It is Friday the thirteenth…. Strange and eerie things are happening around the world on this very day. A phone rings, and it is a person you were just talking about. You show up to a business meeting, and the client has the same tie. (Insert Twilight Zone music here.) Are the forces of darkness steering you to your doom? Are the spirits from the great beyond sending you a message?
“People seem to want to believe that there is something magical or mystical in their existence,” said Jon Carlson, a psychologist from Governor’s State University.
But the truth is, strange and eerie things happen everyday; we just tend to remember the weird ones. Let’s take September eleventh, for example. I recently got one of those forwarded emails (for the upteenth time) about the mysterious “connections” behind the nine-eleven tragedy.
*9/11: 9+1=11
*After September 11 there are 111 days left in the year
*The twin towers look like an “11.”
*The first plane to hit the towers was Flight 11.
*State of NY was the eleventh state added to the Union
*Afghanistan has 11 letters.
*George W. Bush has 11 letters
(This is just a fraction of the list.)
Uri-Geller, who claims to be a psychic, posted something like this on his website and recommended everyone pray for 11 seconds. Dr. Robert Carroll of the Skeptic ‘s Dictionary, writes that this is an example of using selective thinking to make something seem designed or the result of a preordained pattern.
One of the 9/11 flights originated from Boston. John Kennedy and Conan O’Brien are from Boston and both have 11 letters. Is there a connection?
The only force at work here, is the one of coincidence and the only thing that’s mysterious about it is that it involves math, which, if you’ve seen my checkbook, can be very difficult to figure out.
Here’s an example. It seems unusual for us to run into someone with the same birthday. However, you might be surprised to learn that (according to math) in a random selection of 23 people, there is a 50-percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthday.
Here’s a more disturbing example. How about a person dreaming of a plane crash, and the crash happening the next day? A million to one odds may sound large enough to rule out coincidence. But according to Dr. Carroll, “With six billion people on earth, having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant.”
One needs to put coincidences back in context. With a big enough sample, you find that things are not so mysterious. Flipping a coin “heads” six times in a row might seem eerie. However, you would be less impressed if you flipped six consecutive “heads” during a thousand coin flips. You realize---this stuff just happens.
Wheaton native Jim Underdown of the Center for Inquiry West in Los Angeles explains that people are struck by coincidence because they don’t remember (and therefore disregard) the thousands of non-events that are also part of any set of statistics.
“Lottery boards never issue press releases about the 49 million people who lost this week,” Underdown said. “Slot machines don’t whisper ‘hey you won.’ It lights up like a Christmas tree.”
The September eleventh examples involve retrofitting significance. Underdown says look at the “connections” between Elvis and Jesus:
*wore white
*called “the King”
*frequented the desert (Jesus roamed the desert; Elvis often played Las Vegas.)
What does it mean? Nothing. Weirdness can be a piece of evidence worth exploring but in the end, statisticians have the ultimate proof in the numbers.
"One reason we attribute paranormal or supernatural causes to coincidences is because most of us are innumerate. That is, we don't have a clue about what the real odds are of things. When two events come together that seem uncanny or really weird it jolts us into thinking the coincidence is meaningful. But where is the meaning coming from? Not the natural world, because in the natural world, things happen according to whatever laws govern them. So we attribute the meaning to the paranormal or the supernatural. I guess it gives us some comfort and some sense that we're connected to something important, which makes us important, too," said Dr. Carroll.
Weirdness happens on Friday the thirteenth as well as Saturday the fourteenth. Science offers the best view of reality, even when reality is weird, and in nature, that’s not that uncommon. What would really be unusual, is if weirdness never happened. Now that would be creepy.
