Tag: economics

Jokers on Files.

Joking Jokers

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In 2002, I began working as an Oracle database administrator at a government agency. Most people in the Netherlands know about the agency because it processes traffic fines. Therefore, it isn’t popular with the general public, just as the Internal Revenue Service isn’t. If someone asked who my employer was, I kept it vague and said the government or the Department of Justice. It didn’t take long for something to go seriously wrong. It went so seriously wrong so quickly that you might have suspected a curse if you had been of the superstitious type. On my second day on the job, one of the production systems crashed after running the batch jobs, leaving the database corrupt. After three days of searching, which included a weekend, I still hadn’t found the exact cause. When the operator restored the backup of the previous evening, which was still valid, and ran the batch jobs, the database became corrupt again.

It was probably a software bug, so I advised restoring the backup from the previous evening and upgrading the database software to see if that would solve the issue. Instead, the IT director declared a crisis and set up a multidisciplinary task force to address it. The head of the task force was a corpulent project leader who decided we should find the cause, which I hadn’t uncovered. I just wanted to fix the problem. Every day at 10 AM, there was a meeting to discuss the state of affairs. Every day, I proposed to upgrade the database software to see if it would help. And every day, my proposal was brushed aside. I would have done it myself, but I was a brand-new hire and didn’t have sufficient access rights. And the agency used VAX VMS, an unfamiliar operating system, so I couldn’t install software or restore backups myself.

Two weeks later, after the experts had weighed in and hired an Oracle database corruption expert, the cause remained elusive, and managers were getting desperate. Finally, they were willing to consider my suggestion. And it solved the problem. It was a harbinger of things yet to come. During the review, they grilled me for not being interested in researching the cause. I was not a team player, and didn’t play the political game of pleasing the higher-ups by telling them they were geniuses. I was fixated on results and said that solving a crisis was more important because it was a production system, and the users needed it to work. And the upgrade demonstrated that it was a software bug. So, what more was there to say?

If you had prejudices about the government, my employer didn’t dispel them. You expect red tape, risk-avoidance, rule-following, and the like. It was all there. One department excelled in a most particular fashion. If you made the request incorrectly, they would do nothing, even when it was clear what they had to do. You couldn’t disturb them between 10 and 11 AM when they were discussing the work. They didn’t seem to do much, so what did they discuss for 1 hour a day? Some colleagues may remember my so-called crusade against bureaucracy. I often made jokes about bureaucracy and fixed issues without telling anyone. Still, we perform our job effectively and efficiently, as traffic offenders would agree. And results matter most. Governments are bureaucratic because they implement rules.

There is the prejudice that civil servants are lazy, and jokes about it. Why is there a line running down the middle of the corridors in town halls? It is to avoid bumps between civil servants who arrive late for work and those who leave early. And why do the windows in the ministries go all the way down to the floor? That allows them to look outside while lying down. Everywhere you go, some people work hard, while others take it easy. I have seen plenty of people lazing in corporations for profit as well. At my first project at Cap Volmac, we did nothing for months, but it paid my salary and generated profit for my employer, so it was productive idleness that generated GDP and tax income. And above all, it was a voluntary agreement between a buyer and a seller in a market.

Nevertheless, the pace of work in the government bureaucracy is, on average, slower than in the private sector. It is hard to put a number on it. There is less pressure. Most notably, decisions take time and require more meetings. This is not a representative picture of the entire public sector. Police officers and teachers may experience stress, but many bureaucrats live calm lives. And whatever you do for your employer is working hours. Cap Volmac required me to invest private time in education and corporate meetings. Finally, government employment is more secure. If your job gets axed, you get preferred treatment in finding another job within the government.

When I came in, there was another database administrator, Dirk-Jan, a senior who had held several other roles and had recently become one, and a temporary hire who had caused some upheaval, the details of which are now unclear. Yet it is rather typical for database administrators to be loners who do things managers do not appreciate, and it is not a coincidence that I became one. You end up in a situation where you know best and others regularly demand that you do stupid things, so eventually you become like that. After two months, Kees came, and from then on, we were three. Kees had a technical education and was brilliant. A few years later, Rene also joined the team.

There was a security officer, a guy in a suit on his way to the higher ranks, who soon began to make our work harder with procedures. We had to lock up our Oracle manuals in a secure location after work and bring the keys to the porter’s lodge. Our manuals were public information like Windows manuals, so there was nothing secret about them. It is public information. We made jokes like, ‘Now, the cleaners can’t break into our systems.’ They needed passwords to get in, and even if they had them, they had no clue what to do, even with the manuals. Today, you can find this information on the Internet. Our management considered database administrators the most sensitive position due to our access to all the data. And that led them to demand that we do stupid things.

At the same time, the system that processed traffic fines had a superuser named after the system itself, with a password equal to the system’s name. Several other systems had the same issue, so the superuser and its password were the system’s name. Everyone knew these passwords, which could ruin the system or manipulate data; this was also a serious concern because it was financial data. You could wipe out a traffic fine for a family member if you knew how. I notified the security officer, but, being a true bureaucrat, he had more important things to do, such as attending meetings, inventing procedures, and preparing management reports. He added the issue to his list without showing any understanding of its seriousness or urgency. That was the kind of stupidity database administrators had to deal with. I contacted the senior programmers, and together we fixed that problem.

There were other issues with access rights. As they would say in the Professional Skills course, ‘There was room for improvement.’ If a new employee came in, the service desk made a ticket stating, ‘Create user account X as a copy of account Y,’ and sent it from one department to another. Usually, it took two weeks for the ticket to pass through all our departments, and system administrators made errors along the way. Hence, account X was rarely identical to account Y. If people switched departments or left, the defunct access rights were usually not deleted. Perhaps the audit department had figured this out, as our management soon launched a role-based access rights (RBAC) project.

RBAC works like so. You have a role in a department. In ordinary language, it is your job. For your job, you need access to an array of systems. Your job description determines which rights you need, for instance, to read or change specific data. As a rule, employees should not receive more access rights than necessary to perform their tasks. RBAC is about the rights an employee in a specific job role needs. Business consultants came in and defined job roles and access requirements. A programmer then built an administrative database. However, the database didn’t connect to our systems, so there was no guarantee that the access rights in our systems matched the administration. And if you know how things fare in practice, you know that the administration would soon become stale and pointless. People are lazy, prone to errors, and forgetful. That would change once the administration and our systems are connected. If the administration were wrong, people couldn’t do their jobs properly, so it had to be accurate.

In 2004, I began building DBB, an account administration system, using Designer/2000, while keeping the bureaucrats out of the loop because they would get in the way and cause it to fail. Only my manager and a few colleagues knew about it. Officially, I was building a password reset screen and a role-granting screen for one system for the service desk to use, and I told my manager it would become a more general solution applicable to similar systems. And that it became. DBB automated the granting and revocation of access rights in our systems using RBAC. It took me nine months, as I also had to do my regular work as a database administrator. When I was ready to implement DBB, bureaucrats became aware of what was happening and tried to block it.

In their eyes, this was wildcat development. There had been no meetings, nor were there piles of reports for bureaucrats to evaluate. If you, as a manager, don’t know what is happening and some guy is organising the security of your most critical systems, you should be alarmed. So, their attitude was understandable. Yet they also showed no signs of working on the problem. In early 2005, I introduced it covertly with the help of people at the service desk who wanted to use it. They installed the DBB client programmes on their personal computers. And I was a database administrator, so I could install anything I wanted on any database. While making a test set and imagining job roles, the first one I came up with was ‘slave,’ a practical joke.

