One in a Million Coincidences - Part 6

In December 1979, Finnish woman Tuula Hyvärinen boarded a four seater plane flying over Southwest Iceland but it seemed fate was not on her side. Little did Tuula know, she was about to beat all the odds by surviving both a plane crash and a helicopter crash within the space of a few hours! To find out more about this mind-boggling event plus plenty more that’ll make you say, “what are the odds!”, let's delve into one in a million coincidences you won't believe.

Rebecca Townsend

What’s on your bucket list? Visit the Eiffel tower? Swim with dolphins? Get the perfect body? 17 year old Rebecca Townsend from Connecticut had just three things on hers:

1. Kiss in the rain

2. Fly to Spain

3. Save a life

The goals were part of a school assignment, and over the next few years after writing it Rebecca had ticked off the first two: she flew to Spain with her family and kissed her boyfriend in the rain.

After graduating from high school in 2015, Rebecca was due to attend Notre Dame but tragedy struck on July 2nd. That fateful night while on the way back from a fireworks display, Rebecca and her friend Ben Arne were hit by a car.

Sadly, Rebecca did not survive the accident but it seems like she managed to complete her bucket list in her final moments. The last thing Ben remembers from that night is Rebecca pushing him out of the way of the car and telling him to hurry, saving his life and sacrificing hers in the process.

Rebecca’s family set up a Facebook page in their daughters memory called Remembering Rebecca, and in the years since people all over the world have been committing small acts of altruism in her name. We should all be a bit more like Rebecca Townsend, don’t you think?

Thrill of the Chase

This next one was sent in to us by an anonymous viewer of our YouTube channel, but we’ll call him Jim for story purposes. According to Jim who’s now in his 60’s it all took place in the early 1970s in Westland, Michigan when he was still a teenager.

Jim and his friends would ride their motorbikes on private property, with the owner’s permission that was adjacent to John Glen High School and separated by a small wooded area. One day, the owner decided to sell the property and revoked permission to ride there.

But Jim and his pals had no idea, and only discovered they were trespassing when a police car arrived one Saturday afternoon. The teenagers panicked and decided to flee through the woods, knowing the police car was unable to follow them. Assuming the cops had given up altogether, Jim stayed to ride some more, until an officer on a motorcycle showed up about 15 minutes later!

Thinking fast, Jim took off into the woods again, but he knew that the cop bike could go wherever his minibike could. With the officer hot on his tail, Jim rode past the school, onto the suburban streets and made it home which was about a mile away.

Although he was relieved to have made a lucky escape, he wondered why the cop never caught up with him. Then 20 years later Jim was talking to his brother, a fellow motorbike enthusiast, who mentioned that he worked with a former policeman at the Ford Livonia Transmission Plant who claimed he only ever had one accident while working as a motor officer.

Apparently, he’d been chasing a kid on a minibike who drove down the school pedestrian walkway, and he jammed up his bike trying to go through the poles at the end of the path! The officer went door to door looking for Jim but eventually gave up.

When Jim’s brother showed his co-worker a photograph of his brother’s old minibike, he knew instantly it was him! Thankfully, the only thing hurt in the process of that insane coincidence was the officers pride, and some damage to his old bike!

Runs in the Family

On 1st December 1973, 16 year old high schooler Carol Briggs from Pittsburgh USA gave birth to a baby boy named Jon Kenneth Briggs. Briggs decided to keep the baby a secret from everyone apart from her immediate family, she even decided against telling the father, a teenage fling who had gone to college on a scholarship before even she realized she was pregnant.

When he was 6 weeks old, she agreed to put the baby up for adoption. Flashforward to November 2017, and Briggs’ baby 44 year old former NFL player and now coach Deland McCullough decided it was time to look for his birth parents.

McCullough has been adopted by Adelle Comer, before moving to Southern California and starting his own family with his wife Darnell. New laws in Ohio and Pennsylvania had called for the unsealing of adoption records, and McCullough finally received his adoption papers in the mail.

His original birth certificate showed his birth name, Jon Kenneth Briggs, and the name of his mother Carol Denise Briggs, but there was no mention of his father. After tracking down his mother on Facebook, McCollough couldn’t wait to ask about his father.

But when Briggs spoke his name Sherman Smith McCollough nearly passed out. Not only had he known his father for 28 years, but Smith was also his running coach and mentor who McCullough had looked up to since he was 16 years old.

People had always joked how alike the two looked but neither thought anything of it. Not only did they look alike, but both men are also incredible sportsmen, you could probably say it runs in the family!

