The psychologist Claude Arnault has been studying the mysteries of cause-and-effect relationships between events for more than twenty years
In 1992, the French artist Rene Charbonneau, commissioned by the Rouen City Hall, painted the painting "Joan of Arc at the stake" A young student Jeanne Lenois served as a model for him. However, the next day after the canvas was hung in the spacious exhibition hall, reagents exploded in the university laboratory. Jeanne, who was there, could not get out of the room and burned to death.
I have collected thousands of facts when people were subjected to unknown persecution not only from circumstances and situations, but also numbers, names, surnames, dates, says the professor. For example, an Australian midwife named Triplet, which means "triple", was born on the third of March and lives in house number three on the third floor. Mrs. Triplett was married three times and had three children. Moreover, the year before last, she took triplets for the third time. But in the American state of Louisiana, three men were sentenced to death for the brutal murder with the aim of robbing Clive Dorrit, who lived on Stillroad Place. During the investigation, it turned out that the killers bore the names Steel, Road and Place.
The explosion of two passenger trains in India caused two hundred and twenty deaths. A cigarette butt, thrown out of the window by one of the passengers, fell near a pipeline running along the road exactly at the point where the gas leak occurred. But the most unusual thing was that the trains that took off on the air, following the routes of Madras Delhi and Delhi Madras, had the same numbers. According to experts, the likelihood of such a coincidence is reduced to zero.
Once the great Marcello Mastroianni was invited to a party. In the midst of the fun, the actor suddenly jumped up and sang the forgotten old song "The house where I was so happy burned down." Before he finished singing it to the end, he was informed by telephone that his villa in Menton had been burned down. Subsequently, Marcello said that the last time he sang the song was at school age.
A resident of Budapest Gyorgy Sherfezi fell out of the tenth floor window and fell on Laszlo Karvas who was passing by. Exactly a year later, exactly the same case was repeated with the same characters, and both survived.
A tragicomic incident recently took place in Sofia. Thief Milko Stoyanov, having safely robbed the apartment of a wealthy citizen and carefully packed the "trophies" into his backpack, decided to go down the drainpipe from the window overlooking the deserted street for speed. When Milko was on the second floor level, the whistles of the police were heard.
Confused, he released the pipe from his hands and flew down. Just at that moment, a guy was walking along the sidewalk, and Milko fell right on top of him. The police arrived in time, handcuffed both and took them to the police station. It turned out that the guy Milko fell on was a burglar thief who, after many unsuccessful attempts, was finally tracked down. Interestingly, the second thief was also named Milko Stoyanov.
The residents of Barcelona, the Ramirez brothers, who were returning from a disco on a moped, were hit by a taxi on Moncada Street. They were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. After checking out, they wanted to see friends. Driving along Rue Moncada, they were again run over by the wheels of the same taxi driven by the same driver.
Much has been written about one significant coincidence. In 1944, on the eve of the landing of the allied troops in Normandy, a curious crossword puzzle was published in the Daily Telegraph. It included the codenames for the covert operation. Such as, for example, "Neptune", "Utah", "Omaha" and even the basic designation "Jupiter". The investigation of the case of "information leakage" was for a long time occupied by the army counterintelligence, which, no matter how hard they tried, could not detect any malicious intent. The compiler of the crossword puzzle turned out to be an old school teacher, puzzled by his result no less than the examiners themselves.
Often there are also mystical coincidences of various facts that do not depend on each other. In 1900, a tropical hurricane of unprecedented strength hit the American city of Galveston. Under the pressure of the wind, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico poured onto the coast like huge rams, sweeping street after street. The posthumous history of the famous circus acrobat Michael Williams is closely connected with the tropical storm, later called the "hurricane of the century". A year before the disaster, he toured Galveston.
At one of the performances, he unexpectedly fell off the trapeze and crashed to death, falling on the gymnastic apparatus standing below. The artist's face was so disfigured that he was buried in a closed zinc coffin at the local cemetery. When a hurricane swept over the coast, the raging water washed away the graves, and Williams' coffin was carried into the ocean. The coffin, which had been floating in endless waters for nine years, washed up on the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where fishermen found it. Surprisingly, Williams' home, where he lived most of his life, was only a mile from where the coffin was moored.