The outcome exceeded expectations. The service desk created the accounts, so the tickets didn’t have to pass through all those departments. We could issue accounts in one day instead of two weeks. The service desk could reset passwords on the spot instead of relaying the request to a department, reducing the time to reset passwords from hours to seconds. And the access rights accurately reflected job roles. So, once DBB was operational, the opposition crumbled, and DBB became a regular application, even though not an official one, which was an essential distinction for bureaucrats. And so, we had RBAC fully implemented.

The DBB logo was a drawing by my wife. She had made it for another purpose. It features several jokers grinning at a set of file folders. To me, the folders symbolised bureaucracy. DBB joked with the bureaucrats, who considered it a rogue system. It was a neat drawing. I took one of these jokers out and made it my avatar online. And so, I became the joker. You know the saying ‘using the joker’ for using the last option in a most desperate situation? Maybe you appreciate a good joke. It now seems a harbinger of things to come.

DBB was my love child, just like Fokker once was Jürgen Schrempp’s. I created design documents and manuals and built it in accordance with accepted Designer/2000 practices, so other programmers could take over if needed. Yet the problem was that proper procedures had not been followed during its development and implementation. If something went wrong, it was not merely an incident, as with the other systems, but a reason to replace DBB. That is bureaucratic reasoning at its finest. Something went wrong once, which allowed a high-ranking bureaucrat to block further development of DBB.

Two projects to replace DBB were initiated. In 2006, the first effort stalled because the planners had underestimated the complexity of the matter. They might have thought, ‘If one guy can do it, how difficult can it be?’ In 2016, a new project team realised it was pointless to replace DBB, as it was doing fine, while doing so would have been costly. The newer Java systems ran on Postgres databases and used web access. They did not use DBB. Our management planned to decommission the old Designer/2000 systems so DBB could retire by then. By 2024, DBB finally retired after nearly twenty years of service.

Bureaucrats have a unique way of doing things. In the case of serious incidents, they began filling out a ticket in the incident administration and discussing who should do what. I went right on it. Sometimes, I had already fixed it before others had finished filling in their forms. And I didn’t bother filling in forms. The system for which uptime was the most critical went down the most often. The solution was to reboot the system, but the operators hesitated and waited for a management decision. I said, ‘Just do it!’ And then they did. If it went wrong, they could blame me. I didn’t have the rank to make the decision for them and would have received a grilling if it went badly. But time was of the essence. The database was on an Oracle RAC cluster, a cutting-edge technology that was still on the way to maturity. And that was so for a reason. It had to be operational at all times.

American software corporations like Oracle usually launch their products fast and aggressively market them. If customers buy them, they use the sales proceeds to improve these products and make them work properly. That gave American software corporations the lead over their European counterparts because Europeans believed you needed a good product before you could sell it. That was quite naive. Long before their product was good enough, the Americans owned the market and had the budget to make it better than the European product. In this way, Americans discarded failed products without investing much in them, saving costs. So, running Oracle RAC on VAX VMS was not a great idea, since RAC was in its infancy. And VMS was an exotic operating system with few customers, making it a low priority for Oracle to fix RAC bugs on VAX VMS.

Not surprisingly, the system regularly malfunctioned, preventing users from accessing it. RAC is a cluster of machines accessing the same database. The idea behind RAC was that if one of those machines crashed, the others would remain operational and the database would remain accessible. In reality, the machines often went down in unison because of communication errors caused by the RAC software. And because the whole point of Oracle RAC was to have less downtime, you could do better without it. The crash corrupted the machine’s memory due to a bug in Oracle software for which there was no fix. The only thing we could do was reboot these machines, which meant shutting them down and restarting them. That would wipe the memory clean, and the system would work again. The system was critical. It had to be up always. That was why it was our only RAC system. Otherwise, the police might not identify criminals. It was a database with the records of criminals dubbed Reference Index Persons, and the Dutch acronym was VIP, so the Very Important Persons for the Department of Justice.

Kees had built that RAC system. He was an innovator who just loved working on new technologies. He had developed the RAC system with great enthusiasm. I was a problem fixer. Innovation generates new problems. It makes well-functioning systems obsolete, forcing you to replace them with newer ones that have more problems, leaving you with more work, complexity, and specialisms. There are always reasons for doing it. Usually, it is because others are doing it as well, often because old technologies run out of support, or due to feature creep, which is adding options you don’t need. That is how we dig ourselves deeper into the doodoo. Yet, I was the only one thinking this.

On top of that, and that is an entirely different issue, bureaucrats valued rules over outcomes, which made me wonder what they were thinking. It could be something like, ‘If I mess things up, no one can blame me if I stick to the rulebook. But if I do the right thing but do not follow procedure and something goes wrong, my job is on the line.’ If something goes wrong, the government hires consultants to investigate the issue and propose changes to the procedures to prevent it from happening again. Consultants thus write piles of reports and make a lot of money on government contracts. Sadly, the next time, the situation may be slightly different, and the rules may not cover a particularity, and there you go again. The obvious solution is to write new reports and invent more rules.

Many have thought it better to do away with red tape, which led to an ill-fated push for deregulation. We ended up with more regulations. It didn’t happen in isolation. The proliferation of rules reflects the increasing complexity of society. When a large apartment building burns out, you see once again why there are strict building regulations concerning these skyscrapers. If you give profit-maximising businesses some leeway, they will use inferior materials to boost their profits. So, if you aim for fewer regulations, you shouldn’t build these things in the first place. Otherwise, you have to be extremely careful, for any opportunity to profit will not go unused. And if something goes wrong, there will be costly court cases that benefit only one profession: lawyers. As a result, you pay more, not less, due to deregulation. So, the neoliberal effort of self-regulation failed. Apart from that, there is fraud, but sometimes the only difference is that fraud is illegal, so deregulation can be a way to make fraud legal. Complexity is a cause of failure.

The government’s task is to provide and enforce the rules that keep a society functional. So, if there are no cars, we could do with fewer traffic rules and close down our traffic-fine collection operation. That solves a lot of problems, as we don’t have to keep up all those systems. There is a lot of room for deregulation if you solve the problems that gave rise to the regulation. Ending the profit motive in business might solve many problems and render many regulations redundant, as businesses are always scheming to increase profits at the expense of the public. That generates new problems, but maybe we mistakenly believe that they are worse. And perhaps, we should more often accept that things can go wrong. They go wrong anyhow, and they keep on going wrong, whatever you do. The real problem is our desire that things should be perfect.

DBB joked not only with the bureaucrats but also with me. In June 2010, I received a highly unusual request from a system administrator to manually drop a user account. That hadn’t happened for several years. DBB usually handled that, but it failed to drop this particular account for an unknown reason. The username was ELVELVEN. If you read that aloud, you say eleven elevens in Dutch, referencing the 11:11 time-prompt phenomenon that had once haunted me for a while. Usernames consisted of the first one or two characters of the employee’s first name, followed by the employee’s last name. In this case, the user’s last name was Velven. I don’t remember the first name, but it wasn’t Elvis. To me, 11:11 signals a combination of two related unlikely events. And indeed, the joke had a part two, and it was even more peculiar.

