NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE , AUGUST 11
In paranoid times like- these, people
see connections where there aren't any.
Why the complex science of
coincidence is a conspiracy theorist's
worst nightmare. By Lisa Bolkin
When the Miami Police first found Benito Que,
he was slumped on a desolate side street, near
the empty spot where he had habitually
parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same
time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a
white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge
outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner
with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik col-
lapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.
The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four
nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated
in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged
under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splat-
tered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while
jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a
pizza delivery man served as a decoy.
What joined these men was their proximity to the world
of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-
jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School
of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as
anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks
from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before
he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise mis-
siles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths - these
three men and eight others like them - began last fall,
back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring
the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies we
on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.
In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been no-
ticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors
the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other
passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the
articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by
stories like these - all these scientists dying within months of one an-
other, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan
threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity
and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy
they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media
What are the odds, after all?
What are the odds, indeed?
For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence - unexpected
connections that are both riveting and rattling, Much religious faith
is based on the idea that almost nothing is coincidence; science is a
exercise in eliminating the taint of coincidence; police work is often a
feint and parry between those trying to prove coincidence and those try-
ing to prove complicity. Without coincidence, there would be few movie
worth watching ("Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world
she walks into mine"), and literary plots would come grinding to
disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus had not happened to marry his
mother? If Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where Vaijea
was mayor?)
The true meaning of the word is "a surprising concurrence of events,
perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection."
In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coinci-
dence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure
chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel
Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie
"Signs," we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan.
The need is especially strong in an age -when paranoia runs rampant.
"Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps.,, says John Allen Pau-
los, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of
"Innumeracy," the improbable best seller about how Americans don't
understand numbers. Finding a reason or a pattern where none actually
exists "makes it less frightening," be says because events get placed in
the realm of the logical. "Believing in fate, or even conspiracy, can some-
times be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just
happen."
In the past year there has been plenty of conspiracy, of course, but also
a lot of things have "just happened." And while our leaders are out there
warning us to be vigilant, the statisticians are out there warning that pat-
terns are not always what they seem. We need to be reminded, Paulos and
others say, that most of the time patterns that seem stunning to us aren't
even there. For instance, although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1)
equal I 1, and American Airlines Flight 1 1 was the first to hit the twin
towers, and there were 92 people on board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 1 1 is the
254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4), and there are 1 1 letters each in
"Afghanistan ... .. New York City" and "the Pentagon" (and while we're
counting, in George W. Bush), and the World Trade towers themselves
took the form of the number 1 1, this seeming numerical message is not
actually a pattern that exists but merely a pattern we have found. (After
all, the second flight to hit the towers was United Airlines Flight 175,
and the one that hit the Pentagon was American Airlines Flight 77, and
the one that crashed in a Pennsylvania field was United Flight 93, and the
Pentagon is shaped, well, like a pentagon.)
The same goes for the way we think of miraculous intervention. We
need to be told that those lucky last-minute stops for an Egg McMuffin
at McDonald's or to pick up a watch at the repair shop or to vote in the
mayoral primary - stops that saved lives of people who would otherwise
have been in the towers when the first plane hit - certainly looked like
miracles but could have been predicted by statistics. So, too, can the
most breathtaking of happenings - like the sparrow that happened to
appear at one memorial service just as a teenage boy, at the lecturn eulo-
gizing his mom, said the word "mother." The tiny bird lighted on the
boy's head; then he took it in his hand and set it free.
Something like that has to be more than coincidence, we protest. What
are the odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbe-
lievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large num-
bers says that with a large enough denominator - in other words, in a
big wide world - stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. "The really
unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens," explains
Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who has spent his career collecting
and studying examples of coincidence. Given that there are 280 million
people in the United States, he says, "280 times a day, a one-in-a-million
shot is going to occur."
Throw your best story at him - the one about running into your child-
hood playmate on a street corner in Azerbaijan or marrying a woman who
has a birthmark shaped like a shooting star that is a perfect match for your
own or dreaming that your great-aunt Lucy would break her collarbone
hours before she actually does - and he will nod politely and answer that
such things happen all the time. In fact, he and his colleagues also warn me
that although I pulled all examples in the prior sentence from thin air, I will
probably get letters from readers saying one of those things actually hap-
pened to them.
