In 1979, a German magazine – Das Besteran – ran a story writing competition. Readers were asked to send in unusual and interesting stories, but they had to be based on true incidents. The winner, Walter Kellner of Munich, had his story published in the magazine. He wrote about a time when he was flying a Cessna 421 between Sardinia and Sicily. He encountered engine trouble at sea, landed in the water, spent some time in an emergency dinghy and was then rescued. This story was spotted by an Austrian, also named Walter Kellner, who said that the German Kellner had plagiarised the story. The Austrian Kellner said that he had flown a Cessna 421 over the same sea, experienced engine trouble and was forced to land in Sardinia. It was essentially the same story, with a slightly different ending. The magazine was forced to check both stories, and amazingly, both turned out to be true, even though they were almost identical.
On a June night in 1930, police patrolman Allan Falby, from Texas, had a car crash and ruptured an artery in his leg. The bleeding was so severe that he would have died if it wasn’t for the intervention of a passer-by called Alfred Smith. He applied a tourniquet to Falby’s leg, and saved him. Five years later, when Falby was back on the beat, he was called to the scene of a car crash. There, he found a man with a ruptured artery in his leg. It was Alfred Smith, the same man who had rescued him before in identical circumstances.
There are enough weird theories surrounding President John F Kennedy to fill an entire bookshelf, but one of the more amusing is that he ws connected to President Lincoln, by unusual coincidence. The first, and most simple observation, is that both the names Lincoln and Kennedy have 7 letters. While Lincoln was shot in a theatre, and his assassin ran to a warehouse, the opposite happened to Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald (if he was the assassin, lol), shot from a warehouse and then ran to a theatre. Another coincidence is that President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, while Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. After their assassinations, both were replaced as President by men called Johnson.
Claude Volbonne killed Baron Rodemire de Tarazone of France in 1872. The coincidence is that 21 years earlier, the Baron’s father had been murdered by somebody else called Claude Volbonne.
On the 26th November, 1911, three men were hanged at Greenberry Hill in London after being convicted of the murder of Sir Edmund Berry. Their names were Green, Berry and Hill.
As the inhabitants of Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, were watching a scene in the film Around the World in 80 Days, where a hot air balloon was about to take off, their TV sets went off due to a power cut. Nearby, power lines had been damaged. A hot air balloon had crashed into them.
Erskine Lawrence Ebbin and his brother Neville both died, exactly a year apart, at the age of 17. They were both riding the same moped in Bermuda, which was hit by the same taxi, which was carrying the same passenger, on the same street.
