Another Whiff of Coincidence

The aftermath of the superstorm prediction

A whiff of coincidence was in the air. Perhaps it was more than that. And I took notice. In the Autumn of 2008, the time-prompt phenomenon haunted me for weeks. On the Internet, people wrote about similar experiences. As a result, I became preoccupied with numbers for a while, most notably double-digit numbers and multiples of eleven. For instance, in December 2008, we passed a gas station in Sneek. There was a billboard indicating prices. One number was flashing, indicating a price of 1.199. 11 and 99 were both multiples of 11. And I noticed it because of my preoccupation. And so, eleven and some other numbers, for instance, the emergency services telephone numbers 112 and 911, play a significant role in the following report. Some of these stories might be lame, while others could make you wonder.

Also in December 2008, I predicted that a superstorm would strike the Netherlands on 9 February 2009, the birthday of the Lady from the dormitory. The storm came, but it was less severe and hit Northern France rather than the Netherlands. Charles de Gaulle International Airport of Paris had to be closed that day. You can read more about that here:

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The superstorm prediction story came with a peculiar sequel. On 1 June 2009, Air France flight 447 disappeared above the Atlantic Ocean. The incident involved an Airbus 330 with manufacturer serial number 660.1 Both are multiples of 11, referring to 11:11. Flight AF447 and the 9 February 2009 superstorm relate to the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris. It happened 112 days after 9 February 2009, while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number.

At first, I did not consider a relationship between the Air France AF447 flight disappearance and the superstorm. The next day, a helicopter crashed on Ameland.2 We were about to spend our holidays there, and there already had been a few coincidences related to Ameland. That attracted my attention, but I did not think much of it. The next day, my son Rob was watching the news. Suddenly he came to me yelling: ‘Guess what, the plane that crashed was due to arrive at 11:11 AM in Paris.’ That was incorrect. The plane was due to arrive at 11:10 AM. But Rob’s remark made me investigate the incident.

On 30 June 2009, Flight IY626 crashed in the Indian Ocean near Comoros,3 29 days after Flight AF447 disappeared above the Atlantic Ocean. AF447 was destined for the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris. IY626 had departed from this airport. There are 29 days between 1 June 2009, the day flight AF447 disappeared and 30 June 2009, the day flight IY626 crashed, while 2/9 refers to 9 February (American notation).

The church tower in the pond at the university campus of Enschede played a central role in the circumstances that made me make the superstorm prediction. And university campus of Enschede was where I met the Lady. The artwork refers to flooded land. Enschede has area code 53. The last major flooding disaster in the Netherlands happened in 1953. This event is known as the February Storm of 53. The Dutch film De Storm about the 1953 flooding disaster came out in 2009.4

The premiere of the film, which lasts 110 minutes, was on 11 September 2009 (9/11, while 9+1+1=11 and 2+0+0+9 =11, making a reference to 11:11) at the 11th Festival Film by the Sea in Vlissingen.4 Vlissingen was the destination of our summer holidays in the four previous years. Enschede turns up in several spooky coincidences, so it is noteworthy that Enschede has a sorority named Spooky.5

Exactly three years after a blogger from Sargasso.nl posted the story about the fictional superstorm with a flooding disaster hitting the Netherlands on 9 February 2009, the presentation of the World Risk Index of the United Nations University was held on 2 September 2011. The Netherlands had the highest risk of flooding disasters in the European Union. The Netherlands is ranked number 69 worldwide,6 a peculiar ‘position’.

FC Twente becoming Dutch soccer champion

In 2010, FC Twente from Enschede became champion of the Dutch soccer Premier League for the first time ever. In 2009, AZ from Alkmaar had been champion. A is the first letter of the alphabet, while Z is the last. In Greek, that is Alpha Omega. On 21 December 2012, the day the Mayan calendar supposedly ended, there was one match in the Dutch soccer Premier League: AZ – FC Twente. In the years before 2009, PSV Eindhoven was the champion. Eindhoven means Final Gardens, a reference to Paradise. It is where the Lady from the dormitory currently lives.

On 2 May 2010, we went with my parents, my sister and brother-in-law and their children to an indoor playground in Almelo to celebrate my mother’s 65th birthday. It was the day FC Twente became champion. A screen played Disney XD channel for children. I was watching it. Three American football players appeared. One of them had shirt number 19, and another had 53. Then, the football players with numbers 19 and 53 stood side by side and began jumping, making the number 1953 noticed. It was the year of the flooding disaster, and it linked to Enschede because of the area code 53 and the church tower in the pond, and it happened on the day FC Twente from Enschede became champion.