And what of the deaths of nearly a dozen scientists? Is it really possi-
ble that they all just happened to die, most in such peculiar, jarring ways,
within so short a time? "We can never say for a fact that something isn't a
conspiracy," says Bradley Efron, a
professor of statistics at Stanford.
"We can just point out the odds
that it isn't."
I FIRST FOUND MYSELF wondering about coincidence last spring when
I read a small news item out of the tiny Finnish town of Raahe, which
is 370 miles north of Helsinki. On the morning of March 5, two eld-
erly twin brothers were riding their bicycles, as was their
their separate errands. At 9:30, one brother was struck
coastal Highway 8 and killed instantly. About two hours
down the same highway, the other brother was struck by a second truck
and killed.
"It was hard to believe this could happen just by chance," says Marko
Salo, the senior constable who investigated both deaths for the Raahe Po-
lice Department. Instead, the department looked for a cause, thinking ini-
tially that the second death was really a suicide.
"Almost all Raahe thought he did it knowing that his brother was
dead," Salo says of the second brother's death. "They thought he tried
on purpose. That would have explained things." But the investigation
showed that the older brother was off cheerfully getting his hair cut just
before his own death.
The family could not immediately accept that this was random coinci-
dence, either. "It was their destiny," offers their nephew, who spoke with
me on behalf of the family. It is his opinion that his uncles shared a psy-
chic bond throughout their lives. When one brother became ill, the other
one fell ill shortly thereafter. When one reached to scratch his nose, the
other would often do the same. Several years ago, one brother was hit and
injured by a car (also while biking), and the other one developed pain in
the same leg.
The men's sister had still another theory entirely. "She worried that it
was a plot to kill both of them," the nephew says, describing his aunt's
concerns that terrorists might have made their way to Raahe. "She was an-
gry. She wanted to blame someone. So she said the chances of this hap-
pening by accident are impossible."
Not true, the statisticians say. But before we can see the likelihood for
what it is, we have to eliminate the distracting details. We are far too taken,
Efron says, with superfluous facts and findings that have no bearing on the
statistics of coincidence. After our initial surprise, Efron says that the real
yardstick for measuring probability is "How surprised should we be?"
How surprising is it, to use this example, that two 70-year-old men in the
same town should die within two hours of each other? Certainly not com-
mon, but not unimaginable. But the fact that they were brothers would
seem to make the odds more astronomical. This, however, is a superfluous
fact. What is significant in their case is that two older men were riding 1-
cycles along a busy highway in a snowstorm, which greatly increases the
probability that they would be hit by trucks.
Statisticians like Efron emphasize that when something striking hap-
pens, it only incidentally happens to us. When the numbers are large
enough, and the distracting details are removed, the chance of anything is
fairly high. Imagine a Meadow, he says, and then imagine placing your fin-
ger on a blade of grass. The chance of choosing exactly that blade of grass
would be one in a million or even higher, but because it is a certainty that
you will choose a blade of grass, the odds of one particular one being cho-
sen are no more or less than the one to either side.
Robert J. Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University who proved that
it was probably not coincidence that accident rates increase when people si-
multaneously drive and talk on a cellphone, leading some states to
ban the practice, uses the example of a hand of poker. "The chance of get-
ting a royal flush is very low," he says, "and if you were to get a royal
flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is
low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when
you get the royal flush."
When these professors talk, they do so slowly, aware that what they are
saying is deeply counterintuitive. No sooner have they finished explaining
that the world is huge and that any number of unlikely things are likely to
happen than they shift gears and explain that the world is also quite small,
which explains an entire other type of coincidence. One relatively simple
example of this is "the birthday problem." There are as many as 366 days
in a year (accounting for leap years), and so you would have to assemble
367 people in a room to absolutely guarantee that two of them have the
same birthday. But how many people would you need in that room to
guarantee a 50 percent chance of at least one birthday match?