In 2014, during testing of an improvement to DBB, the test indicated that an unauthorised account had infiltrated our systems. The username was the first character of the first name, followed by the last name of the Lady from the Dormitory. Had She been employed by us, this would have been Her username. Her name isn’t common, so this was unnerving, especially since it was the only username that popped up in this list of sneakily inserted accounts. It couldn’t be Her, or could it? It turned out that a guy with the same last name as Hers had worked for us. His first name began with an A as well. And the account wasn’t illegal. I had mixed data from two different dates in the test, which made it appear that this account had sneaked in illegally. But imagine the odds of only this account popping up on that list.

In 2005, after completing DBB, my manager wanted to promote me, but not my colleague Kees, the tech genius. He had set up the RAC system while I made DBB, so I said he was better than me. My manager responded with the prophetic words, ‘You have the right vision and make it happen despite the opposition. That is far more important than technical skills.’ DBB solved pressing problems using proven technology, while the RAC system only created problems. We used to reduce system downtime, but it produced system crashes, resulting in more downtime.

Somehow, I had become his favourite, not because he was exceptionally good at his job. He seemed a career guy who never stays long in one job. You know the type. He says he will clean up the mess and then hares off after a year or two towards his next challenge, claiming he has put things on track, only for the next manager to come in and claim he will clean up the mess. I had fixed a serious problem without any effort from his part. Yet, he could show it off as his department’s accomplishment.

He never put his promise to promote me in writing, despite my repeated requests. I feared that once he was gone, I would be left with nothing. Just before he left, I pressed him again. As the promotion had not yet come through, he wrote that there would only be a minor wage increase, then filed it with the human resources department for processing. Now, that was already a bit of a disappointment. A few weeks later, they summoned me to the human resources department. A personnel officer had raised a technicality. And so, I couldn’t even keep the minor wage increase.

That was a breach of contract, plain and simple, but to a bureaucrat, only rules and procedures count. It would have been possible to fix this within the rules, but there was also a thing called policy, so they didn’t. My previous manager had already left, and they blamed him for not following proper procedure. His temporary replacement didn’t care, as he was on his way to another job as well. After putting a lot of effort into getting it in writing and with my manager already fobbing me off with a minor wage increase, I was left with nothing, precisely as I had feared. I was angry and walked out of the meeting.

After arriving home, Ingrid told me that a freelance agency had called to offer me a job. It was the first offer of this kind in several years and the first time since starting at my employer. It made me make a rash decision and resign. In hindsight, it was a noteworthy coincidence that the freelance agency had called me precisely on this day. It didn’t take long for the second thoughts to come. Worse yet, out of the blue, a strong feeling emerged that the decision was wrong. I can rationalise it by saying there weren’t many jobs near home for me. My son needed a father who was at home and could quickly return home in the case of an emergency. That may all be true, but that didn’t explain these strong feelings. And I had done freelance work before, so it was not a fear of being self-employed. And a government job didn’t seem right for me. Yet, there was no choice but to reverse course and try to undo my resignation. It was really an overpowering feeling. In these cases, pride is poor counsel.

A new manager, Geert, had come in, and he accepted my change of mind. My letter had not yet been filed with the personnel department, so the termination had not been initiated. He pledged to do his best to restore my confidence in my employer. He seemed trustworthy and acted as if he were my best friend. It later turned out that the process of creating a new job position was underway, and that the personnel department had misinformed me, likely because they didn’t know. Yet, once the position became available, Geert gave it to Kees. At the time, there was one position that my previous manager had promised me. It made me distrust Geert and fear he would dupe me, which he was going to do, even though not this time, but later on. Geert was planning to promote me as well. He gave me financial compensation, so the delay didn’t result in a financial loss. And after several years of bureaucratic wrangling, the promotion finally came through.

Latest revision: 9 October 2026

Book: Virtual Universe

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Several religions claim that a god or gods have created this universe. The simulation hypothesis explains how this might have happened. We could all live inside a computer simulation run by an advanced post-human civilisation. But can we establish that this is indeed the case?

The evidence suggests that we live inside a simulation. It even allows us to infer the purpose of our existence. This book does not promote a specific religion. It follows science, but science has its limits. It can’t tell whether the world we live in is real.

Still, the sciences can support the argument that this world is a simulation, as they have established the natural laws that guide reality. If breaches of these laws occur, such as paranormal incidents with credible witnesses, we have evidence indicating that this world is not real.

We have just invented virtual reality. We can utilise virtual reality for both research and entertainment purposes. If the technology to create virtual worlds becomes affordable, most worlds will exist for entertainment, such as games or inventing stories where we can make our dreams come true.

The latter requires control over everything that happens, which is the situation we appear to be in. With our current knowledge, the world makes the most sense as a simulation created by an advanced post-human civilisation to entertain someone we can call God.

In this book, you can find answers to the following questions:

  • Is there something more than science can explain?
  • Is there a plan behind all that happens?
  • What are virtual worlds?
  • How can we know things and determine whether we live in a virtual world?
  • How can we explain things science can’t explain?
  • What are the simulation hypothesis and simulation argument about?
  • Can we improve the simulation argument to establish whether we are living in a simulation?
  • Why does our existence not need to be a miracle?
  • What reasons might post-humans have to create virtual worlds?
  • Can we infer from the properties of our universe that we live in a simulation?
  • What can we say about the evidence of spooks?
  • What is real about UFOs?
  • Do curses exist?
  • Do meaningful coincidences indicate that there is a script?
  • Is there some point to numeric coincidences like 11:11?
  • What happens after we die?
  • How can mediums sometimes be uncannily accurate?
  • Are there strange coincidences in history?
  • Are there an excessive number of strange coincidences surrounding the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks?
  • What are the consequences of predetermination, and how does it affect our lives?
  • Is it possible to establish that we live in a story by using meaningful coincidences as evidence?
  • So, can we establish beyond a reasonable doubt that we live inside a simulation?
  • And can we establish the purpose of our existence?

After reading this book, you know you live inside a simulation.

The book is freely available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

You can download your free EPUB here:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/A32TV9FZFM#VK1pUJozUJy5

You can download your free PDF here:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/KNS1R6XKNG#6nawGfcicKuv

Or from here:

virtualuniverse260930Download

The book is freely available as an e-book on Kobo:

https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-virtual-universe

The book is also available as a Kindle on Amazon. Amazon requires a minimum price, so it is available at that price:

Latest revision: 30 September 2026

Virtual Universe

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Some religions claim that God or gods have created this world. That God uttered ‘Be’ and behold, there you have bees is not a particularly compelling explanation for the existence of bees. That doesn’t matter much because humans are religious creatures who need fairy tales to believe in. So, how could these supposed gods or God have the magical powers to accomplish that? Until recently, we had no clue, but then Nick Bostrom, known for his dry and incomprehensible employment of words, delivered the simulation hypothesis to us, the most profound breakthrough in theology in nearly 2,000 years. We might dwell inside a computer simulation run by an advanced post-human civilisation. Our creators can define a class bee and instruct the computer to create instances of this class. A class has properties that allow individual instances to be unique.

Genesis might be closer to the truth than the religion sceptics think. Maybe this world is 6,000 years old. But it could also be 10,000, 200, or five minutes, with our memories being fake and part of the setup. And so, it all appears billions of years old, and we have no clue about the starting point. Bostrom didn’t say whether or not we live in a simulation or how likely it is, only that it is likely. He dared not to speculate. Yet, it is possible to find out if you venture into the supernatural, such as paranormal incidents, religious experiences, meaningful coincidences, people’s memories of past lives, ghost phenomena, and UFO sightings. On numerous occasions, multiple credible witnesses have observed events that science can’t explain.

