Focus: What are the chances of that?
A whale jumping out of the water and on to your yacht seems like a billion-to-one shot, but it happened last week. And, as David Randall reveals, those who investigate unbelievable events know that the extraordinary happens every day
24 August 2003


A holidaying family from Coventry was sailing off the Australian coast last week when a humpback whale jumped clear out of the water and landed on their yacht, much to the distress of mast, sails and sailors. Of all the oceans in all the world, the whale had to fall into theirs. What are the chances of that happening? There are 135 million square miles of ocean and the boat was only 30ft long. Randomly toss a humpback whale in the air and the odds of it hitting any particular ten yards of sea are about one-in-far-too-many-to-get-your-head-round. Wow.

Well, yes, as those of us who spend our lives monitoring the planet's more ludicrous events would say, up to a point. For we know the really freaky thing would be the world going very long without remarkable happenings. As Paul Sieveking, who has spent nearly 30 years with the Fortean Times, sifting and adding to its three-million-item archive of the strange, says: "Phenomena occur much more often than people imagine." And so, the world being in a constant state of Just Fancy That, we've developed a sort of Richter Scale of the Remarkable. It goes, as the pianists say, something like this:

1 Routine phenomena

Barely a day goes by without a letter delivered decades late (112 years, Australia to England is the record), a cat trapped under floors for weeks on end (always with the added detail that it survived by lapping condensation), a road accident between lorries carrying fortuitous loads (one with bacon, say, colliding with another bearing eggs), pets navigating vast distances to return home (normally cats, the record is held by a collie who managed, by stowing away on a boat, the 3,000 miles from Calcutta to Inverkeithing, Scotland), and various permutations of golfers holing in one (the odds on any ace are 27,000 to one).

2 The ring recovered

Lost rings found and returned by strangers are the small change of the phenomena world. They are, after all, made of substances that endure, and are often inscribed. In Hawaii, diver Ken DaVico reckons to find about 15 weddings rings a year in the sea, many of whose owners can be traced. Even if fish get there first all may not be lost: there are cases of rings being retrieved many years later from sharks, monkfish, mussels and pike. Far less common are losers making the find, as when Karen Goode went to a Pembrokeshire beach and found a ring she had lost when bathing 10 years before.

3 Lightning striking more than twice

Instances of people (invariably park rangers or similar) being struck more than five times are almost commonplace. Few women, however, have been unluckier than Martha Martika, a Bulgarian who has been widowed not once, not twice, but three times by lightning strikes. But this pales compared to the loss suffered by the Bena Tshadi football club in the Congo who, on 25 October 1998, had all 11 players killed by lightning during a match. The opposition was untouched.

4 Long-lost Uncle Billy only lives down the road!

Long-lost relatives, like rings, have a habit of turning up in the strangest ways. Sisters Barbara Small and Doreen Frost, adopted separately in 1943, bumped into each other in the butcher's shop after an interval of 52 years; and John Leadbitter of Southampton had been trying for decades to trace his brother, whom he had not seen for 40 years, when he met a woman who said "You look like my husband". The rest you can guess.

5 The freaky fall

Babies falling 17 floors and landing on their nappies are not the only ones to survive long drops. Only last month a woman slipped off Beachy Head and was caught on a narrow ledge hundreds of feet from the ground. Snow often plays a part, cushioning the fall - of a Japanese climber who tumbled 4,000ft off Mount Rishiri, for instance - and giving many the owner of a failed parachute a soft landing. For a true miracle, however, try the Swiss pensioner who was blown by a freak wind from his 17th-floor balcony, only for another gust to propel him safely on to a lower balcony.

6 The spooky coincidence

Many - like two people at a party sharing a name, or a birthday, or even the famous coincidences between the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy - are not that unusual, people's amazement at them being due largely to ignorance of the laws of probability. And yet... Sir Anthony Hopkins, left, got on the Tube after a fruitless search for George Feifer's novel The Girl from Petrovka. He looked down, and there on the next seat was a copy of the book. It was the author's own, stolen two years before. Two more classics: in 2001 Laura Buxton released a balloon in Staffordshire. It was found 140 miles away - by a girl called Laura Buxton. Neville Ebin died in Bermuda when a taxi knocked him off his moped. A year later his brother was killed on the same moped in the same street by the same taxi driven by the same man and carrying the same passenger. And, best of all, in Massachusetts in 1965 Roger Lausier, aged four, was saved from drowning by a woman called Alice Blaise. Nine years later Roger saw a man drowning on the same beach, dived in and saved him. He was Alice Blaise's husband.

7 The ironic exit

Courtesy of the not-so-Grim Reaper comes the following: South African Danie du Toit gave a lecture warning that death could occur at any time. He sat down, popped in a peppermint, and promptly choked to death on it. In 1998 Jose Ricart was walking around Burgos, Spain, with a banner that read "The End of the World is Nigh". Sure enough a lorry ran him over. And in 1988 Anderson Godwin, a murderer reprieved from the electric chair, was sitting on a steel commode and bit through a wire while trying to fix his TV headphones, thus turning his metal toilet into a version of Old Sparky. WOW! What are the odds against that? Well, rather less than you might think, even for something so utterly unusual. Nine years later exactly the same thing happened to Laurance Baker, a Pittsburgh prisoner who had also been spared the electric chair. Billion? Schmillion. Happens every day. 

The probability of you following the maths of this is, er, quite high 
To understand the weird world of billion-to-one chances, you need to have, I'm afraid, a little working knowledge of statistics. Nothing too onerous, just enough to prevent your jaw from sagging and your eyes from going pop every time someone spins a yarn of alleged freakishness.

To illustrate this, we take you over to Anytown Crown Court where the DNA expert has just left the witness box, and Mr Sebastian Smarmy QC, for the prosecution, has turned to address the jury. "So, as you have heard," he says, "the chances of the samples found at the scene matching anyone other than the defendant are" - and here he pauses - "a million to one."

Impressive? Would you convict on that? Well, if you did, you'd be falling for what is known as the "prosecutor's fallacy". Sebastian has made it seem that the chances of anyone other than the man in the dock committing the crime are so small as to be hardly worth considering. In fact, probability theory would express the chances in another way, and thankfully Ms Daphne Simpkins, counsel for the defence, knows that. "We have heard," she says, "that the DNA matching is a one-in-a-million chance. Since there are approximately 50 million people in this country, we can conclude that 50 of them have DNA which would match that found at the scene. Therefore, far from a one-in-a-million chance that it was not my client who committed this crime, there is, based on the DNA, only a one-in-50 chance that he did commit it."

Probability is particularly relevant to events peddled as coincidences. Take any two celebrities, compare their data and spookiness sets in, eg comedian Steve Martin and Prince Albert: both became famous in their 20s; both married women called Victoria. As distinguished Harvard mathematician John Allen Paulos has pointed out, on such random (and statistically highly probable) associations are conspiracy theories constructed.

Then there's birthdays. How many people do you need in a room to get a 50-50 chance of them sharing a date? 180? No, 23, with which you get 256 possible pairings. And the probability, every so often, of a much smaller number sufficing is very good indeed. Apply that thinking to the wider world, and you can see, with all the possible variables of people, animals, and the elements, that the chances of regular, weird conjunctions are actually very high.