One in A Million Coincidences - Part 3

Coming up are some of the most ridiculous coincidences in the world. Let's find out about the craziest coincidences ever.

April 19, 2023・

11 min read

At some point you’ve probably experienced something which made you say “it’s a small world”, but there are some coincidences out there that are so impressive they deserve a special place in history. Here are some more one in a million coincidences you’ll have to see to believe!

Right Behind You

Time can move surprisingly fast, and sometimes we don’t realize quite how long it’s been since we last saw our loved ones. Over a decade had passed since British father Michael Dick last saw his eldest daughter after separating from his first wife, so he set about tracking her down with a little help from his two other daughters.

Mr. Dick contacted the local paper in 2007, and a journalist from Suffolk Free Press photographed the trio in their hometown of Sudbury, promising that it would appear in the next edition. Sure enough, Michael's long-lost daughter Lisa, now 31, saw the photo, but on closer inspection, she realized that she was actually in it, too.

Lisa, now living in Essex, was visiting her mother and had been standing in the exact spot the photo was taken just moments earlier, and they can be seen walking away in the background. At first, Michael thought it was all a hoax, but after meeting with Lisa the pair couldn’t believe their incredible luck.

Starling Murmuration

During the fall, European Starlings flock to the skies in huge crowds known as murmurations and take on some weird and wonderful shapes as they group together to protect themselves from predators.

In 2018, amateur photographer Daniel Biber spent several days photographing these mass aerial stunts over the Costa Brava, but it wasn’t until he checked the photos on the computer that he noticed something amazing. In one of the images, thousands of birds seem to have taken the shape of one giant Starling in the sky in a seriously meta coincidence.

This incredible action shot earned him the top prize in an international photography competition, and he’s even had offers to display it at galleries.

Nailed It

The cringe-inducing X-Ray below might seem like your worst nightmare, and it’s certainly a pretty nasty injury, but had it not been for a double stroke of luck this guy could’ve been in a much worse situation.

The cringe-inducing image is the result of a nail-gun misfiring not once but twice, and in both cases, the giant nails managed to narrowly miss his actual kneecap or femur, which surely would’ve only been 10x more painful. Well, no one said all coincidences are good, but this certainly could’ve been worse.

James Dean’s Cursed Car

Hollywood actor James Dean was killed in a car accident in 1955, and word of the infamous cursed Porsche 550 Spyder has spread ever since, thanks to a series of spooky coincidences. When Dean first showed the customized car, also known as "Little Bastard", to actor Alec Guinness, Guinness told him: “if you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week”.

Sure enough, Dean was killed in the car just seven days later, but the coincidences don’t end there. After the car was resold to George Barris, it slipped off its trailer and crushed the legs of the mechanic repairing it.

William Eschrid and Troy McHenrythen purchased the engine and put it into race cars, but while racing against each other McHenry lost control and hit a tree, killing him instantly. Barris then agreed to give the car’s remnants to an exhibition, but its first location, a garage, burnt down, and at the second showing at a local high school the car fell off its display and broke a student's hip.

These are just a few of the malevolent coincidences in the long history of the cursed car, and legend has it only one piece now remains in the Historic Auto Attractions museum in Illinois.

Almost Screwed

Imagine arriving at your destination after a long drive and finding a screw wedged between the rubber ridges of your tire.

This incredibly lucky coincidence was just one wrong move away from bringing this driver to a complete standstill, not to mention the cash saved. After being so nearly screwed – literally – this car lives to ride another day.

Enzo Ferrari and Mesut Ozil

In some religions, like Buddhism and Taoism, there is a belief that when we die our spirit is reborn as another human or animal. You may not in believe it yourself, but there are a few unmistakable coincidences which are hard to argue with.

Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari passed away on August 14th, 1988, and almost exactly two months later, on October 15th, 1988, German footballer Mesut Ozil was born. Despite no real relation between them, anyone might think that the two are twins or father-and-son. Just an eerie coincidence, or something more?

Booth Saves Lincoln

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth on that fateful day in 1865 is so famous that it’s become known as the ‘crime of the century’ – but what if I told you Booth saved Lincoln’s life not long before? Well, that’s not exactly true as this story actually features another Booth, his older brother Edwin, and Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln, but it’s still a historic coincidence.

Sometime between 1863-4, fate bought the men together at a crowded train station in New Jersey, when Robert Lincoln was leaning up against a train while purchasing an overnight ticket. When the train suddenly moved off, Lincoln was rushed off his feet and started to fall into the tracks, but Edwin seized him by the coat collar and saved him.

Lincoln recognized Edwin, who was a stage actor, thanked him, and recounted the incident several times, only for the cruel events of 1965 to make this one ironic historic coincidence.

Unexpected Visitor

The keenest nature lovers will go to great lengths to spot their favorite species in the wild, but sometimes we need a little helping hand from mother nature. A butterfly hunter definitely got a pleasant surprise when the little fella they were looking for landed right on top of his own picture. What are the chances? Or maybe he was just looking for a potential mate.

Clean Break

We’ve all made a fatal error in the kitchen at some point by dropping something ceramic which shatters all over the floor, but one Reddit user had to share this incredibly lucky coincidence which also happened to save them a lot of tedious cleaning up.

Without a single loose shard this is one seriously satisfying clean break, but for all the sticklers out there; just how perfect is it?