Intuitively, you assume that the answer should be a relatively large
number. And in fact, most people's first guess is 183, half of 366. But the
actual answer is 23. In Paulos's book, he explains the math this way:
[T] he number of ways in which five dates can be chosen (allowing for
repetitions) is (365 x 365 x 365 x 365 x 365). Of all these 3655 ways, how-
ever, only (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) are such that no two of the dates
are the same; any of the 365 days can be chosen first, any of the remain-
ing 364 can be chosen second and so on. Thus, by dividing this latter
product (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) by 3655, we get the probability that
five persons chosen at random will have no birthday in common. Now, if
we subtract this probability from I (or from 100 percent if we're dealing
with percentages), we get the complementary probability that at least
two of the five people do have a birthday in common. A similar calcula-
tion using 23 rather than 5 yields 1/2, or 50 percent, as the probability that
at least 2 of 23 people will have a common birthday."
Got that?
Using similar math, you can calculate that if you want even odds of find-
ing two people born within one day of each other, you only need 14 peo-
ple, and, if you are looking for birthdays a week apart, the magic number is
seven. (Incidentally, if you are looking for an even chance that someone in
the room will have your exact birthday, you will need 253 people.) And yet
despite numbers like these, we are constantly surprised when we meet a
stranger with whom we share a birth date or a hometown or a middle
name. We are amazed by the overlap - and we conveniently ignore the
countless things we do not have in common.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite
reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a re-
searcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer
Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs. He
never worked with anthrax or any infectious disease, according to Dr. Bach
Ardalan, a professor of medicine at the University of Miami and Que's boss
for the past three years. "There is no truth to the talk that Benito was doing
anything related to microbiology," Ardalan says. "He certainly wasn't do-
ing any sensitive kind of work that anyone would want to hurt him for."
But those facts got I-ost amid the confusion - and the prevalence of
very distracting details - in the days after he died. So did the fact that he
had hypertension. On the afternoon of Monday, Nov. 19, Que attended
a late-afternoon lab meeting, and as it ended, he mentioned that he hadn't
been feeling well. A nurse took
Que's blood pressure, which was
190/110. "I wanted to admit him"
to the hospital, Ardalan says, but
Que insisted on going home.
Que had the habit of parking his
car on Northwest 10th Avenue, a
side street that Ardalan describes
as being "beyond the area consid-
ered to be safe." His spot that day
was in front of a house where a
young boy was playing outside.
Four youths approached Que as he neared his car, the boy later told the
police, and there might have been some baseball bats involved. When the
police arrived, they found Que unconscious. His briefcase was if
side, but his wallet was gone. His car was eventually found abandoned
several miles from the scene. He was taken to the hospital, the same one
at which he worked, where he spent more than a week in a coma before
dying without ever regaining consciousness.
The mystery, limited to small items in local Florida papers at first, was
"What killed Benito Que?" Could it have been t e mugging? A CAT
scan showed no signs of bony fracture. In fact, there were no scrapes or
bruises or other physical signs of assault. Perhaps he died of a stroke?
His brain scan did show a "huge intracranial bleed," Ardalan says, which
would have explained his earlier headache, and his high blood pressure
would have made a stroke likely.
In other words, this man just happened to be mugged when he was a
stroke waiting to be triggered. That is a jarring coincidence, to be sure.
But it is not one that the world was likely to have noticed if Don Wiley
had not up and disappeared.
Don C. Wiley was a microbiologist. He did some work with anthrax,
and a lot of work with H.I.V, and he was also quite familiar with
Eboia, smallpox, herpes and influenza. At 57, he was the father of
four children and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the de-
partment of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard.
On Nov. 15, four days before the attack on Benito Que, Wiley was in
Memphis to visit his father and to attend the annual meeting of the scien-
tific advisory board of St. Jude's Research Hospital, of which he was a
member. At midnight, he was seen leaving a banquet at the Peabody Hotel
in downtown Memphis. Friends and colleagues say he had a little to drink
but did not appear impaired, and they remember him as being in a fine
mood, looking forward to seeing his wife and children, who were about to
join him for a short vacation.
Wiley's father lives in a Memphis suburb, and that is where Wiley should
have been headed after the banquet. Instead, his car was found facing in
the opposite direction on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which spans the
Mississippi River at the border of Tennessee and Arkansas. When the po-
lice found the car at 4 a.m., it was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition
and the gas tank was full. There was a scrape of yellow paint on the driver's
side which appeared to come from a construction sign on the bridge, and a
right hubcap was missing on the passenger side, where the wheel rims were
also scraped. There was no sign, however, of Don Wiley.