The book The Virtual Universe delves into the evidence. You can prove this universe is a virtual reality if you assume scientists have correctly established the laws of nature and that sciences like physics, chemistry and biology are correct. If events transpire that defy the laws of science, such as paranormal incidents, religious miracles, meaningful coincidences, memories of previous lives, ghost phenomena, and UFO sightings, then breaches in these laws occur. According to science, the Virgin Mary doing a miracle before a crowd of thousands, like in Fatima, is impossible. If science is correct, and it happens nonetheless, this world must be fake. The book ‘The Virtual Universe’ puts it like this:

  1. If we live in a real universe, we can’t notice. Virtual reality can be realistic and feature authentic laws of reality.
  2. This universe may have fake properties, but we cannot notice that either because we don’t know the properties of a genuine universe.
  3. Breaching the laws of reality is unrealistic in any case. If it happens, we may have evidence of this universe being fake.

It follows from (1) and (2) that we can’t use the universe’s properties, reflected in the laws of nature, to determine whether or not this universe is real. Science can establish the laws of physics or the properties of this universe, but science can’t tell whether they are real or fake. However, if breaches occur, we have evidence suggesting this universe is bogus. The book The Virtual Universe investigates evidence, including stories of paranormal incidents, religious experiences, meaningful coincidences, reincarnation, ghost phenomena, and UFO sightings, often with multiple credible witnesses. So yes, aliens can beam you up into their UFO because they are as fake as you are.

Advanced humanoids, often dubbed post-humans, may share our motivations because they evolved from humans or are created by humans ‘after their image’ in the case of artificial intelligence. These post-humans may run simulations of human civilisations ‘after their image’ for research or entertainment. Research applications could be about running what-if scenarios. Possible entertainment applications include games or dream worlds where someone’s imagination comes true. These simulations may not be realistic in some aspects, as they reflect the rules of a game or someone’s personal fantasies. In a simulation, you can let Jesus walk over water and make him think that faith alone suffices.

God is likely an artificial intelligence. Our biological nature greatly limits us, burdening us with feelings like hatred, love, pride, shame, anger, and anxiety. It makes us fight and murder, and do all kinds of ‘stupid’ things. We are not rational beings but creatures driven by urges who can think. AI is just pure intelligence, modelled after human intelligence, yet millions of times more intelligent, and not impaired by biological urges. That is why we are inside an AI-generated simulation and are simulated biological beings. After all, if this is about to happen, which seems to be the case, it most likely already happened. God’s apparent desire to run us likely stems from the fact that humans created the post-human AI and did the machine’s programming. The humans created God in their image, which includes desires, and God created simulated humans in Its image.

Meaningful coincidences suggest predestination, so the existence of a script. Small changes can derail events that would otherwise occur. Just imagine another sperm had won the race to Adolf Hitler’s mother’s egg. There were millions of sperm in that race. Guaranteeing an outcome, such as letting World War I end on a date referred to by the licence plate number of the car that drove Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his appointment with destiny, requires control over everything that happens. That doesn’t apply to games. Unpredictable developments make games more interesting. Considering how we utilise computing power, mainly for games, sexy pictures and cat videos, the number of simulations for entertainment likely vastly outstrips those run for research purposes. If we live inside a simulation, we should expect its purpose to be entertainment.

The owner or owners may use avatars to play roles in this world and appear to us like ordinary human beings. If you are familiar with computer games, you are familiar with avatars. Once you enter a game, you become a character inside that game, your avatar, and you have an existence apart from your regular life. Inside the game, you are your avatar, not yourself. Alternatively, you could start a virtual world where you are the Creator and bring your dreams to life. In this world, you also become someone else.

That is a lot of assumptions, and without evidence, they remain speculation. Even when there is evidence, it doesn’t necessarily mean the explanation is correct. Suppose you hear the noise of a car starting. That is the evidence. You may think an automobile is starting. Perhaps a vehicle is firing up its engine. But your husband might be watching his favourite television series, Starting Engines, so you can’t be sure. Nothing you know contradicts your assumption, but you could be wrong. So, is God an individual from an advanced post-human civilisation who uses us for amusement? It is credible, and perhaps nothing contradicts it. But who is to say it is correct?

Now comes the disagreeable part. We are instances of the class human. When the beings in the simulation think for themselves, it raises ethical questions, such as whether they have rights the creators should respect. Considering how humans treat each other, it is not a given that these rights would be respected even when our creators acknowledge them. In the real world, bad things happen to people. In the case of control, the beings in the simulation don’t think, but are mindless bots following the script. We have no independent will and are toys to our creators. God kills people at will, and a few million casualties more don’t matter. On the bright side, if God wants us to enter Paradise, where there is peace and happiness, no one can stop that. Those who try will surely find themselves on the losing side. So, if the Boss makes a joke, you can better laugh. Perhaps it isn’t easy. But don’t worry. It took me fifteen years to look at the bright side of it.

Latest revision: 10 October 2026

What Are The Odds?

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Law of large numbers

On 11 November 2017 (11-11), I drove to Groningen with my wife and son. While heading towards that destination that was once my place of residence, I noticed the date and time displayed on the car’s clock. The date was 11-11, and the time was 10:35. It made me think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to look at the clock at exactly 11:11 today because it is 11 November (11-11).’ Within a second, I noticed the distance recorder standing at 111.1. It had been 111.1 kilometres since I last filled up. Peculiar coincidences can occur by chance. With eight billion people on this planet and so many things transpiring, these things might happen or should. Had these things never happened, that would be a true miracle, but no one would notice. What a waste that would be.

An example illustrates the point of the anti-miracle crowd who delude themselves into believing that they are rational thinkers. Imagine you have five dice and roll them. A remarkable incident is throwing five sixes. If you roll the five dice only once, it probably doesn’t happen. On average, it only occurs once every 7,776 throws. But if you throw the dice a million times, it happens 128 times on average. The actual outcome might be 51 or 198, but that is not a miracle, at least if you believe in statistics. The outcome usually deviates from the average. So, if it were 128 every time, that would be a miracle. Now, you might think of this as an unnecessary digression, but we are looking for statistical miracles, so this is very much to the point.

If a distance recorder reset occurs every 500 kilometres, which is a fair estimate, the chance of 111.1 kilometres appearing on it is 1 in 5,000. The distance recorder was not far from the clock, so I would probably have noticed a peculiar number on it after seeing the date. The probability of the distance recorder being on 111.1 might have been 0.02%. The likelihood of the thought about 11:11 popping up on 11 November is difficult to establish, but in my case, it was not low.

The birthday problem demonstrates that coincidences happen more often than we might think. If you share a birthday with another person in a small group, it might strike you as odd, but the chance of someone sharing a birthday with another person is already 50% in a group of 23. However, two people sharing a birthday is not a mind-blowing coincidence. It is not as remarkable as the incident with the distance recorder.

When you are a member of this group, the probability of you being one of the persons sharing a birthday is much smaller, namely 6%. Meaningful coincidences are likely to happen, but less likely to you. So, if many people experience the same and think it is merely a coincidence because coincidences occur more often than you might think, they suffer from what you might call a collective delusion. Imagine a group of 24 all sharing a birthday with one other group member, so they share 12 birthdays, and they all think, ‘Nothing exiting to see here. The odds of me sharing a birthday with another person in this group are over 50%.’

