The subject of this posting is synchronicity which is just another fancy word for coincidence. Being a former criminal investigator I was trained to believe there is no such thing as coincidence. For quite a few years I truly believed that there weren’t but one midnight shift in the summer of 1974 change all that. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible but I tend to ramble so bear with me.

It was an extremely hot August night; it was Sunday which was one of the slowest days of the week for police business. My partner and I were bored out of our minds because due to the heat there was very little activity. Around 2:30 in the morning we drove back to the state police barracks to check on the desk man who was working alone in the building. We brought him some soft drinks and lunch and we settled down to kill a few minutes.

We walked into the desk area, and it was like a bomb went off in there. He had been given an assignment on a slow night to start purging old reports from the files. We’re talking reports going back for years or more and he had three large trash barrels completely filled with pink slips. The pink slips were slips where each call was recorded and then forwarded to the appropriate officers for follow-up and reports. While both of us felt really sorry for the desk man, we didn’t feel sorry enough to jump into that nightmare. After 20 minutes of whining, we were guilted into helping the poor guy.

I was standing over one of the trash barrels that must’ve contained at least 400 old pink slips. While I was talking to the desk man I randomly picked one up and quickly read the title. Now you got to go back with me a few minutes because an hour or so prior to our visit to the barracks we’d been on a call for a suspicious vehicle at a specific residence at a specific time in the northern part of our county. I looked down at the pink slip I’d picked out of the barrel, and it was dated exactly one year ago and concerned a suspicious vehicle at a specific residence at a specific time in the northern part of the county. It was identical to the call we just completed. Exactly the same residence at exactly the same time and for the same reason. Then it got really weird because the officers assigned to the original complaint were my partner and me. To say we were stunned is an understatement.

To this day I can hardly believe the whole thing happened but it did. I have absolutely no explanation as to how that could have come about which I suppose is what keeps it interesting to this day. It’s made me wonder upon occasion if some of the weird coincidences we hear about are absolutely true.

I just finished reading a book titled Incredible Coincidences, written by Alan Vaughan. He documents dozens and dozens of cases similar to this and of course can offer no explanation for his either. It seems to me that it happens way more than we think if his book is any indicator. I’m still not a big believer in all the weirdness that people alleged is out there, but this incident gave me pause.

WEIRD!