The police trawled the muddy Mississippi, but they didn't really ex-
pect to find him. Currents run fast at that part of the river, and a body
would be quickly swept away. At the start of the search, they thought he
might have committed suicide; others had jumped from the DeSoto
Bridge over the years. Detectives searched Wiley's financial records, his
family relationships, his scientific research - anything for a hint that the
man might have had cause to take his own life.
Finding nothing, the investigation turned medical. Wiley, they
learned, had a seizure disorder that he had hidden from all but
family and close friends. He had a history of two or three major epi-
sodes a year, his wife told investigators, and the condition was
made worse when he was under stress or the influence of alcohol.
Had Wiley, who could well have been tired, disoriented by bridge
construction and under the influence of a few drinks had a seizure that
sent him over the side of the bridge?
That was the theory the police spoke of in public, but they were also
considering something else. The week that Wiley disappeared coincided
with the peak of anthrax fear throughout the country. Tainted letters ap-
peared the month before at the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Two weeks earlier, a New York City hospital worker died of inhaled an-
thrax. Memphis was not untouched by the scare; a federal judge and two
area congressmen each received hoax letters. Could it be mere chance
that this particular scientist, who had profound knowledge of these mi-
crobes, had disappeared at this time?
"The circumstances were peculiar," says George Bolds, a spokesman
for the Memphis bureau of the F.B.I., which was called in to assist.
"There were questions that had to be asked. Could he have been kid-
napped because his scientific abilities would have made him capable of
creating anthrax? Or maybe he'd had some involvement in the mailing of
the anthrax, and he'd disappeared to cover his tracks? Did his co-con-
spirators grab him and kill him?
"We were in new territory," Bolds continued. "Just because something is
conceivable doesn't mean it's actually happened, but at the same time, just
because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't happen. People's
ideas of what is possible definitely changed on Sept. 11. People feel less se-
cure and less safe. I'm not sure that they're at greater risk than they were
before. Maybe they're just more aware of the risk they are actually at."
As a species, we appear to be biologically programmed to see patterns and
conspiracies, and this tendency increases when we sense that we're in danger.
"We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences", says Persi Diaconis. "It
goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd
better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at
a tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are
noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it."
Adds John Allen Paulos: "Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It
might just be part of our biology that conspires to make coincidences
more meaningful than they really are. Look at the natural world of rocks
and plants and rivers: it doesn't offer much evidence for superfluous co-
incidences, but primitive man had to be alert to all anomalies and respond
to them as if they were real."
For decades, all academic talk of coincidence has been in the context of
the mathematical. New work by scientists like Joshua B. Tenenbaum, an as-
sistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at
M.I.T, is bringing coincidence into the realm of human cognition. Finding
connections is not only the way we react to the extraordinary, Tenenbaum
postulates, but also the way we make sense of our ordinary world. "Coinci-
dences are a window into how we learn about things," he says. "They show
us how minds derive richly textured knowledge from limited situations."
To put it another way, our reaction to coincidence shows how our
brains fill in the factual blanks. In an optical illusion, he explains, our
brain fills the gaps, and although people take it for granted that seeing is
believing, optical illusions prove that's not true. "Illusions also prove
that our brain is capable of imposing structure on the world," he says.
"One of the things our brain is designed to do is infer the causal struc-
ture of the world from limited information."
If not for this ability, he says, a child could not learn to speak. A child
sees a conspiracy, he says, in that others around him are obviously com-
municating and it is up to the child to decode the method. But these same
mechanisms can misfire, he warns. They were well suited to a time of cave-
men and tigers and can be overloaded in our highly complex world. "It's
why we have the urge to work everything into one big grand scheme," he
says. "We do like to weave things together.
"But have we evolved into fundamentally rational or fundamentally it-
rational creatures? That is one of the central questions."
WE PRIDE OURSELVES on being independent and original, and yet our reac-
tions to nearly everything can be plotted along a predictable spectrum.