In the years that followed, Ajax Amsterdam became champion. The Ajax team is nicknamed Sons of God, and Amsterdam is often abbreviated to Adam. Adam is the Son of God (Luke 3:38). Johan Cruijff, the most famous Ajax football player in history, has the initials JC like Jesus Christ. His nicknames were Number 14, The Skinny One and The Oracle. Number 14 was his shirt number. And that number refers to the initials of the Lady. I was a skinny person employed as an Oracle developer and database administrator. Cruijff also became the trainer for FC Barcelona in Spain. According to persistent rumours in the Dutch press, people in Barcelona called him The Saviour.

2 September 2011 is a curious date (2/9/11 or 2/9/2011 while 20=9+11), making multiple combinations of elevens. That day, the Dutch national soccer team, nicknamed the Dutch Eleven, won their Euro 2012 qualifying match against San Marino in Eindhoven. The score was 11-0, surpassing their previous 9-0 record score.7 This is a 9:11 reference. Soccer is played by two teams of 11 players, and 11:11-reference.

And on 2 September 2011 was the farewell party of star soccer player Ruiz of FC Twente, who played a crucial role in the championship of FC Twente in 2010.8 In his new team Fulham, Ruiz had number 11. His first match for his new team was on 11 September 2011. Remarkably, FC Twente played its next contest in group K of the Europa League on 15 September 2011 against Fulham, Ruiz’s new team. K is the eleventh letter of the alphabet, while the match result was 1-1. The return match was on 1 December 2011. 1 December is 1/12 (European notation), while 112 is the European emergency telephone number.

A peculiar set of plane crashes

On 15 September 2012, a small plane crashed in a field near Den Helder in the Netherlands. At the same time, there was an air show in Den Helder, but the accident was not related to the air show.9 That evening, another small plane crashed in the Netherlands in a field in Valkenswaard near Eindhoven. This plane had taken part in the Den Helder airshow earlier that day.10

On the same date, a small plane flying for the Dutch KLM Flight Academy was found crashed in a canyon in the mountains east of Phoenix, Arizona. Three people died on the crash site.11 Three weeks later, on 6 October 2012, another small aircraft flying for the KLM Flight Academy crashed into another small plane. Both managed to make an emergency landing, and nobody was injured.12 There had never been any accidents involving the KLM Flight Academy before.

The following related incident pairs can be identified: two planes crashing on the same day in the Netherlands and two aircraft of the KLM Flight Academy crashing, linked by the Netherlands and the date 15 September 2012. The number three occurred three times. Three planes were in the news on 15 September 2012, and three people were killed. And there were three weeks between the accidents.

And so, I pondered on 10 October 2012 whether or not the number three was part of this scheme. A few hours later, the news reported that three people had killed themselves in a rare triple suicide in Utrecht. Among the dead were two twin brothers aged 33.13 That made it even more bizarre. According to the report, police entered the apartment after the family had received farewell letters.

On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. The plane was a Boeing 777-200. The incident happened four months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) went missing on 8 March 2014. The aircraft is still missing, which makes its disappearance particularly mysterious. That plane also was a Boeing 777-200, and the 404th plane of that type produced while 404 is the number associated with missing (not found) web pages.

The Flight 17 plane first flew on 17 July 1997, exactly 17 years before the accident.14 That was exactly one year after the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 on 17 July 1996.15 It crashed 777 days before Swissair Flight 111.16 That is peculiar because of the numbers 777 and 111. Exactly 7 years, 7 months, and 7 days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down in Ukrainian airspace, Putin started the Ukraine war. Did he count the days? Probably not.

Looking at the numbers

Again in December 2008, we took a trip to Amsterdam by train. Rob and I had been noticing 11 related coincidences all day. In the evening, we were on the train destined for Sneek and sat down. Rob then said: ‘The number of this train unit has nothing to do with eleven.’ He was mistaken. The number was 242 or 2 * 11 * 11. And I took notice.

In January 2009 after work, I sat down in train unit 306. I realised that 306 is not a multiple of 11. My calculation was 330 – 306 = 14. It demonstrated that 306 was not divisible by 11. So this was not spooky. Then I looked to the left. On the track next to me was train unit 234. This number was not a multiple of 11 either as 234 – 220 = 14 also. Then I found myself contemplating whether or not the number 14 turning up was a coincidence. I looked to the right just when bus 14 was entering the bus station. 14 translated into letters is AD, the initials of the Lady. If you turn that number upside down, you get ‘hi’.