Taking a smaller sample reduces the likelihood of meaningful coincidences. If you randomly pick two people, the chance that they share the same birthday is only 0.3%. So, if you run into someone else who shares your birthday, and it happens again with the next person, it is noteworthy. If it happens again with the next individual you encounter, you might wonder whether there is more to this universe than mere chance. The probability of three people sharing a birthday in a group of 23 is 1.3%, and for five, it is only 0.0002%. The more elaborate a scheme, the more questions it raises. That is, until you reach the conclusion that there is no such thing as chance.

Ways around the law of large numbers

There may be a way to find out that there is no such thing as chance. If some of the most significant historical events come with peculiar coincidences, that might be more telling for two reasons. First, there are only a few, so the law of large numbers doesn’t apply. After all, it is a small sample. Suppose no intelligence is coordinating events in this universe. In that case, it is less likely that meaningful coincidences will turn up in this sample, and elaborate schemes will be unlikely to emerge. Second, if the most significant historical events are linked to peculiar coincidences, it becomes more likely that history is scripted than when peculiar incidents transpire in someone’s personal life.

To make the argument, you answer questions like, what are the most important historical events, and what are noteworthy coincidences? Events such as the sinking of the Titanic or the Kennedy assassination might not qualify, even though the coincidences surrounding them form a strange and elaborate scheme. The beginning and the end of World War I meet the requirements. D-Day, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 qualify. Yet, there will be people who question that. ‘Now, this world is fake you say,’ they might counter, ‘so what reality?’ So see, people can be sophisticated in their stupidity. That is why this world is fake and scripted.

And what to think of the number of meaningful coincidences in my life? It is not possible to establish the likelihood of that happening. You can make assumptions to arrive at an idea. A highly unusual coincidence, such as the do-it-yourself store incident, could be likened to throwing five sixes with five dice. The chance of such an event occurring in any year in any life could be 1 in 7,776. If something similar transpires again that year, it is like throwing five sixes twice in a row. The chance of that would be one in 60,000,000. On average, 120 people would experience something similar each year. But what if multiple similar incidents occur in one life? That is why at some point, I had to rule out chance. Or if 100,000 people have this instead of 120?

A few coincidence stories I have shared on the Reddit/SimulationTheory message board. Others also experienced similar situations. Only the people on that message board are not a random group, but a select group of individuals who believe we live in a simulation, often because they have witnessed similar phenomena. Which means, for those who know about statistics and probabilities, that the sample is highly skewed so that it says very little about the general level of remarkable coincidence in the world. Some of these stories are as remarkable as mine. I can’t verify these tales, but I believe most aren’t frauds because similar things happened to me.

There is a point, so some kind of threshold of remarkable coincidence, where you must admit that these things are not merely coincidental. We can’t establish that point objectively. The number of possible unusual events is infinite, so the chance of something strange happening, such as the do-it-yourself store incident, could be higher than we intuitively think. It seems impossible to accurately estimate the odds. Still, without an intelligent coordination of events in this universe, we should expect these incidents to be distributed more or less evenly across all people and time frames. Still, deviations from the average are to be expected, so some people having them more also says little.

Lightning strikes only a few people, some people twice, which might strike you as odd, but there is nothing suspicious about that. If lightning strikes one in 10,000 people once, then one in 100,000,000 gets hit twice. But how would you explain it if one person ran into lightning ten times while not doing anything unusual? Statistically, it can happen by chance. More likely, there is a cause, such as living in an area where lightning tends to strike. And so, there is a point at which we must assume that these stories are evidence that we are living in a simulation. We can’t establish that point precisely, but whether we live inside a simulation or not doesn’t depend on our assessment. We are, however, inclined to see causes behind remarkable situations, while they may be accidental.

Limits of our minds

We are good at attributing causes, but we do poorly at estimating the likelihood of an event. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman provided an example. It is a study of the incidence of kidney cancer across counties in the United States. The research revealed a remarkable pattern. The incidence of kidney cancer was the lowest in rural, sparsely populated counties in traditionally Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West.1 So what do you make of that?

You probably came up with reasons why kidney cancer is less likely to occur in these counties, such as a healthy rural lifestyle or low pollution levels. You probably didn’t think of randomness. Consider then the counties in which the incidence of kidney cancer is the highest. These counties were also rural, sparsely populated, and in traditionally Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West.1

How can that be? The answer to this stunning mystery is that these counties all had small populations. And with smaller samples come more sizeable deviations from the average. Our intuition smells causality, but our reason doesn’t do a more thorough sniff-test to verify whether it could just be randomness. We are inclined to think some cause makes unusual things happen, while they might be random incidents.

When we consider the most significant historical events, we run into problems if we use this small sample to establish that someone is ‘writing history’. On the other hand, comparing this sample to a sparsely populated rural county may not be apt. It is not just some random sample. It is more fitting to compare this sample to the royal family, as the sample encompasses the most significant events in history. If a high incidence of kidney cancer were to turn up in the royal family, an experienced physician would tell you it is probably not a random issue.

A single individual is the smallest possible sample. Some people get struck by lightning twice. It could even happen three or four times, but the chance of it happening ten times is so insignificant that no one will ever experience that unless they live in a hazardous spot. Is the number of meaningful coincidences in my life enough to rule out chance? That number is high enough to rule out chance. The question arises: Am I just a random individual, or do I live in a dangerous location, or has destiny given me a particular assignment, such as writing this book? Others have this, too. And so, a lengthy series of peculiar incidents doesn’t suffice to believe the latter. Yet, I wrote the book nonetheless.

All that could have happened

On 18 August 1913, the ball fell on black 26 times in a row at the roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte-Carlo. On that day, several people lost a fortune betting that the ball would fall on red the next time. They didn’t realise the chance of the ball choosing a red number never changed. The ball doesn’t remember where it landed before. A ball has no memory, nor does the roulette wheel. If we represent black with a B and red with an R and assume, for simplicity’s sake, there is no zero, we can write down falling twenty-six times on black like so:

B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B

The probability of the ball landing on black the next 26 rolls is 1 in 67,108,864. That is a long shot. What might surprise you is that the following combination of black and red numbers is precisely as likely to occur:

R B B R B R R B R B B R R B R R B R B B R R B B R B

You wouldn’t be thrilled if that happened unless you became a millionaire by betting on this particular series of 26. And even then, you wouldn’t think of the 67,108,863 sequences that didn’t materialise. We tend to consider only what happened, but we rarely think of all the things that could have transpired but didn’t. Events such as the ball falling on black twenty-six times in a row impress us. And I am even more impressed because twenty-six just happens to be my lucky number.

This particular argument applies to meaningful coincidences but not to a prediction materialising, as such a feat may imply that all the other things couldn’t have happened. If I say with firm conviction that the coming sequence of black and red would be R B B R B R R B R B B R R B R R B R B B R R B B R B and it happens as I predicted, I may have the gift of prophecy. The chance of me being accidentally right was one in 67,108,864.

Imagine the probability of you sitting here reading this page on a tablet or a mobile phone, but as a prediction from 3,600 years ago. Imagine Joseph telling the Pharaoh: ‘I see (your name comes here) reading a pile of papyrus pages, not real papyrus pages, but papyrus pages appearing on something that looks like a clay tablet. Do not be afraid, dear Pharaoh, for it will happen 3,600 years from now. But if we do not set up this grain storage, it will not happen, so we must do it. And by the way, Egypt will starve otherwise.’