When the grid is coincidences, one end of the scale is for those who believe
that these are entertaining events with no meaning; at the other end are
those who believe that coincidence is never an accident.
The view of coincidence as fate has lately become something of a mini-
trend in the New Age section of bookstores. Among the more popular au-
thors is SQuire Rushnell (who, in the interest of marketing, spells his first
name with a capital Q). Rushnell spent 20 years producing such television
programs as "Good Morning America" and "Schoolhouse Rock." His fas-
cination with coincidence began when he learned that both John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson died on the same July 4, 50 years after the ratifica-
tion of the Declaration of Independence.
"That stuck in my craw," Rushnell says, "and I couldn't stop wondering
what that means." And so Rushnell wrote "When God Winks: How the
Power of Coincidence Guides Your Life." The book was published by a
small press shortly before Sept. 11 and sold well without much publicity. It
will be rereleased with great fanfare by Simon on & Schuster next month. Its
message, Rushnell says, is that "coincidences are signposts along your uni-
versal pathway. They are hints that you are going in the right direction or
that you should change course. It's like your grandmother sitting across
the Thanksgiving table from you and giving you a wink. What does that
wink mean? 'I'm here, I love you, stay the course."'
During my interview with Rushnell, I told him the following story: On
a frigid December night many years ago, a friend dragged me out of my
warm apartment, where I planned to spend the evening in my bathrobe
nursing a cold. I had to come with her to the movies, she said, because she
had made plans with a pal from her office, and he was bringing a friend for
me to meet. Translation: I was expected to show up for a last-minute blind
date. For some reason, I agreed to go, knocking back a decongestant as I
left home. We arrived at the theater to find that the friend who was sup-
posed to be my "date" had canceled, but not to worry, another friend had
been corralled as a replacement. The replacement and I both fell asleep in
the movie (I was sedated by cold medicine; he was a medical resident who
had been awake for 36 hours), but four months later we were engaged, and
we have been married for nearly 15 years.
Rushnell was enthralled bv this tale, particularly by the mystical force
that seemed to have nudges me out the door when I really wanted to
stay home and watch "The Golden Girls." I know that those on the oth-
er end of the spectrum - the scientists and mathematicians - would
have offered several overlapping explanations of why it was
unremarkable.
There are, of course, the laws of big numbers and small numbers - the
fact that the world is simultaneously so large that anything can happen and
so small that weird things seem to happen all the time. Add to that the
work of the late Amos Tversky, a giant in the field of coindence theory,
who once described his role in this world as "debugging human intuition.
Among other things, Tversky disproved the "hot hand" theory of basket-
ball, the belief that a player who has made his last few baskets will more
likely than not make his next. After examining thousands of shots by the
Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds of a successful shot cannot be
predicted by the shots that came before.
Tversky similarly proved that arthritis sufferers cannot actually predict
the weather and are not in more pain when there's a storm brewing, a belief
that began with the ancient Greeks. He followed 18 patients for 15
months, keeping detailed records of their reports of pain and joint swelling
and matching them with constantly updated weather reports. There was
no pattern, he concluded, though he also conceded that his data would not
change many people's beliefs.
We believe in such things as hot hands and arthritic forecasting and pre-
destined blind dates because we notice only the winning streaks, only the
chance meetings that lead to romance, only the days that Grandma's hands
ache before it rains. "We forget all the times that nothing happens," says
Ruma Falk, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, who studied years ago with Tversky. "Dreams are another
example," Falk says. "We dream a lot. Every night and every morning. But
it sometimes happens that the next day something reminds you of that
dream. Then you think it was a premonition."
Falk's work is focused on the question of why we are so entranced by
coincidence in the first place. Her research itself began with a coincidence.
She was on sabbatical in New York from her native Israel, and on the night
before Rosh Hashana she happened to meet a friend from Jerusalem on a
eManhattan street corner. She and the friend stood on that corner and mar-
veled at the coincidence. What is the probability of this happening? she re-
members wondering. What did this mean?
"How stupid we were," Falk says now, "to be so surprised. We related
to all the details that had converged to create that moment. But the real
question was what was the probability that at some time in some place I would meet
one of my circle of friends? And when I told this story
to others at work, they encoded the events as
two Israelis meeting in New York, something
that happens all the time."
