In 2006, Portland resident Allen Heckard filed a lawsuit against one of the best basketball players in basketball history, Michael Jordan, and Nike founder Phil Knight.
He accused Jordan of being an athlete very similar to him, and Nike for an aggressive advertising campaign that made the basketball player a world famous.
For 15 years, Heckard was regularly confused with a basketball player, despite the fact that he is as much as 15 centimeters shorter than the athlete. The plaintiff complained that Jordan ruined his life.
Heckard estimated his moral suffering at $ 832 million - 50 percent of this amount must be paid by Nike and Jordan himself.
SECOND "I"
Americans are a strange people, sometimes one gets the impression that they are not fed with bread - let someone compete with someone in court. Allen Heckard's lawsuit is among the ten most stupid and ridiculous lawsuits in America.
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It is not known whether Allen could have won the trial: a few months later, he withdrew the application. But he created a precedent: this was the first lawsuit based on the similarity of two completely different people. Allen himself, oddly enough, did well to reinforce that similarity: wore Nike sneakers, an earring in one ear like his counterpart, and even played amateur basketball.
Many would not refuse to have a famous double. No matter how Heckard convinces the public of the opposite, the benefits are obvious. Wherever you appear, you are everywhere mistaken for a star, offer discounts, take pictures, etc.
However, there is another side of the coin - excessive attention. But the existence of a double, not burdened with fame, is of equal interest to many. Dublin student Nymph Jeanie and two of her friends have created an Internet resource called Stranger Twins and a similar Facebook community. With their help, they invite everyone to find their exact copy.
According to Gini, every person has at least seven doubles. The project attracted the interest of several thousand users, and the Nymph herself was the first to find her twin. Her double turned out to be 29-year-old Karen Branigan, who lives a couple of hours from Dublin. Girls look alike like two peas.
GOOD OR BAD?
In fiction and cinema, many cases are reflected when doubles who exchanged places received a lot of advantages, simply had fun, joked, in the end, found their happiness. In our time, thanks to the development of technology, as well as globalization, we began to communicate more, for example, on social networks.
Therefore, the likelihood of meeting your exact copy has increased many times over. Almost every celebrity can boast of their own double among fans, and sometimes among colleagues. Today such a meeting does not cause any concern in us.
Moreover, such a "date" is a desirable and even profitable event. For example, some photographers make fortunes out of the similarities of different people. Thus, the Canadian photographer Francois Brunelle photographs dozens of unknown pairs of doubles from all over the world, similar to each other like twins.
Ekaterina Rozhdestvenskaya made a name for herself on the similarity of people from completely different eras. Her project "Private Collection" is a gallery of portraits of our famous contemporaries. Ekaterina's idea is to find characters similar to them in paintings by Durer, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Monet, Renoir, Vrubel and other famous artists among the stars of Russian show business, politicians, actors, musicians, athletes.
They treated the existence of doubles in the past quite differently. People believed that such meetings promised misfortune and even death. They say that shortly before their death, the Russian Empresses Catherine II and Anna Ioannovna saw their counterparts, as well as the author of the famous "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" Lord Byron.
The fateful meeting was with the poet Percy Shelley. While driving on the lake, Percy saw that a replica of him was sitting in one of the many boats. Back ashore, Shelley told his friends about the incident. They considered the meeting a bad omen and were not mistaken. Soon the poet drowned.
Many European newspapers wrote about the strange incident in Prague. In the Czech capital, under the wheels of tram number 22, a person died, whose identity could not be established. The deceased looked like two peas in a pod like a tram driver, 47-year-old Jiri Globek. The victim and the driver of the vehicle even had the same blood group.
In addition, they had the same diseases and ages. According to Czech law, the deceased was buried six months later as an unidentified person. The only person who attended the pedestrian's funeral was the driver who hit him. And a year after the funeral, he himself died. The poor fellow had a massive heart attack. Shortly before his death, he told his wife that he would like to be buried "next to him."
AT HIGHER POST
At all times the powerful of this world have tried to surround themselves with twins. For what? The answer is obvious: for safety. It is known that Napoleon Bonaparte had a double: a certain Francois Robo was his exact copy. After Napoleon was imprisoned on Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, Robo was returned to his native village, and a few years later he mysteriously disappeared. At the same time, Bonaparte began to lose his memory, started talking, calling himself Francois. There is a version that the real emperor fled, and a double took his place.
