A man speeds along a winding road in his red Dodge Viper, when he turns a curve another car crosses his path and he slides into the car. Fortunately, the damage is minimal and none of the drivers are injured. That’s when the man realizes that the car he damaged is a red Dodge Viper like his. He shakes his head and tells the other driver that he should have expected such an odd match with a name like John Chance. The other driver seems surprised and tells you that his name is also John Chance.

Although the details of the above story have been updated, the incident is a real event. What are the odds? A skeptical approach would be to argue that the answer is just that, the probability and mathematical naivety of assuming a match is unique. Based on the hypothesis that with billions of people on the planet, strange coincidences are likely to occur frequently, coincidences are common events that occur more frequently than we think.

Because psychologists believe that people have an uncanny ability to find meaningful connections between things that they may not have at all, the likelihood that most people will experience meaningful coincidences is increased. Due to the billions of people and the number of significant coincidences in the millions of billions, it is inevitable that people will experience strange coincidences every day.

This is the argument that is used to explain the phenomenon that thousands of people have experienced worldwide, of constantly seeing the number 1111, which is explained in detail in my 11:11 Coincidence or destiny? Article. Those who believe that the eleven-eleven phenomenon is more than a coincidence, explain that when we look for evidence of intangibles or the fingerprints of higher intelligence, we can decipher them through patterns. If out of chaos a pattern appears, there is an intelligence behind it. Therefore, the possibility that the facilitating events occur randomly is contrary to all predictions.

However, what if we used the skeptical approach above, of evaluating unusual matches by calculating probabilities, and the calculation reveals matches at a higher level than chance, with no fraud or error to attribute to it? What should we do? of that then?

I was in my living room about to adjust the wooden blinds when I noticed the sunlight coming through a smaller square window separated in such a way that it created three strange-looking bright spots on the carpet. It caught my attention because it appeared to be a kind of smiling face with two off-shaped dots (the “eyes”) above a slightly wide curved light shape below it (a wide “smile”). I noticed the sunlight coming through the artificial tree near the entertainment system, but I couldn’t understand how only three points of sunlight formed that way on the ground. Well, I had to write, so I left the room muttering, “Strange.”

The next day, while checking my email, I was surprised to read a certain link in the Daily Herald and immediately clicked on it to see the bold black headline; Could Elgin’s death be the work of the ‘Smiley Face’ killer? I immediately remembered the “smiley face” that I saw the day before. If realizing that I live very close to Elgin wasn’t creepy enough, I came across another article almost a month later via AOL news: Do ‘smiley face killers’ hunt students? This article has four photos of the smiling faces painted by psychopaths and three of them are eerily similar to the “face” I saw on the carpet. The smiling face hasn’t reappeared since then, by the way. The calculation of probabilities offers little help in individual cases like this.

Also, there are cases where there is no probability expectation on which a calculation can be based and the probability is infinitesimally small. For example, if one in every billion suicides was by two strangers with the same name, from the same occupation, and under the same circumstances, we still need to consider the date when it is likely to occur or has occurred. How do you take that into the calculation? It could happen literally at any time. The improbability of the match, therefore, has no effect against its occurrence.

Is there a good example of this level of “match”? On March 31, 1930, Frederick Henry Butler and David Henry Butler both shot each other with pistols in the side of their cars. They were both butchers and unrelated strangers. London newspapers reported that the men were found shot in separate areas; one near London, the other in the county of Nottingham.

I have a black cap with amber stitching that says “11:11 is not a coincidence.” I was wearing it while eating at a certain crowded fast food restaurant with my wife and daughter. About an hour later, we were behind several cars at a stoplight about to leave the parking area when I noticed (and admired) a shiny black Mercedes waiting to enter the traffic lane on the right. Not wanting my wife to think that I was admiring the very attractive woman behind the wheel, I pretended to divert my attention elsewhere as the Mercedes pulled into traffic directly in front of us. A moment later, my wife says, “Look at that.” and points to the license plate of the Mercedes. That’s when I see 1111 (and two letters).

Perhaps you have had the experience of thinking of someone and that person suddenly calls you on the phone, or while reading a certain word from a book, it is said simultaneously on television at that exact moment. Or how about when you are sitting in your car in the parking lot of the mall and the moment you decide to exit the parking lot, is when someone behind you decides to do the same or a car passes behind at that moment. However, before the decision to move was made, there were no moving cars. I can’t tell you how many times these coincidences have happened to us.

I could possibly write a book just about the theories of why these strange coincidences occur. Many of the famous people of The secret The DVDs say that there is no such thing as “coincidence” and that we are ultimately responsible for all the things that happen to us in our lives. The secret is the Law of Attraction, which seems to be validated by the holographic universe paradigm popularized by the late Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe. Could these examples provide a possible connection to those moments of strange synchronicity or strange serendipity? The answer can always remain debatable and uncertain.