Why was her experience so resonant for her,
Falk asked herself, but not for those around her?
One of the many experiments she has conducted
since then proceeded as follows: she visited sev-
eral large university classes, with a total of 200
students, and asked each student to write his or
her birth date on a card. She then quietly sorted
the cards and found the handful of birthdays that
students had in common. Falk wrote those dates
on the blackboard. April 10, for instance, Nov. 8,
Dec. 16. She then handed out a second card and
asked all the students to use a scale to rate how
surprised they were by these coincidences.
The cards were numbered, so Falk could de-
termine which answers came from respondents
who found their own birth date written on the
board. Those in that subgroup were consistently
more surprised by the coincidence than the rest
of the students. "It shows the stupid power of
personal involvement," Falk says.
The more personal the event, the more mean-
ing we give it, which is why I am quite taken with
my story of meeting my husband (because it is a
pivotal moment in my life), and why SQuire
Rusbnell is also taken with it (because it fits into
the theme of his book), but also why Falk is not
impressed at all. She likes her own story of the
chance meeting on a corner better than my story,
while I think her story is a yawn.
The fact that personal attachment adds signifi-
cance to an event is the reason we tend to react
so strongly to the coincidences surrounding
Sept. 11. In a deep and lasting way, that tragedy
feels as if it happened to us all.
Falk's findings also shed light on the count-
less times that pockets of the general public
find themselves at odds with authorities and
statisticians. Her results might explain, for in-
stance, why lupus patients are certain their
breast implants are the reason for their illness,
despite the fact that epidemiologists conclude
there is no link, or why parents of autistic chil-
dren are resolute in their belief that childhood
immunizations or environmental toxins or a
host of other suspected pathogens are the
cause, even though experts are skeptical. They
might also explain the outrage of all the pa-
tients who are certain they live in a cancer clus-
ter, but who have been told otherwise by re-
searchers.
Let's be clear: this does not mean that con-
spiracies do not sometimes exist or that the
environment never causes clusters of death
And just as statistics are often used to show us
that we should not be surprised, they can also
prove what we suspect, that something is
wrong out there.
"The fact that so many suspected cancer clus-
ters have turned out to be statistically insupport-
able does not mean the energy we spent looking
for them has been wasted," says Dr. James M.
Robins, a professor of epidemiology and biosta-
tistics at Harvard and an expert on cancer clus-
ters. "You're never going to find the real ones if
you don't look at all the ones that don't turn out
to be real ones."
Most Often, though, coincidence is a sort of
Rorschach test. We look into it and find what we
already believe. "It's like an archer shooting an
arrow and then drawing a circle around it," Falk says
"We give it meaning because it does mean
something - to us."
VLADIMIR PASECHNIK WAS 64 when he died.
His early career was spent in the Soviet Union
working at Blopreparat, the site of that country's
biological weapons program. He defected in
1989 and spilled what he knew to the British, re-
vealing for the first time the immense scale of
Soviet work with anthrax, plague, tularemia and
smallpox.
For the next 10 years, he worked at the Cen-
ter for Applied Microbiology and Research, part
of Britain's Department of Health. Two years
ago, he left to form Regma Biotechnologies,
whose goal was to develop treatment for tuber-
culosis and other infectious disease. In the
weeks before he died, Pasechnik had reportedly
consulted with authorities about the growing
anthrax scare. Despite all these intriguing de-
tails, there is nothing to suggest that his death
was caused by anything other than a stroke.
Robert Schwartz's death, while far more dra-
matic and bizarre, also appears to have nothin
to do with the fact that he was an expert on
DNA sequencing and analysis. On Dec. 10 he
was found dead on the kitchen floor of his isolat
ed log-and-fieldstone farmhouse near Leesburg
Va., where he had lived alone since losing his wife
to cancer four years ago and his children to col-
lege. Schwartz had been stabbed to death with
two-foot-long sword, and his killer had carve
an X on the back of his neck.
Three friends of Schwartz's college-age
daughter were soon arrested for what the pros-
ecutor called a "planned assassination"; two of
the trials for first-degree murder are schedule
for this month. A few weeks later, police arrest-
ed the daughter as well. One suspect has a histo-
ry of mental illness, and their written statements
to police talk of devil worship and revenge
There is no talk, however, of microbiology.
