But just how remarkable are these events? Is the hedgehog experience of Dame West more or less remarkable than the meeting of the two women in the hospital twice on occasions two years apart? Are the odds of a spy living near you at the time you decide to write a novel involving a spy that much different from the odds of being dealt a bridge hand with 13 spades? Is it less likely that Utah, Omaha, Mulberry and two other common words would be used in a crossword puzzle just at the time a secret military operation has given them a secret significance, than that the sailor would get his class ring back a year and a half after losing it in the ocean?

Take the 13-spade bridge hand, where it is simple to calculate the odds. With 20 million bridge players dealing 30 hands a week, we should get one all-spade hand per 20 years. In fact, as bridge expert Oswald Jacoby pointed out, such hands are reported much more frequently, perhaps a dozen times per year. An obvious explanation, easily verified on several occasions, is that one or more players conspire to play a practical joke on the other players by simply stacking the deck. It is a harmless way to get your name and photograph in the newspapers. If two people in the same profession, who routinely must travel from Austin to New York several times per year on business, were to happen to meet in the airport or in a familiar hotel, we would hardly consider this as unusual. Yet it is not so much more unusual for two elderly friends to decide to take a vacation in Washington, D.C., in May to see the cherry blossoms, independently, and to run into one another by chance at one of the places every tourist visits while in Washington. Again, if hedgehogs are fairly common in English gardens, it is not too surprising that Dame West was writing about finding one and that in fact one was found in her garden. Again, if both of the women in Tulsa were married to men in the oil business, who are regularly separated from their wives for many months while they work in overseas oil fields, then our view of the probability of both women being in the maternity ward at the same time is greatly changed. Generally, people tend to underestimate grossly the probability of any event that happens to them, especially one perceived at "strange."

Pseudoscientists frequently take advantage of this inability of people to understand the nature of coincidence. Thus coincidences that are hardly remarkable are passed off as "miracles" that can only be explained by ESP, intervention by benevolent Space Brothers or guardian angels, etc. The failure to understand the odds is particularly noticeable when one hears about feats of alleged psychics, fortunetellers, astrologers, and others who claim to foresee future events.

Pseudoscientific predictors tend to stress the time or two they made a really spectacular correct "prediction" -- for some reason we don't hear about the thousand other "predictions" made by them during the same time period, that didn't quite pan out. Recall the fable about the boy who cried wolf; eventually he was correct, but he had given so many false alarms prior to that time that the villagers didn't respond to the valid warning. For some reason, many people in our society do not recognize the parallel between the boy in this fable and the alleged "psychics," who are allowed to get away with being wrong nearly all the time, and still are taken seriously on the rare occasions they happen to be correct.

Let's take an example. Suppose you try to guess every time the telephone rings who is calling before picking up the receiver. Inevitably you will be correct if you guess often enough, just by chance. The usual practice is to remember and talk about only the times when you were correct; but if you keep track of the misses as well as the hits, you will see that the correct guesses are no more frequent than sheer chance would imply. If we consider the hundreds of thousands of stories that are written by Dame West, Norman Mailer, and other thousands of active writers being published over the years, we soon realize that by accident some incident described in one of these stories will eventually prove to have parallels in real life. It simply has to be that way. The remarkable thing would be if none of those plausible incidents described by writers ever happened!

The point is that each moment of each day of even the most ordinary, humdrum life of an individual is filled with events, and each of those events, no matter how ordinary, is quite improbably. It is very improbable that just as I sit down to type something, a student comes into my office to ask me something. But I sit down to type very frequently, and students come into my office very frequently, so it's bound to happen sometimes. Only if every time I sat down to type, a student came into my office, would something miraculous be happening. Once this is appreciated for the events of our own humble lives, it should be clear that it must pertain for the lives of famous and important people as well. A "strange" event happening to a famous person, or at a crucial moment in history, is no more or less strange than a similar event happening to you in the bathtub tonight.

What would be paranormal, what would be miraculous, what would be unexplainable, would be if NO SUCH coincidence or unlikely accidents or "strange" events every happened to anyone.

Pseudoscience Fact Sheets: Resources to Promote Critical Thinking are produced by the Austin Society to Oppose Pseudoscience (with the assistance of AFF).

The complete collection of Pseudoscience Fact Sheets is available from AFF Electronic Bookstore. 43 pp.