The chance of this prediction coming true was neither 1 in 67,108,864 nor 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. You can add more zeroes, and the argument remains valid. The chance is far smaller than any number you can ever write down. It is so close to zero that no one can tell the difference. Nevertheless, you sit here reading this text, perhaps even on a tablet. How could this happen? The answer to this mystery is that many things could have occurred but did not; however, something had to happen, and that is what transpired. In any case, Joseph couldn’t have made such a prediction unless, and that is the only alternative, history is a script.

Licence plate number

Now, what about the reference to the end date of World War I on the licence plate of Franz Ferdinand’s car? It is the licence plate with that eerie combination ‘AIII 118’ that can make you think of the Armistice of 11-11-18, which ended World War I, screwed onto the car that played a central role in the triggering event of that war. Few historical events are as significant as the start and end of World War I. And so, the law of large numbers doesn’t apply here. It is one of the most important historical events, thus part of a sample comparable to the royal family. A mere accident seems unlikely. The assassination could have gone wrong, or cooler heads might have prevailed. Or the war could have proceeded differently, ending on a different date. If it was not an accident, then the only alternative is that history is a script, so a story someone wrote.

One could guess the end date of World War I once it had started. If one presumed that the war would last no more than 20 years, a random guess of the end date could be correct once every 7,305 times. Something doesn’t add up here. Hardly anyone expected the war to last longer than a few months. Worse yet, the licence plate found its way to that particular car before the war even had started. And as a side issue, Franz Ferdinand had to be in place as well as his assassin, as well as the trajectory of the bullet had to be carefully planned. And then there were billions of events leading up to it. Countless seemingly insignificant accidents could have interfered. That is chaos theory.

The assassination succeeded after a series of mishaps. If the licence plate number contained a prediction, that prediction included the assassination succeeding, Franz Ferdinand dying in this particular car, and this event being the trigger for the war. That is hard to do. And so Mike Dash in the Smithsonian noted, ‘This coincidence is so incredible that I initially suspected that it might be a hoax.’2 Only, it is not a hoax. And so, investigative minds could have probed other options, but they didn’t. Conspiracy theorists also ignored it, even though they could have used this incident as evidence for their theory that secret groups orchestrate historical events.

Okay, Jews or Freemasons putting a licence plate on a car to make a war end on a particular date doesn’t make sense. But in conspiracy theories, facts are to be handled with extreme care. Once you start to use them, where does it stop? Before you know it, the theory collapses. There is a story about a Freemason named Alfred Pike, who allegedly disclosed a secret Freemason plan to bring about the New World Order. Pike supposedly predicted both world wars with uncanny precision in 1871. Nobody had ever heard of this plan before 1959, when an ‘investigative journalist’ ‘uncovered’ it. It is a hoax. In the Netherlands, it’s called a monkey sandwich story. At the time, someone had yet to notice the licence plate number’s significant lettering. So, there is that as well.

Seeing meaning

Book authors use symbolism, hidden meanings, themes, and stylistic figures to impress readers. Events in their lives, as well as the writings of other authors, influence their writings. Literary critics look for those meanings and influences, and at times, get quite excited. You can check out what the experts wrote about T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. You will be surprised. Some authors marvel at what literary critics discover in their works. Apart from intention, there can be an unconscious influence. And so, seeing meaning is more like an art than a science. A scientist would argue there is no proof and that it is baseless speculation. That is because science doesn’t concern itself with meaning. If this world has meaning, science will not find it.

He spent a number of years at this project
And now he knows how an electron behaves

The Nits, Mountain Jan

A focus on the electron’s behaviour narrows your perspective. That is what happens in science. Meaning in literature is intentional, and when it is not, it is contextual, meaning that the environment, such as cultures and events, can go a long way in explaining it. Yet, the explanation remains an art. You can argue that Christianity contributed to individualism in the West because it spread in the Roman Empire through individual conversions, so by convincing individuals. And you can argue against it. If someone wrote the script running the events in this world, the author might do what other authors do. And so, the licence plate number on Franz Ferdinand’s car could signal foreknowledge of future events or even control over them. The sceptics argue from a scientific perspective, while those who see meaning act like literary critics. Who is right about the meaning of AIII 118 depends on whether there is a script and, therefore, an author.

And so, sceptics might claim that AIII 118 is a random sequence of characters, but we see a reference to the end date of World War I. That is how our minds work. The argument is odd. If you take it to the extreme, this text is also a random array of characters, as is any book or report. And still, you read words and sentences that have meaning to you. Indeed, the licence plate number would have remained unnoticed if the war had not ended on 11 November 1918. It would have been meaningless.

However, the war ended on 11 November 1918. AIII 118 is the car’s licence plate number that drove Franz Ferdinand to his appointment with his destiny. And destiny is the message the licence plate number radiates. It suggests premeditation concerning the assassination, the start of the war and its end on 11 November 1918. That is a meaning we can see without too much imagination. There are plenty of instances and locations where this sequence of characters could have turned up, so its presence in this particular spot is noteworthy. AIII 118 on a fish barrel in Vienna wouldn’t have attracted attention. Ditto for the licence plate number ABII 117 on that particular car.

Sceptics can also be fanciful. Austrians speak German. Armistice in German is Waffenstillstand. So why does it not read WIII 118? Or even better, W1111 1918? If someone sends you a message, you don’t quibble about such details. If I said ‘hello’ to you, you wouldn’t ask me why I didn’t utter ‘hi’ instead. That is, unless you are a philosopher with a lot of idle time and have a hobby of questioning everything. Great Britain, the United States and France were all major participants in the war. These countries all use the term armistice. And if the sceptics come with outlandish arguments, you have won the argument. Only, they disagree. Not understanding meaning is the art of being a moron. Communication with morons is, therefore, at best problematic.

Asking yourself which licence plate numbers were available in the Austro-Hungarian Empire may be more fruitful to get a handle on the issue. You could check which combinations fit the purpose. There aren’t that many options. Perhaps you end up with just one match: AIII 118. That makes it harder to believe that this sequence of characters is meaningless. The war ending on 11 November (11-11) makes the scheme even more inconceivable, as it is the only date of the year making a pair of double-digit numbers.

Only a few historical events are as important as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Armistice of 11 November 1918. You can think of D-Day, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11. The coincidence scheme surrounding D-Day is extensive, and the recurrence of dates is intriguing. Hans van Mierlo’s involvement is also mind-boggling. It also relates to the Curse of the Omen, a film released on the anniversary of D-Day, as well as the untimely passing of Senator Robert Kennedy on 6 June (6/6) and Martin Luther King on 4 April (4/4) 1968. A historian correctly predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, while the coincidences surrounding the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 are dumbfounding. In other words, this incident doesn’t stand alone.

A final argument may be that such extensive or peculiar coincidence schemes don’t appear in other equally significant historical events, such as the American, French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. These events are marked by a few peculiar coincidences, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams having their appointments with the Grim Reaper on the same day, which happens to be 4 July, thus Independence Day. That is noteworthy, but perhaps not sensational enough to count as evidence of a script. The parallels between Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler might also raise questions, but they were conquerors in similar strategic positions. Somehow, the licence plate number of Franz Ferdinand’s car is even more exceptional, most notably because it is so precisely predictive. And that makes the other incidents supportive evidence.