On the same day that Schwartz died. Set Van
Nguyen, 44, was found dead in an air-locked
storage chamber at the Australian Common-
wealth's Scientific and Industrial Research Or-
ganization's animal diseases facility in Geelong.
A months-long internal investigation concluded
that a string of equipment failures had allowed
nitrogen to build up in the room, causing Nguy-
en to suffocate. Although the center itself dealt
with microbes like mousepox, which is similar to
smallpox, Nguyen himself did not. "Nguyen
was in no way involved in research into mouse-
pox," says Stephen Prowse, who was the acting
director of the Australian lab during the investi-
gation. "He was a valued member of the lab-
oratory's technical support staff and not a re-
search scientist."
Word of all these deaths (though not the spe-
ific details) found its way to Ian Gurney, a Brit-
ish writer. Gurney is the author of "The Cassan-
dra Prophecy: Armageddon Approaches," a
book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate
that judgment Day will occur in or about the
year 2023. He is currently researching his second
book, which is in part about the threat of nuclear
and biological weapons, and after Sept. 11 he
entered a news alert request into Yahoo, asking
to be notified whenever there was news with the
key word "microbiologist."
First Que, then Wiley, then Pasechnik,
Schwartz and Nguyen popped up on Gurney's
computer. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist," says
the man who has predicted the end of the
world, "but it certainly did look suspicious."
Gurney compiled what he had learned from
these scattered accounts into an article that
he sent to a number of Web sites, including
Rense.com, which tracks U.F.O. sightings
worldwide. "Over the past few weeks," Gurney
wrote, "several world-acclaimed scientific re-
searchers specializing in infectious diseases and
biological agents such as anthrax, as well as
DNA sequencing, have been found dead or
have gone missing."
The article went on to call Benito Que, the
cancer lab technician, "a cell biologist working
on infectious diseases like H.I.V," and said that
he had been attacked by four men with a base-
ball bat but did not mention that he suffered
from high blood pressure. It then described the
disappearance of Wiley without mentioning his
seizure disorder and the death of Pasechnik
without saying that he had suffered a stroke. It
gave the grisly details of Schwartz's murder, but
said nothing of the arrests of his daughter's
friends. Nguyen, in turn, was described as "a
skilled microbiologist," and it was noted that he
shared a last name with Kathy Nguyen, the 61-
year-old hospital worker who just happened to
be the one New Yorker to die of anthrax.
Of course, there have always been rumors
based on skewed historical fact. Recall, for ex-
ample, the list of coincidences that supposedly
linked the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and
Kennedy. It goes, in part, like this: The two men
were elected 1 00 years apart; their assassins were
born 100 years apart
(in fact, 101 years apart); they were both succeed-
ed by men named Johnson; and the two Johnsons
were born 100 years apart. Their names each con-
tain seven letters; their successors' names each
contain 13 letters; and their assassins' names each
contain 15 letters. Lincoln was shot in a theater
and his assassin ran to a warehouse, while Ken-
nedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin
ran to a theater. Lincoln, or so the story goes, had
a secretary named Kennedy who warned him not
to go to the theater the night he was killed (for
the record, Lincoln's White House secretaries
were named John Nicolay and John Hay, and Lin-
coln regularly re)'ected warnings not to attend
public events out of fear for his safety, including
his own inauguration); Kennedy, in turn, had a
secretary named Lincoln (true, Evelyn Lincoln)
who warned him not to go to Dallas (he, too, was
regularly warned not to go places, including San
Antonio the day before his trip to Dallas).
I first read about these connections five years af-
ter the Kennedy assassination, when I was 8,
which says something about how conspiracy the-
ory speaks to the child in all of us. But it also says
something about the technology of the time. The
numerological coincidences from the World Trade
Center that I mentioned at the start of this article
made their way onto my computer screen by Sept.
15, from a friend of a friend of a friend of an ac-
quaintance, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that
"the Web has changed the scale of these things."
Had there been a string of dead scientists back in
1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that
no one would have ever known. "Back then, you
would not have had the technical ability to gather
all these bits and pieces of information, while to-
day you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that
if you take a lot of random noise, you can find
chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to
collect random noise."