Hitler had several doubles. The Fuhrer was terrified of death, so he sent a double instead of himself to the most dangerous events. There is a version that one of them was killed by his order together with Eva Braun, and the leader of the Third Reich himself disappeared.
Joseph Stalin had fused second and third toes on his left foot, and his left hand was somewhat shorter than the right. According to the assumptions of some historians, the "father of nations" died, all the doctors who treated him were shot, and instead of Stalin, the people were presented with his double - the artist Felix Dadaev, who successfully played the role of his entire life to the end. Dadaev had no physical injuries.
Boris Yeltsin also had a couple of doubles. They were prepared for several years, bringing them to perfection with the help of plastic surgery and the removal of extra fingers on the hand. There is information that the real Yeltsin died on August 7, 1999, not having time to fulfill the tasks set. To complete the privatization process and transfer power to new henchmen, a double of the first president was hastily prepared. Outward resemblance was not enough.
The double removed the phalanges of the fingers that were missing from Yeltsin, and underwent several plastic surgeries. According to entrepreneur German Sterligov, the "new" Yeltsin was very different from the "old". Boris Nikolayevich underwent a serious heart operation and recently did not look well, and his double had a blooming healthy appearance.
In April this year, at the Panamanian summit of the two Americas, two … presidents of Venezuela appeared at once. CNN TV channel showed how in the morning Nicholas Maduro and his wife Celia left the Sheraton Hotel and went to the Palace of Congresses, where all the heads of American states were meeting. However, at the same time, the real Maduro went to the summit site in one of the vehicles of the Venezuelan delegation. Without a wife.
Why such conspiracy? The Venezuelan leader has repeatedly stated the existence of numerous conspiracies directed personally against him and his country. In December 2014, Maduro accused the US Embassy in Venezuela of plotting to overthrow him. According to him, the conspirators wanted to inflict airstrikes on the building of the Ministry of Defense and the presidential palace using a Venezuelan Air Force plane.
Indeed, Nicholas Maduro has long been like a bone in the throat to Americans. By the way, his predecessor Hugo Chavez also had a double, but this did not save him from an untimely death. Chavez was the first to talk about the US "cancer conspiracy". He, like other leaders of the Latin American countries, disagreeable to the Americans, he argued, is specially poisoned with substances that cause cancer.
This statement could be considered a fantasy of an overly sensitive president, if not for the facts. Few of the leaders of Latin America have escaped the dire diagnosis. The presidents of Cuba, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay suffered cancer at almost the same time. Many have died. It is not surprising that Maduro and his wife sometimes prefer to exhibit their own counterparts instead.
BIG FAMILY
Where do the doubles come from? Supporters of the mystical view of the world believe that nature never creates a person in a single copy. Each of us has our own copy.
But genetic scientists claim that mysticism has nothing to do with it. Doubles are people with the same set of genes responsible for height, eye color, hair color, and other external data.
Despite the huge number of gene combinations that human DNA can create, such a repetition does not seem to specialists to be anything special. 99.9 percent of the genome in humans is the same, and only one tenth of a percent is responsible for the uniqueness of the individual. And there are even fewer genes responsible for appearance. Therefore, the same sets of genes are found.
Biologists confirm that twins are people whose genomes not only contain the same genes, but also have the same antigenic composition of the blood. Moreover, there is a "recurrence of the psyche." Geneticist S. Zaslonkin believes that genes are shuffled like cards in a deck. The reason for the similarities between different people is "secret kinship".
Many people are brought to each other by distant relatives. If you count, then, on average, every person after eight generations will have 256 descendants (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, etc.). And how many relatives will this progenitor have in 30 generations? Of course, the genetic material will be greatly diluted, but according to the theory of probability, similar combinations of genes will sooner or later form. So people who are similar in appearance will be born.
Scientists see great prospects in the existence of twins. The similarity of genomes will help save the lives of many in need: twins can become excellent donors for each other. In this case, tissue or organ transplant will not cause rejection reactions.
Vlad ROGOV