Deus Ex Prediction

The classic role-playing PC game Deus Ex, released in 2000, is a staple of gaming culture but it also has a reputation for some very eerie future predictions. The dystopian narrative is set in New York City in the year 2052, but some of the most eagle-eyed players noticed one glaring omission in the iconic skyline: the missing World Trade Center, or twin towers.

According to game-makers, the reason for this was nothing more than a lack of game memory, but their absence still needed explaining, and that’s where things get weird. According to the plot, the twin towers were destroyed in a terrorist attack, a good year before the actual 9/11 attacks took place.

Toe Swap

Bodily mutations like polydactyly, which results in extra fingers or toes, can be more common than you’d think. However, meeting someone with a similar physical defect as you is unlikely to be a regular occurrence, so these colleagues were more than surprised to find that while one of them has six toes, the other only has four.

In the US, the odds of having 6 toes is 1 in 1,339 people, while the odds of having just four are 1 in 30,000-40,000, making the chances of these two meeting incredibly slim. If only there was some way they could perform some kind of swap.

Message in a Bottle

Your chances of finding a message in a bottle are about the same as your chances of finding a golden ticket in a Wonka bar, so a Norwegian woman was seriously intrigued when one washed up at her local beach on the island of Ingøy.

After salvaging the unusual bottle from the rocky shoreline, Helene took the bottle home and carefully picked out the rolled-up note inside. On the piece of paper was a child’s drawing dated May 14, 1996, accompanied by a name and address.

To her surprise, it was her childhood home address in the village of Havøysund, and the name was of her younger brother, who had unexpectedly passed away 4 years earlier. Although she can’t recall her brother making the note at just 5 years old she assumes an older sibling helped him write the address, and she was delighted that the 23-year-old message made its way back to her.

The Right Path

Sometimes things fall right into place unexpectedly, and you can't blame this dog-walker for stopping to snap a photo of this momentous occasion.

It just so happens that these well-behaved pups are standing on the path which best matches their fur pattern, which is a good thing because this would’ve seriously triggered my OCD otherwise. I guess they just don’t see eye to eye.

Meteor Lands On Commette House

In October 2018, a family from Paris returned home from vacation and noticed unusual damp stains on their ceiling, so they decided to call in a roofer suspecting a leak in the attic. Once aloft, the worker reported back that he’d found a tile so mightily smashed that only Superman could’ve broken it in such a way.

On closer inspection, the baffled roofer recovered a small heat-blackened object lodged in the insulation. The family then had the offending object inspected and were shocked to learn that it was of extra-terrestrial origin. In fact, it was an 88 gram meteorite which had been in the atmosphere for around 4.5 billion years.

Only around 50 meteorites have been known to land on French soil in the past 400 years, and this was the first ever found within 80km of Paris, but that’s hardly the most amazing part of the story. It just so happens that the family’s surname is actually Comette! So at least we know that if there are aliens up there, they’ve got a sense of humor.

Freak Weather

A sudden rain shower can easily ruin your plans for the day, so being clued up on the local forecast is always a good idea before leaving the house. But what exactly do you call the weather in the image below, literally a 50% chance of rain?

The odds of this happening to you must be pretty slim, and I can’t decide whether starting on the already-wet side or walking into the rain would be the better option.

Baptist Church Explosion Spares Choir

On the evening of Wednesday, 1st March 1950 a church choir practice was scheduled at the West Side Baptist Church at the regular time of 7:20 pm, but at 7:27 pm a devastating gas explosion completely destroyed the building.

Astonishingly, none of the 15 choir members were present, so no one was injured in the disaster. Every single member, including the choir director and the reverend, was late to practice that evening, for reasons varying from running errands, posting a letter or having car trouble.

This mass lateness was particularly unusual because the choir director was notoriously strict on punctuality, and as each member arrived to witness the devastation they slowly realized they’d all fortunately escaped it. To this day, all 15 survivors believe the remarkable series of coincidences to be a case of divine intervention.

Glitch In The Matrix

With over 7.8 billion people currently in the world, it’s entirely possible that you might run into your doppelganger someday, but the image below truly defies logical explanation.

Whoever captured this blonde-haired dystopia on the bus definitely revealed a glitch in the matrix, or maybe there was just a sale on beige coats and blonde highlights down at the salon. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened either, the clones in the bus photo below even have matching boyfriends!

Fused Bullets

The 1915 WW1 bullets in the image below look like something from a slow-mo scene in The Matrix, and it’s hard to believe something like this could even happen in the first place.

In reality, the Gallipoli War bullets didn’t exactly collide in mid-air, as the more likely scenario is that one bullet was fired and coincidentally hit a loaded round in the soldier's ammo pouch, pulling the unfired bullet from the live round to create this immense display of firepower. This explains why the fired round has ‘rifling marks’ while the penetrated round doesn’t.

It might not be exactly what it looks like, but at the battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War in 1963 so many rounds were fired that a few bullets, known then as ‘Minié balls’, did hit each other. Due to the immense speed and impact of the collision, the result is less reminiscent of the penetrated WW1 bullets, as the two Minié balls fused together into one unrecognizable mass like these.

If you were amazed at these incredible coincidences, you might want to check out our entire One In A Million Coincidences series. Thanks for reading!