It happens that we are late for a train or plane, and it crashes. Or something prevents us from going to a certain place, and there is a terrorist attack. Maybe higher powers consciously protect us from harm? This happened 55 years ago with the famous Argentine race car driver Juan Manuel Fangio. On February 23, 1958, he was kidnapped by Cuban rebels.
It happened a day before the start of the next Formula 1 stage - the Havana Grand Prix. After 28 hours, the rebels released Fangio, making a statement that they had committed this act so that the whole world knew about the uprising against the Batista dictatorship.
During the races in which Fangio was unable to take part, there was a terrible disaster with many casualties. After that, Fangio said that Providence itself intervened in his fate, and refused to give any evidence against his captors …
The case of Fangio's miraculous rescue is by no means an isolated one. For example, somehow all the members of the church choir from the American town of Beatrice were late for the rehearsal for various reasons. The rehearsal was supposed to start at 19:20, and at 19:25 the church exploded …
Air France flight attendant Isabelle Sarian in 2000 was supposed to take off on the next flight. But in the morning she cut her finger, and then her son had a fever. Isabelle called her mother and asked to sit with the child. But she managed to slip on a tangerine peel thrown by someone at the threshold and break her leg. After that, Isabelle had no choice but to call her superiors and ask her to change. A few minutes after takeoff, the airliner crashed …
On September 11, 2001, many of the staff at the World Trade Center in New York also had a lucky break. For example, Greer Epstein from the office on the 67th floor, shortly before falling on the plane building, went to get cigarettes. A certain Bill Trinkle was late for work, playing at home with his little daughter and not catching the morning train, and a girl named Monica O'Leary was fired the day before the tragedy …
In the summer of 2006, a certain Valery Struganov was supposed to return by flight number 778 from Moscow to his home in Irkutsk, but decided to stay for a day in the capital. The plane crashed in which 120 people died.
In 2008, five people missed a Boeing 737 flight en route Moscow - Perm for various reasons and had to travel to their destination by train. During the landing, the Boeing crashed, none of the 87 people on board survived.
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In August of the same year, there was a plane crash at the Spanish airport "Barajos", which claimed 153 lives. Of the 175 passengers, 13 missed the flight …
Researcher William Cox found that the number of passengers on 28 trains that crashed was significantly less than a week before the accident or a few days after it … In addition, the number of passengers in damaged or derailed cars was also less than in the rest …
And the American sociologist James Staunton, having analyzed 50 air and rail accidents since 1900, found that in most cases, during the tragedies, vehicles were only 60 percent full. If the occupancy rate exceeded 75 percent, then crashes were very rare.
Curious about these statistics, Staunton interviewed a number of people who accidentally managed to avoid dying in traffic accidents. It turned out that many of them had no premonitions the day before: circumstances prevented them from getting into a catastrophe. Before the trip to the airport, one of them had a stomach problem, another suddenly died of a relative, the third, going downstairs, twisted his leg and missed the train … And there were hundreds of such cases!
Staunton's research has generated quite a stir around the topic of predicting disasters. One of the enthusiasts who conducted research on this topic was the famous writer Stephen King.
“After I first read Staunton's article, the Magic Airlines plane crashed at Logan Airport,” King said. “Everyone on board died. When everything had settled down a bit, I called the office of this company. I introduced myself as a journalist - a little well-intentioned lie. He said that we would like to write an article about the plane crash, and asked for information on how many people who bought a ticket did not fly this flight. There were 16 of them. When asked how many latecomers are on average on the line from Denver to Boston, I was told that there were no more than three. And besides, another 15 people refused to fly this flight, while usually the number of refusals does not exceed eight. It turns out, although the headlines of all the newspapers shouted: "The plane crash in Logan killed 94 people", they could be read like this: "31 people escaped death in the crash."
Margarita Troitsyna