20 Most Amazing Coincidences (and a few extras)

Oddweek.com has an article of the 20 most amazing coincidences. But I think they left a few out.

1. The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen, an X-Files spinoff series, involved the heroes stumbling upon a conspiracy by a rogue faction of the US government planning to take remote control of a commercial passenger jet in order to fly it into the World Trade Center; spurring a worldwide demand for arms sales against a looming "terrorist" threat. The heroes are able to hack into the plane and avert a crash -- just barely in time. This program aired on 03/04/2001, over six months prior to the eerily similar events of September 11, 2001.

2. In 1986 Martin Keating, brother of then-governor of Oklahoma Frank Keating, wrote a technothriller entitled Final Jihad. Part of the story involved muslim-backed terrorist attacks upon government buildings in Oklahoma City and included a character named Tom McVay. This was four years before Timothy McVeigh presumably attacked the Murrah Federal Building in that same city.

3. Over a hundred years before the discovery of Mars's two moonlets by telescope in 1877, writer Jonathan Swift invented them for his book Gulliver's Travels (1726). He called these two moons Phobos and Deimos and gave them orbital periods of 10 and 21.5 hours respectively, very close to the actual values of 7.6 and 30.2 hours. He also got their sizes approximately correct. The moons, of course, were given the names from Swift's book as a nod to his eerie precognition.

4. This is a personal coincidence, and not all that cosmic, but I found it kinda cool. I went bowling with my family a couple of months ago. We were given lane 18. Above various lanes were placards indicating when a PGA bowler had bowled a perfect 300 game there. As it turns out, someone named Mike Reichstein had bowled a perfect game on our lane on October 18, 2006, the date of my last birthday. The individual digits of the date 10-18-2006 add up to precisely 18. And the cost of our family's game that day came to exactly $18. How cool is that?