Twin-ception

If you answered C, congratulations you’re a winner baby! Although the two minor league baseball players in the image below seem like a dead ringer for identical twins on first glance, they actually share no DNA. Their ginger beards and glasses aren’t their only similarities, either. Both men are named Brady Feigl, and each stands 6 foot 4!

Even more spooky is that both players underwent "Tommy John surgery" to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament inside the elbow, caused by repetitive throwing and catching and even used the same doctor!

When it comes to differences; one Brady is left handed, though the other throws right handed, while one Brady is 24 years old and plays for a Single-A affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, but the other is 29 and pitches for the Texas Rangers Triple-A club.

The pair first learned about each other after the younger Brady was mistaken for the older Brady by the office of Dr. James Andrews, the surgeon who operated on their elbows in 2015. Confusion over the two doppelgängers has run rampant online, with the Ole Miss Baseball social media account even wishing the wrong brady a happy birthday on twitter in November 2017!

In February 2019, the two players decided to settle the score for good by meeting for the first time and taking a DNA test. Unfortunately, the test only confirmed what they already knew, the pair do not share any DNA just genes!

Summer Lovin’

In summer 2017, Heidi Parker and Ed Savitt tied the knot in Derbyshire, U.K. The lovebirds who now live in London, first met at Newcastle University in 2011 when Ed was studying Psychology and Business and Heidi was studying Economics and Management or so they thought.

They got talking when Ed messaged Heidi asking her how to use the tumble dryer in his student accommodation as she had been a previous tenant, now there’s a new pick-up line. Four years after they started dating, the couple went for dinner with both of their mothers in South-west London.

During the dinner, Heidi’s mother Kay Parker mentioned that Heidi had a holiday romance with a boy called Ed when she was 6 years old. The group laughed at the coincidence but didn’t think much of it until two weeks later, when Kay was rummaging in the attic and came across a photo of her daughter with the boy from their family holiday to Turkey in 1997.

Shockingly, Kay instantly recognized him as Heidi’s current boyfriend Ed! Ed’s family then dug out their own photo album from the same holiday and found more photos of the duo. Ed and Heidi were so dumbstruck by the coincidence that they even decided to recreate one of the shots decades later! Separated as kids, reunited as students and married as adults!

Bait and Switch

This next coincidence was sent in by a viewer of our YouTube channel named Jérémie from the city of Terrebonne, in Quebec, Canada. Jérémie is an avid fisherman and loves to fish by the riverside of la Rivière-des-Mille-Îles. Although it’s a fun hobby, fishing there can sometimes get difficult when the water level is low, because the lure can often get stuck at the bottom of the river.

On the 20th June 2019, Jérémie prepared to go fishing at the river and grabbed his favorite lure which had already bought him great luck catching walleyes and carps in the past. But not long into the trip, the lure got caught at the bottom of the river and broke off. Distraught, Jérémie swore never to replace the lure.

Then almost a year later on the morning of 16th June 2020, he cast his line when it snagged on something big. Excited by the prospect of a juicy catch, Jérémie bought in the line to discover it was nothing but a branch. But on closer inspection, he noticed something else his favorite lure was tangled up in it too!

Jérémie had just been reunited with the lure when he lost it again to a greedy lake sturgeon. It seemed the story was over, until he embarked on yet another trip on his uncle’s motorboat nearly two months later on 1st August 2020. During that trip, Jérémie caught an impressive fish and not just any fish, but the exact same lake sturgeon, which still had the lure hanging from it’s gills!

Good Fortune

No matter how many times you play, your chances of winning the lottery are still pretty slim. But back in March 2005, a staggering 110 players came ridiculously close when they each managed to score 5 out of the 6 correct U.S. Powerball lottery numbers. They may not have won the grand prize, but the incredible feat still made them all second place winners.

Considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five second place winners. Each winner was due $100,000- $500,000, meaning the 110 players would cost almost $19million in unexpected pay outs!

But how could over 100 people score the 1 in 3 million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33 and 39? Of course, Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud, but the truth was even more shocking: the players had all got their numbers from inside fortune cookies.

The 110 players had all missed out on being first place by just one number 42 after they each picked number 40 instead thanks to the fortune slip. As winners from Idaho, Texas, Kansas, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Minnesota and more came forward saying they’d got their numbers from a fortune cookie, lottery officials did some investigating and discovered the batch had come from the same Long Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food.

Derick Wong from Wonton Food said number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day after workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them out randomly. The whole thing might’ve been one incredible coincidence, but the unexpected second place winners almost exhausted the $25million reserve held for unusual situations.

Owen J. Baggett: Parachute Shoots Down A Plane In WW2

You may think you have skills, but you don’t know anything until you hear the incredible war story of Owen J. Baggett. During WW2, Baggett served as a Second Lieutenant in the 7th Bomb Group of the United States of America Army Forces.

