Interesting times - strange but true

There is a history of strange coincidences in my family. Genetic or pure chance- who knows? I’ve been a professional ecologist for over half a century, and on occasion have seen some quite impossible things that, even now, I cannot ‘explain’. As a scientist am of course familiar with problems in which it is necessary to distinguish between coincidence and correlation, and I have had to treat the straight and narrow track of due diligence and caution in dealing with many puzzling occurrences in my career as a globe-trotting consultant. But there have been some incidents in which I have been completely unable to draw any conclusions Here are some examples. 1. Random selection of a missing item amongst many thousands. During my National Service in 1958 I trained as a medical radiographer at RAMC Woolwich in London, UK. One morning I went into the room where patient X-ray records and photographs were stored. In those days X-ray images were on large photographic sheets of film, which were kept in very large identical brown envelopes. There were many thousands of envelopes on the racks of shelves along one very long wall of this room. I realised that there was something wrong when I heard the alarmed voices almost panicking because a very important patient was undergoing surgery and the radiologist and staff were unable to locate his vital X-ray record in this vast rack of records - it had apparently been misfiled. Without even knowing the name of the officer whose records they were looking for, I walked to the rack of files, picked out one, without even looking at the name on the envelope, and gave it to the staff. It was the correct file. (And no, it was not one that I myself might have filed wrongly - I was still only at the beginning of my training, and had never been involved in either taking patient X-rays or in filing any records.) 2. Remarkable accuracy of an archery shot. For a brief period I went out with a girl from Kent, but we went to different Universities in 1961, she to Cambridge and I to Southampton, and we drifted apart. Our only continuing contact was a somewhat competitive one - she became Captain of Archery at Cambridge whilst I held the same position at Southampton. Although neither of us had taken any serious interest in the sport before we went to University, our relationship dwindled to a purely competitive one, and in each annual Inter-University Archery competition we tried to out-do each other personally. During the last of our matches, at Cambridge in 1964, the event was a two-day meeting, with a ‘Clout Shoot’ on the second day. In a clout shoot an arrow is stuck in the ground a long way away from the shooting line (up to 180 yards), with a small piece of cloth (the ‘Clout’) tied to it as a marker. Archers compete to see who can get as close to the clout as possible. Competition between us was fierce, but I had a considerable advantage, as I was using the most powerful bow at the meeting, and could sight directly on the target. She.on the other hand, had a weaker bow, and had to simply aim as high as possible in the general direction, and hope her arrows got close - 180 yards was actually at the extreme range of her equipment. Although I got pretty close to the clout, I had to concede defeat when one of her arrows hit the one to which the clout was tied precisely where it stuck up out of the ground - a purely accidental precision of zero inches at 180 yards (6,480 inches!) 3. Expecting the unexpectable. In 1964 I became engaged to a girl in Southampton in my last year at University there. When I left University I got a job in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and went back to Southampton some weekends, hitch-hiking. One Friday I decided to go back to Southampton, and set off without letting her know. When my last ride dropped me the outside the town I got a bus into the City Centre, late in the afternoon. I had never taken that route into the city before - usually my rides dropped me close to the house where we were living. When I got off the bus, she was waiting at the bus stop, and told me that she knew I would be there, so came to meet me. 4. Freaking out the teacher over predicting the cards in a Zener card pack. For a short time, around 1973, we lived near Fleet in Hampshire, and our daughter, then aged seven, went to the local village primary school. Shortly after she started there, the school held an Open Day, and one of the teachers decided to demonstrate - for reasons that I still find surprising - chance and probability, and produced a pack of Zener cards. These cards were devised by Karl Zener in the 1930s, who worked with J B Rhine, ‘the Father of Modern Parapsychology’. The decks contain 25 cards, about the size of playing cards, and each card has one of five symbols on one side - a cross, star, wavy lines, a circle and a square. The idea is that one person is shown a card at random, and the other - unable to see it - has to try to guess what the symbol is. If the guesses are random, then they will generally average five correct guesses. If they get significantly more than that, then this suggests that there might be some other factor than chance at work, although occasionally someone may get a surprisingly large number correct purely by chance So I agreed to have a go with my daughter, and we started, watched by a group of parents and other children. Each time the teacher showed me a card my daughter guessed it correctly. By the time we had finished the entire pack, the teacher, and most of the onlookers, were completely spooked, yet there was absolutely no collaboration of trickery involved - we just did it, and my daughter identified all 25 cards correctly! 