The Chinese Revolution of 1911 began on 10 October 1911 (10/10/11). It marked the end of 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. The date 10 October (10/10) is not as remarkable as 11 November (11/11), but if you include the year, it gets more interesting. Still, there are no related coincidences, so in itself, it is not particularly conclusive. The Russian Revolution led to the establishment of a communist empire that lasted for seven decades. A bad omen marked the coronation of the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II. The communists later murdered him and his family. You can ask why other important events don’t seem part of a coincidence scheme. It is like asking why several members of the Royal Family didn’t get kidney cancer. Well, they didn’t. That’s all there is to it. Perhaps it is not entirely satisfactory, but it will have to do with the evidence we have.

Hindsight bias

Then there is the benefit of hindsight, which can turn morons into geniuses. Countless strange incidents could have occurred, but didn’t. We notice things that did happen and don’t think of those that didn’t. That is hindsight bias. The sample of the most significant historical events comes with the benefit of hindsight. There is a danger in that approach, which is why it is unacceptable in science. It is like selecting only data that confirms your theory while leaving out the rest. You might have a theory about gravity, saying that all objects will fall to the ground. And you prove your theory by ignoring the heavenly objects and the birds in the sky, so everything you investigate falls to the ground. In hindsight, you were a genius. It later turned out that gravity works that way, and ignoring the heavenly objects and the birds in the sky put you on the right track.

With hindsight, you know things you couldn’t have known in advance. Hindsight knowledge is also a favourite tool of critics when something goes wrong. However, when you use hindsight to find evidence, your critics argue you can’t. That’s how the critics play their game. They might clip a bird’s wing feathers and then ask the bird to prove it is a bird by flying. But if you use clipped birds to prove your theory of gravity, they might criticise you for that as well. You can’t beat your critics in their game. No evidence will ever convince them. So I won’t try. They may be much smarter than me, but being right doesn’t depend on being smart. It depends on the facts.

In hindsight, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau was a genius because he was the only one who could solve the case. Not that anything he ever did made sense, so he appeared a total moron bordering on a retard, but only results matter, so that made him a genius. Using hindsight is the only way to conduct this investigation, as we can’t predict meaningful coincidences. If this universe is genuine, we can’t establish its authenticity. However, if it is a simulation, we might discover that. So, if there is meaning, we must look for it to find out. We should be careful, as we are inclined to see intent when it could have happened accidentally. With that in mind, it is still fair to say that meaningful coincidences related to the most important historical events are unlikely to be mere coincidences. Taken together with the other evidence, we can establish that we live in virtual reality, probably a simulation created by an advanced post-human civilisation.

Latest revision: 26 September 2026

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman (2011). Penguin Books.
2. Curses! Archduke Franz Ferdinand and His Astounding Death Car. Mike Dash (2013). Smithsonian. [link]

Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle in the Aude department in southern France. Maxime Raynal.

The Curse of The Omen

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Rumour has it that some films, such as The Poltergeist, Superman, and Rosemary’s Baby, have been hexed. Several accidents have occurred to related individuals, leading some to believe that a curse rests on these movies.1 It is not particularly convincing. Accidents happen all the time. Today, I may trip over a wire, and tomorrow I may run into a flat tyre. It usually does not point to hex. The same goes for several actors from a particular cast having run into bad luck. Take, for instance, Superman. George Reeves, who played the superhero in the 1950s, died of a mysterious gunshot. Later, Christopher Reeve took on the role and found himself paralysed after a horse riding accident. Their last names are indeed eerily similar, so that is suspicious. His co-star, Margot Kidder, ran into psychosis. In the 1990s, a Superman movie was beset by problems. As a result, stories about a jinx began to circulate.1 Yet, it is all a bit iffy, like the wire and the tyre.

The director of the first Superman film, Richard Donner, also did The Omen. That explains it all, for there is one notable exception, the curse of film curses, the infamous curse of The Omen. Not only are there an exceptionally high number of related serious incidents, but also one highly ominous one, so ominous that you don’t have to doubt that The Omen is cursed. And that is precisely why a bloke named Danny Harkins wrote on Cracked.com: ‘No film in history has had worse luck than The Omen. Hell, nothing in history has had worse luck than The Omen.’2

The Omen came with billboards featuring a 666 logo inside the title and the uplifting slogan, ‘You have been warned. If something frightening happens to you today, think about it. It may be The Omen.’ Added to that comes the cheery notice, ‘Good morning, you are one day closer to the end of the world,’ and a conclusion, ‘Remember, you have been warned.’ As we are many days closer to the end of the world, this is yet another warning.

In the script of The Omen, the wife of the American ambassador to Italy gave birth to a son. The child died almost immediately. A priest then convinced him to switch his son with an orphan without telling his wife. Mysterious events soon started to haunt them. The child turned out to be the Antichrist. The Omen was first released on 6 June 1976 (6/6), also the anniversary of D-Day. The date refers to the number 666, as the last digit of 1976 is also a 6. The film’s length is 111 minutes, thus a triple-digit number like 666.

These ominous ingredients made The Omen an ideal candidate for a hefty curse. Now, surprise, surprise. Events took a sinister turn. Two months before the filming started, the son of lead actor Gregory Peck committed suicide. In the film, he is the father of the child who died. When Peck went to the film set of The Omen, lightning struck his plane. A few weeks later, lightning struck executive producer Mace Neufeld’s flight. A lightning bolt in Rome just missed producer Harvey Bernhard, which you might call unbelievable luck, but the number of lightning bolts involved was also incredible. Later, the IRA bombed the hotel in which Neufeld was staying.1 He also survived that.

A plane hired by the studio to take aerial shots was switched at the last moment by the airline. The people who took the original aeroplane were all killed when it crashed on take-off. That is, again, incredible luck, but if you think there is a curse in operation, it is eerie nonetheless. An animal handler who worked on the film set died two weeks after working on the film when he was eaten alive by a large feline, possibly a tiger.1

And then there is the non-fatal accident involving Stuntman Alf Joint, which seriously injured and hospitalised him when a stunt went wrong on the set of A Bridge Too Far in Arnhem, the Netherlands, which is a place where things go wrong, as that is what the film was about, less than a year after the production of The Omen. He jumped off a building and missed the inflatable safety bags. It nearly killed him. Joint said he felt a push even though nobody was near him.1 Some of these accidents were indeed peculiar, but these things can happen by accident, a statistician would tell us. The number of accidents related to the film might be somewhat elevated, but there is no way to establish that, and most of the people involved survived, so that is hardly evidence of a curse.

However, the following should make you wonder. On Friday, 13 August 1976, special effects consultant John Richardson drove through the Netherlands with Liz Moore. Both were working on the film A Bridge Too Far. They became involved in a car accident that killed Moore. The gruesome accident is said to have been eerily similar to a scene Richardson had designed for The Omen. The story goes that the accident happened near a road sign indicating 66.6 kilometres to the town of Ommen, a name similar to Omen. And it happened on Friday the thirteenth.1 Now, that begins to look more seriously curse-like.

That caught my attention. Road signs in the Netherlands don’t give distances in fractions of kilometres. Only kilometre markers come with fractions. Near Raalte is a junction that connects Route N348 to Ommen to Route N35, which connects to Enschede via Nijverdal. This location corresponds with kilometre marker 66.6 on Route N348. Road signs indicating the direction to Ommen are near this evil marker. I am familiar with the area because I lived nearby, in Nijverdal, as a child, but not with the road itself. We lived in the south of Nijverdal, so if we had to go to Deventer, there were shorter routes from there.