The group was working with the 10th Air Force in India, which was responsible for defending the supply line from China to India, as well as interfering with the Japanese supply line from the north of the country to Rangoon, Burma. The pilots would fly B-24 bomber planes in formation.

During one of those missions, the B-24’s of Baggett’s unit were intercepted by Japanese fighters and both sides opened fire. Baggett’s plane received a serious hit to the fuel tanks and the oxygen bottles around him and his comrades shattered. Although the crew did everything to try and save it, it soon became apparent that the aircraft was finished.

Baggett and the others jumped from the burning plane moments before it exploded and opened their parachutes to make their descent but the peril was far from over. The Japanese fighters started firing at the men and managed to shoot two of the crew members out of the sky.

Baggett was shot in the arm and decided to play dead, but quickly pulled his .45 caliber handgun out of its holster and rested it against the side of his leg. When a Japanese fighter came to double check that he was really dead, the enemy pilot opened his canopy to get take a better look a mistake that proved fatal.

Thinking fast, Baggett raised his pistol and took four shots. Miraculously, one of the bullets struck the enemy pilot in the head and caused the plane to enter a tailspin before crashing as Baggett landed among his remaining crew members. Talk about a one in a million shot!

Tuula Hyvärinen: Survived Two Plane Crashes in a Single Day

Tuula Hyvärinen and her friend Maria Elisa Falkenburg had been working in Iceland as physical therapists since January 1979. As December rolled around, the pair prepared to return home for the holidays. They decided to take a scenic flight over Southwest Iceland and asked their friend Gérard Delavault to fly them.

John Murthag Russell or "Russ" was the last person to join them aboard the four seat plane. They took off from Reykjavík Airport and flew over Gullfoss waterfall and Geysir, as well as Þingvallavatn lake. Everything was going smoothly, until the plane crashed suddenly over Mosfellsheiði heath.

All four people were severely injured, but they managed to get out of the wreckage and wait in the snow for help. Rescue workers soon arrived on the scene followed by a large U.S. rescue helicopter but their ordeal was far from over. The decision was made to fly Russ to hospital first and bring back two doctors to attend to the rest.

When the helicopter returned, there were 11 people on board including Tuula, Maria and Gérard the original plane’s pilot. But just a few minutes after take-off the helicopter also crashed, just hundreds of meters from the first accident site.

Thankfully, Tuula and Maria were able to haul themselves from the wreckage for a second time and received some much needed pain killers right away. All Tuula remembers is insisting that she was transported to hospital by ambulance this time.

Joy Andrew: Survived A Murder Plot And A Plane Crash

Some people seem to have luck on their side, and no one knows that better than 99 year old Joy Andrew. That incredible woman has cheated death so many times the grim reaper doesn’t even bother swiping right for her on Tinder anymore! Joy was born and raised in London in the 1920s, before joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force as a sergeant during the second world war.

After the war, she joined the British Army of the Rhine, an occupation force in Germany created after the two world wars. She was posted to Dusseldorf where she lodged with an elderly couple who she became very friendly with, but whose daughter was part of a certain German fascist group beginning with "N".

Joy who was from a German family herself, was allocated a driver to take her wherever she wanted to go while she was in Germany. One day, the driver picked Joy up and on the way to her destination, deliberately crashed the car in an attempt to assassinate her. Soon afterwards, the driver was arrested and found to belong to that very same fascist group.

Next, Joy joined the British Airways Corporation as one of the first air hostesses travelling internationally, mostly in Africa. But Joy was struck by bad luck once again when the pilot made a dreadful mistake and flew off course, running out of fuel and crashing in Libya. One passenger died when the plane broke up on impact, and the rest of the people on board, including Joy, were rescued by Bedouins a nomadic Arab of the desert.

In the 1950s, Joy married a squadron leader in the RAF named David Andrew, and in 1963 the couple adopted a daughter, Michele. Joy then spent many years as a housewife and even defeated breast cancer in the 1970s.

Despite suffering from dementia, Joy had lived many happy decades in Yorkshire when her family received some heart wrenching news on May 16th, 2020: Joy had tested positive for COVID-19. She wasn’t eating or drinking, and her oxygen levels were fluctuating wildly, Michele was told to bid her mother a final farewell.

For the next two days, Joy’s life hung in the balance. But after everything she’d survived in her incredible life so far, she wasn’t going to let the virus beat her. Once again, Joy Andrew dodged death and beat COVID-19 just in time to celebrate her 100th birthday, what a woman!

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!