5. A last minute rendezvous? For many years my wife and my mother did not get on, and they rarely met for thirty years. Towards the end of her life my wife increasingly wanted to make up their difference, and I suspect so also did my mother. But they were never able to do so, because they lived several hundred miles apart and neither could travel. One morning my brother phoned me in Somerset to tell me that my mother had died in Kent, and asked me if I would be able to travel to attend my mother’s funeral. I had to tell him that unfortunately this would not be possible - my wife had died at almost the same time in Somerset. She was 59 years old, my mother 92. 6. Meteorology meets the Martial Arts! About 15 years ago I was Mission Leader for an International Development Agency in Qinghai Prefecture in Central China. The region has been an ethnic melting pot for centuries, with strong historical links to Tibet, and is presently under the unwelcome administration of China. There is strong resentment over Chinese development policy there, which is destroying the traditional highly productive agrarian economy to make room for more Han immigration - a politically-inspired increase in population that cannot be sustained by the limited environmental capacity of this mountainous region. My team was visiting a project in mountainous country, and we were being entertained to an evening meal by our Chinese hosts at a compound on the Project, and our food was being served by two young women, one Chinese and one Tibetan. After the meal our hosts announced that the women would sing to us, after which it would be our turn to entertain our hosts! So first the Chinese girl sang, an unremarkable romantic song, performed in an unremarkable voice as she coyly flirting with the foreign gentlemen. Then it was the Tibetan woman’s turn. Now you have to be aware that this all occurred in a high mountain area, far from any towns. It was early spring, a freezing cold evening with snow on the ground, and without a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky. Everything outside the small building was totally still. As the Tibetan girl started her song, her incredible voice literally raised the hairs on the back of my neck - this was no ordinary voice, its quality and power was astonishing - none of our Chinese hosts, nor even our interpreter, understood the language she used, but this young woman’s voice held everyone locked in their seats, as it rose and swelled until it totally filled the room. Nor was this any ordinary song - the defiance and challenge in this performance were unmistakable. And as she sang, something really extraordinary happened. The tin roof of the building started to shake, gently at first, but as she reached the heart of her song, it was rattling violently, and the entire building was shaking. Everyone was looking at each other in alarm, mesmerised by this amazing performance. But most eerily of all, this was only happening around our building: we were in the centre of a small but ferocious whirlwind, echoing that woman’s incredible voice and her penetrating song. And as she came to the end of it, the wind dropped, and then stopped entirely - everything outside the room was once again totally silent. In my years in martial arts I have seen many strange things that our science has no ability to explain. Just occasionally someone reveals a hint of what lies beneath the surface, and such moments are precious and, for those who can recognise them, they provide new insights into ourselves and the world around us. As she finished her song, I knew that this was no coincidental whirlwind - something quite deliberate and extraordinary had happened in those few moments. My colleagues and our hosts were alarmed, shaken even, but either closed their minds to it or else tucked it away into a safe closed box in their minds. Only I knew what had happened, as this apparently unremarkable young woman sang her defiance at the uncomprehending Chinese invaders of her homeland.. As we looked at each other as she finished, she knew that I understood what she had done, and she smiled. And a year later I was able to answer her appeal for help to stop the environmental and social devastation that the new ‘development’ projects were causing in the area. So, what are the odds that local weather conditions could have suddenly caused an extremely localised, stationary, whirlwind lasting only for exactly the same period of time as this remarkable woman was singing, and occurring at no other time during our stay in the region? A ‘traveller’s tale if you like - but this really did happen, and is something that I treasure and shall never forget.