnessing a total eclipse of the sun. As I wrote in 2017:

At 99 percent total, the eclipse was pretty interesting. A bluish veil descended over earth, birds made night sounds and the few passing cars had their lights on. But the moment the eclipse reached 100 percent totality was incomparably different from the view a split second earlier — surreal beyond imagination. … Shadow bands — wavy lines like ripples on a pond — stretched for miles across the landscape. The corona surrounding the blackened moon was a ring of pure white brilliance resembling burning magnesium. Only one other time — the birth of my son — have I witnessed anything so miraculous and remote from my life’s other experiences.

In “A Total Solar Eclipse Feels Really, Really Weird,” astronomy writer Bob Berman does justice to the event in a way I’ve never seen from any other writer.

Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, “I think I saw one.” That’s like a woman saying, “I think I once gave birth.”

In a passage that gives me great thanks to have lived during this period of earth’s history, Berman described the—yes—astronomical unlikelihood of solar eclipses.

No discussion of totality should omit the strange science lurking behind it. It starts with a bizarre coincidence: the moon is four hundred times smaller than the sun, but it also floats four hundred times nearer to us. This makes the two disks in our sky appear to be the same size. Now, if the moon appeared larger than the sun, it could still occasionally stand in front of it, but it would also blot out the dramatic prominences along the sun’s edge, those geysers of pink nuclear flame. So for maximum amazingness, these bodies must have identical angular diameters—i.e., they must appear to be the same size. And they do.

The moon wasn’t always where it is now, which makes the coincidence even more special. The moon has really just arrived at the “sweet spot.” It’s been departing from us ever since its creation four billion years ago, after we were whacked by a Mars-size body that sent white-hot debris arcing into the sky. Spiraling away at the rate of one and a half inches per year, the moon is only now at the correct distance from our planet to make total solar eclipses possible. In just another few hundred million years, total solar eclipses will be over forever.

When the moon exactly covered the face of the sun on that long-ago morning, my overwhelming thought was, “This can’t possibly be accidental.” For that moment, I was firmly in Dr. Beitman’s spiritualist camp. I have since given numerous lectures in which I explain that coincidence in Dr. Hand’s rationalist terms. But I am content to retain the cognitive dissonance inherent in holding both views.

In 2017, I wrote of my disappointment in missing the total eclipse that crossed America on August 17 of that year. I thought of chasing the two eclipses that crossed South America in 2019 and 2020 but couldn’t manage either trip. I very much hope to witness my second total eclipse when yet another one crosses the U.S. on April 8, 2024. If that happens, I will have won the lottery twice.

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos

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