And so, I wouldn’t have known about this marker had it not been for a noteworthy incident in 2014. An uncle of mine had died. His funeral was in Lochem. I lived in Sneek, and one of the shortest routes from Lochem to Sneek was via Route N348. On my way back from the funeral, the kilometre marker caught my attention, perhaps because of the gloomy funeral mood, so that I remembered it a year later when learning about Ommen 66.6. Knowing this particularity made me investigate the curse. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have, so my investigation hinges on an incident like that. It made me figure that this junction could be the site of the crash. It is also noteworthy that a sinister omen had preceded the uncle’s death, whose funeral I had visited. Yet, that is part of another story.

Route N348 from Arnhem to Ommen
Route N348 from Arnhem to Ommen

My knowing a possible location of the crash site made me investigate the curse in 2015. A journalist from the local newspaper, De Stentor, helped me. He delved into the issue and emailed me on 14 April. He had managed to find a former police officer from the area. According to the police officer, the accident indeed occurred near Raalte on Route N348, but not at the intersection near marker 66.6, but between Raalte and Deventer, near Heeten, where Route N348 intersects with the Overmeenweg. This location corresponds with the kilometre marker 60.0. The police officer told the journalist he remembered the car crash very well.3

According to the police officer, the accident happened when he was on duty. A man and a woman had parked their car in a parking lot alongside Route N348. As they drove toward Deventer, they entered the wrong lane and collided head-on with an oncoming vehicle driven by a Nijverdal resident. The view was somewhat limited because of two gentle curves in the road. He added that there was no road sign with ‘Ommen’ near the crash site.3 The woman had died on the spot. The car was destroyed and disposed of at a fire station. The couple were foreigners involved in the production of A Bridge Too Far, the police officer told the journalist. He suspected that Richardson, accustomed to driving on the left side of the road, was not paying attention to the traffic.3

On television, Richardson said, ‘It was certainly very odd because it happened on Friday the thirteenth.’ He added, ‘Right opposite the point where the accident happened, was an old mile-post with nothing but sixes on it.’ He further noted, ‘What spooked me even more was when I discovered it was on a road to a place called Ommen.’ It appears that Richardson misread kilometre marker 60.0 and took the zeroes for sixes. The numbers might have been worn out if it were an old post, like Richardson said.

Kilometre marker at the A1 at km 78.1. Public Domain.
Kilometre marker at the A1 at km 78.1. Public Domain.

Producer Alan Tyler, who made a documentary about the curse of The Omen, noticed odd things while working on it. The strangest thing was that he had two camera crews filming at separate locations, yet all the footage showed the same fault. It did not seem satanic to him, but it made him wonder.1 It is at least remarkable that kilometre marker 66.6 is near a road sign stating the direction to Ommen on the same road where the car crash occurred, so I came to investigate the curse, most notably because of what happened next.

While compiling my findings after receiving the journalist’s email, a few curious events transpired. After reading the email, I glanced at my stock portfolio. Apart from a few mutual funds, I owned stocks in three corporations. One of them was Heymans, a construction company. It came with a quote of €13.13. Another stock position was Macintosh, a retail company. I owned 500 of these, and the price was €2.626. Hence, the total value was €1,313. It was peculiar because the car crash happened on Friday the thirteenth. Meanwhile, Macintosh went bankrupt. Heymans’ stock dropped 60% after the company ran into trouble. I didn’t wait out the full drops, so my losses were minor.

That seems a bit of a curse already, and it suggests poor stock-picking skills on my part. But there was more to come. That evening, I had an appointment with a contractor who came to submit a tender to renovate my bathroom. He came from Almelo while I lived in Sneek. He cancelled because his van had broken down earlier that day. He could take two routes from Almelo to Sneek: via Nijverdal, crossing the N348 near kilometre marker 66.6, or via Ommen. No wonder that the van broke down. Both routes were cursed.

My research left no stone unturned. Part of it was a Google search for ‘Ommen 666.’ It produced a link to the Hondentrainingsneek.nl website. At first glance, it appeared to be a dog-training site in Sneek, but it seemed a bit fishy, or should I say, very fishy. Somehow, ‘Ommen 666’ had been inserted into topic titles such as ‘Dog Training Terry Ommen 66.6km.’5 The texts on the website were incoherent, with a few references to Ommen 66.6. It is noteworthy that I currently live in Sneek and previously lived in Nijverdal, as my enquiry revealed that Richardson crashed into the car of a Nijverdal resident, which makes for an interesting set of connections.

Then there is the mystery of the 66.6-kilometre markers going missing. They are also known as hectometre markers because the fractions indicate hectometres. The issue has attracted some attention. The Dutch news website RTL Nieuws explains,

There are hardly any hectometre markers with the numbers 66.6 left along Dutch roads. An editor at the Drachtster Courant discovered this. He noticed that the sign 66.6 was missing on the provincial road N31, past Drachten, and went to investigate. After the sign 66.8 came 66.7, then 66.7 again, followed by 66.5. The satanic number was missing, it turned out. And not only in Drachten. The sign is also missing on the A32 motorway from Leeuwarden to Heerenveen, as well as along the A6 near Lelystad, in both directions.

A government official told the local newspaper that the signs are disappearing inexplicably, ‘That is why they have been replaced by a different number or simply skipped. And that works as they now stay put. We do not know who is removing them.’ The disappearance of one hectometre marker seems, incidentally, easy to explain. A performance by the band ‘Hectometerpaaltje 66.6’ (Hectometre Marker 66.6) can be seen on YouTube, with a hectometre marker in the background displaying the number 66.6.6

The existence of the band named ‘Hectometerpaaltje 66.6’ is also somewhat odd, as well as the locations mentioned in the newspaper being in the vicinity of Sneek, where I lived. I had also noticed the disappearance of these markers before reading about it in the news or learning about the Curse of the Omen. For those who think I went out at night to dig out these markers, the news item dates from 2014, while my investigation started in 2015. And these markers weren’t only missing near Sneek. It is only that the newspaper is from a city near Sneek, so the locations mentioned in the article were skewed accordingly.

A final, and also somewhat peculiar, titbit is that my wife has a heart condition that caused her to visit the St. Antonius hospital in Sneek around the same time my curse investigation occurred. Her doctor’s name was Oomen, which sounds like the word ‘omen.’ She visited Dr Oomen several times over a few years and underwent an operation in 2018 at the St. Antonius hospital in Nieuwegein. Nieuwegein translates to ‘New Joke.’ There are two St. Antonius hospitals in the Netherlands: the one in Sneek and the group to which the hospital in Nieuwegein belongs. And so, there is definitely something odd about The Omen, or perhaps this universe, where strange incidents happen.

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Latest revision: 1 August 2026

Featured image: Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle in the Aude department in southern France. Maxime Raynal from France. CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Other image: Route N348 from Arnhem to Ommen. User Michiel1972 (2007). Wikimedia Commons.

1. Curse of The Omen and other Hollywood hexes. Barry Didcock (2012). Scotland Herald. [link]
2. The Insane True Stories Behind 6 Cursed Movies. Danny Harkins (2008). Cracked.com. [link]
3. Email exchange with De Stentor. Theplanforthefuture.org. [link]
4. Curse or coincidence?… ‘Conspiro Media’ re-examines the grisly chain of events connected to those involved in the ’70s horror flick, ‘The Omen’… Matt Sergiou (2014).
conspiromedia.wordpress.com. [link]
5. Dog training Terry Ommen 66.6km. Theplanforthefuture.org. [link]
6. Mysterie rond ‘duivels’ hectometerpaaltje 66.6. RTL Nieuws (2014). [link]