My lucky number was 26 because I was born on 26 November. As I remember it, the Lady was born on 9 February (9/2 European notation). That links the number 92 to Her. Now it happens to be that 92 is 26 upside down. And probably we were both born in 1968. We crossed each other’s path in 1989, while 89 is 68 upside down. That makes it a pair of related coincidences like 11:11. Also, 1968 and 1989 were revolutionary years. If this is not a mere coincidence, then some thinking has gone into this.

Numbers do not have any meaning except their value, and coincidences can happen by chance. Thinking of myself as rational, I once tried to debunk these suggestions as irrational. When commuting home from work on the train, I tried to convince myself that number coincidences are selective remembrance. If you focus on something, for instance, a specific number, you notice it more often. Upon nearing train station Sneek North, I told myself, ‘Let’s focus on 86, a number that has no meaning to me, and I will start to see it.’ And indeed, the following number I saw was 86 on the licence plate of a car parked at the station. Did that prove my point, or was Someone poking fun at me?

At the time, most Dutch licence plates had the following formats: AA-AA-99, 99-AA-AA, and 99-AAA-9 (A is a letter, and 9 is a number). The chance of a two-digit number like 86 on the first licence plate was close to one per cent. One year later, this incident came to my mind again. When parking my bike at work, I thought of it for no apparent reason. Then I walked down the parking lot and noticed the licence plates. Among the eight licence plates I saw, three had an 86, one had a 68, two had an 11, which might refer to 11:11, and two were unrelated to the incident, a pretty impressive score.

On 17 March 2012, the number 26 popped up conspicuously often. It never happened like that. As it is my lucky number, I would have noticed that. That afternoon Ingrid, Rob, and I were biking. The number 26 kept coming up, for instance, on licence plates. I began wondering what kind of luck was waiting for us. Rob wanted to go to the restaurant named Het Paviljoen near the lake. It was closed in March, so I warned him it would be closed. Rob wanted to go there anyway. The restaurant turned out to be open unofficially. The owner was waiting for a supply truck. It was late, and it arrived when we were there. After we left, the restaurant closed.

I also noticed the number 92. For a while, it appeared that when I left a building, the first car to pass often had the number 92 on its licence plate, perhaps, about one in three to five times, while once in a hundred was to be expected. Once, I tried to cross a road. The first car passing had a licence plate number with a 92. The second car also had 92 in its licence plate number. And so did the third. Only these three cars passed before I could cross. It was a temporary phase, and selective remembrance played a role, but it did not seem entirely coincidental.

A small white car with licence plate number 9-GXD-2 was parked in Leeuwarden on a parking lot near the train station nearly every morning for years. The letter O is not on Dutch car licence plates, so I imagined the X could represent an O linking God to 9 February (9-GOD-2). I also found this car parked 100 metres from my home in Sneek a few times. That may seem insignificant, but a related incident makes it noteworthy.

I own a green Opel Astra with licence plate TZ-GT-18. Once when we were on holiday in Zeeland, I noticed another green Opel Astra with licence plate TZ-GT-54. That attracted my attention. Later, I found it parked in Sneek near my home several times. It was in the same parking place where the car with licence plate 09-GXD-2 had also been. The distance between Zeeland and Sneek is 300 kilometres. That combination of peculiar events is like seeing 11:11.

Featured image: Poster for the film The Storm. Universal Studios (2009). [copyright info]

1. Air France Flight 447. Wikipedia. [link]
2. Helikopter stort neer boven Ameland. Volkskrant (2 June 2009). [link]
3. Yemenia Flight 626. Wikipedia. [link]
4. Stormachtige start voor 11e Film by the Sea. Trouw (9 September 2009). [link]
5. Lesleden dispuut Spooky doen graag uit de doeken wie ze zijn. Huis Aan Huis Enschede (4 May 2018). [link]
6. Nederland heeft grootste kans op natuurramp in Europa. Nu.nl (2 September 2011). [link]
7. San Marino on the end of record Netherlands win. UEFA (2 September 2011).
8. Verdrietige Ruiz verlaat Twente met pijn in het hart. Trouw (2 September 2011). [link]
9. Een gewonde bij vliegtuigcrash Den Helder. RTL Nieuws (15 September 2012). [link]
10. Straalvliegtuig gecrasht in Valkenswaard. Nu.nl (15 September 2012). [link]
11. 3 found dead after small plane crashes in Ariz. Fox News (15 September 2012). [link]
12. Weer ongeluk lesvliegtuig KLM. Trouw (6 October 2012). [link]
13. Drievoudige zelfmoord in Utrechtse studentenflat. Nu.nl (10 October 2012). [link]
14. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Wikipedia. [link]
15. TWA Flight 800. Wikipedia. [link]
16. Swissair Flight 111. Wikipedia. [link]

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