An equally mysterious story happened with the American astronaut Neil Armstrong. In 1969, barely stepping onto the lunar surface, he said:
I wish you success, Mr. Gorski. The mission control specialists couldn't figure out which Mr. Gorsky the astronaut remembered. Returning to Earth, Armstrong said that once, as a child, he, playing hide and seek with his peers, ran into the courtyard of his neighbors, whose last name was Gorski. Through the open window came the screams of the scandalous spouses.
Lousy impotent, Mrs. Gorski yelled. It's easier for a neighbor's boy to fly to the moon than to satisfy a woman for
you. When Armstrong actually flew to the moon, a remark he heard in childhood suddenly surfaced in his mind, and he, shocked by an incredible coincidence, unexpectedly for himself uttered a seemingly absurd phrase.
Italian Giacomo Felice, which means "happy", was driving at a speed of one hundred and twenty kilometers along an empty metropolitan street when he suddenly noticed the headlights of an oncoming car. Both cars drove so fast that a collision was inevitable. However, Felice escaped from the wreckage of his Ferrari safe and sound, and was convinced that the other driver had escaped with slight fright.
Delighted that the unpleasant story ended quite happily, Giacomo introduced himself to his new acquaintance. He opened his eyes wide in surprise, since his name was also Giacomo Felice.
One day, road police officer Dino Quadri near Rome was chasing an overspeeding car. When the offender suddenly braked at a bend, the police car crashed into a tree at high speed. Quadri, having damaged an artery in his leg, would have probably died if Leone Reggiani had not passed by, who stopped the bleeding. Three years later, Quadri was informed by radiotelephone that a car accident had occurred near Milan.
Arriving at the scene of the accident, the policeman saw the driver lying on the ground, blood flowing from his leg. Quadri, having treated the wound, applied a pressure bandage and thus saved the victim's life. When he got a better look at him, he recognized the same Reggiani, who at one time helped him.
When the editorial board of the Swedish newspaper "Dagens Nyheter" announced a competition for the best story about the most interesting adventure, she did not expect that the world would learn about another mysterious coincidence. The pilot from Gothenburg Jena Brende sent to the competition a story about his happy salvation. At the end of last year, he was flying over the Hawaiian Islands in a Cesna-540 plane, when suddenly the engine failed. Brenda ejected and swam in the ocean for a while in a small rubber boat until he was rescued.
The members of the editorial jury liked the story, and, having made sure of its truth, they awarded Brenda the first place. However, the newspaper received a letter from a certain Pence Brende from the Norwegian city of Trondheim, claiming that the story of the Swedish pilot happened to him. True, it ended differently.
He went to the office and said that during a flight across the Pacific Ocean, a malfunction in his Cesna540 aircraft forced him to land at the Honolulu military airfield. The first Brenda remembered reading in the logbook that another pilot with the same name flew on the same plane, but, of course, could not assume that a similar accident had occurred with him.
Some of the coincidences look so implausible, said the professor, one of the jury members, that in their essence they resemble some kind of "soap opera" with a far-fetched plot.
Frenchman Charles Fosse constantly traveled around the world, was a passionate poker player and was known as a notorious sharper. In one of the private gambling houses in Los Angeles, he once won five thousand dollars. Partners accused him of fraud and shot him. Despite the bloody corpse lying on the floor, gambling gamblers were going to continue the game.
However, among the "professionals" it is generally accepted that a cheater's money brings misfortune, so they turned to a stranger who was sitting alone over a glass of whiskey to take the place of the murdered one. He willingly agreed to take part in the game with Fosse's win as with his own bet.
However, instead of losing the game and out of the game, as Fosse's killers had expected, the new partner managed to win another two thousand dollars before the police arrived. The police officers, having arrested the criminals, considered that Fosse had received five thousand legally, and demanded them from the lucky one in order to transfer them to the next of kin of the victim.
However, their decision was superfluous, since it soon became clear that the stranger was his own son to the sharper. He just did not recognize the unlucky dad, whom he saw for the last time twenty years ago.