What a Coincidence

1 ANSWERS

1. Brett
   

   Writer Mark Twain was born in 1835, the year of Halley’s comet. Twain remarked that as he had come into the world with the comet, so he would pass from the world with it. Halley’s comet returned in 1910, and, sure enough, Twain died that year.
   
   During the Second World War the British Museum in London was twice hit by German bomb, the second passing through the hole made by the first. Neither bomb exploded.
   
   Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon. Aldrin was the second man on the Moon.
   
   In 1898, retired Merchant Navy Offices Morgan Robertson wrote a novel, The Wreck of the Titan, which uncannily predicted the Titanic disaster 14 years later. Apart from the similarity in the names of the two ships, Robertson’s Titan was also huge, supposedly unsinkable British liner making its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York with 3000 passengers on board. It too struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank with many people losing their lives because of the shortage of lifeboats.
   
   In April 1935, a ship named the Titanian, carrying coal from Newcastle to Canada, almost suffered the same fate as the Titanic when encountering an iceberg on the same area of the North Atlantic. Luckily, crewman William Reeves had a premonition of impending disaster and yelled “Danger ahead!” to the navigator shortly before the iceberg beamed visible in the darkness. Reeves was born on 15 April 1912 – the day the Titanic sank.
   
   Duane Allman of The Allman Brothers rock band was killed in a motorbike accident in Macon, Georgia, in 1971. A year later, fellow Allman Brother’s member Berry Oakley was killed in another motorbike crash just three blocks away.
   
   In 1799 and American privateer, the Nancy, was seized by a British warship in the Caribbean. Prior to capture, the Nancy’s skipper, Thomas Briggs, managed to throw the hip’s American paper overboard and replace them with Dutch forgeries. Charged in Jamaica with running a British blockade during wartime, Briggs looked set to go free for lack of evidence, But in the course of the trial another British warship, HMS Ferret, arrived in port and produced the incriminating papers. The ferret, had caught a large shark off Haiti and inside the shark’s stomach were the papers.
   
   For three successive seasons between 1956 and 1958, Leeds United were drawn at home to Cardiff City in the third round of the FA Cup. Each time, Cardiff won 2-1.
   
   Four of the first six US Presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams - were 57 when they were inaugurated.
   
   In 1975 a Bedfordshire family were stunned when a huge chunk of ice dropped out of the sky and crashed through the roof of their house. At the time they were watching a film on TV about the Titanic.
   
   On 23 May 1939, the recently built American submarine Squalus sank off the eastern seaboard. A sister ship, the Sculpin succeeded in rescuing half of the 56-man crew. The Squalus was subsequently salvaged and renamed the Sailfish. In 1943, the Sculpin was sunk by the Japanese who took 42 men prisoner, placing half of them on board the aircraft carrier Cuyo. Approaching Japan, the Cuyo was torpedoed by the Sailfish and everyone on board was killed. So the crew of the Sailfish had killed half of the survivors of the submarine that had come to their rescue four years previously

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