The Gurney article traveled from one Web site
to the next and caught the attention of Paul Sie-
veking, a co-editor of Fortean Times, a magazine
that describes itself as "the journal of Strange Phe-
nomena.
"People send me stuff all the time," Sleveking
"This was really interesting." Wearing his
second hat as a columnist for the The Sunday
Telegraph in London, he wrote a column on the
subject for that paper titled "Strange but True -
The Deadly Curse of the Bloresearchers." His
version began with the link between the two
Nguyens and concluded, "It is possible that
nothing connects this string of events, but ... it
offers ample fodder for the conspiracy theorist or
thriller writer."
Commenting on the story months later, Slevek-
says "It's probably just a random clumping,
but it just happens to look significant. We're all na-
rural storytellers, and conspiracy theorists are Just
frustrated novelists. We like to make up a good
story out of random facts."
Over the months, Gurney added names to his
list and continued to send it to virtual and actual
publications around the U.S. Mainstream news-
papers started taking up the story, including an
alternative weekly in Memphis, where interest in
the Wiley case was particularly strong, and most
recently The Toronto Globe and Mail. The tally
of "microbiologists" is now at I 1, give or take,
depending on the story you read. In addition to
the men already discussed, the names that appear
most often are these: Victor Korshunov, a Rus-
Sian expert in intestinal bacteria, who was bashed
over the head near his home in Moscow; Ian
Langford, a British expert in environmental risk
and disease, who was found dead in his home
near Norwich, England, naked from the waist
down and wedged under a chair; Tanya
Holzmayer, who worked as a microbiologist
near San Jose and was shot seven times by a for-
mer colleague when she opened the door to a
pizza delivery man; David Wynn-Williams, who
studied microbes in the Antarctic and was hit by
a car while jogging near his home in Cambridge,
England; and Steven Mostow, an expert in influ-
enza, who died when the plane he was piloting
crashed near Denver.
The stories have also made their way into the
e-mal in-boxes of countless microbiologists.
Janet Shoemaker, director of pub-
lic and scientific affairs for the
American Society for Microbiolo-
gy, heard the tales and points out
that her organization alone has
41,000 members, meaning that the
deaths of 11 worldwide, most of
whom were not technically micro-
biologists at all, is not statistically
surprising. "We're saddened by
anyone's death," she says. "But
this is Just a coincidence. In an-
other political climate I don't
think anyone would have noticed."
Ken Alibek heard them, too, and
dismissed them. Alibek is one of
the country's best-known micro-
biologists. He was the No. 2 man at
Blopreparrat (where Victor Pasech-
nik also worked) before he defected
and now works with the U.S. gov-
ernment seeking antidotes for the
very weapons he developed. Those
who have died, he says, did not real-
ly know anything about biological
weapons, and if there were a con-
spiracy to kill scientists with such
knowledge, he would be dead. "I
considered all this a little artificial,
because a number of them couldn't
have been considered B.W ex-
perts, " he says with a hint of dis-
dain. "I got an e-mall from Pasech-
nik before he died, and he was
working on a field completely dif-
ferent from this. People say to me,
'Ken, you could be a target,' but if
you start thinking about this, then
your life is over. I'm not saying I'm
not worried, but I'm not paying
much attention. I'm opening my
mail as usual. If I see something
suspicious, I know what to do."
Others are not quite as sanguine.
Phyllis Della-Latta is the director
of clinical microbiology services at
New York's Columbia Presbyteri-
an Medical Center. She found an
article on the deaths circulating in
the most erudite place - an In-
ternet discussion group of direc-
tors of clinical microbiology labs
around the world. These are the
people who, when a patient de-
velops suspicious symptoms, are
brought in to rule out things like
anthrax.
Della-Latta, whom I know from
past medical reporting, forwarded
the article to me with a note: "See
attached. FYI. Should I be con-
cerned??? I'm off on a business
trip to Italy tomorrow & next
week. If I don't return, write my
obituary."
She now says she doesn't really
believe there is any connection be-
tween the deaths. "It's probably
only coincidence," she says, then
adds: "But if we traced back a lot of
things that we once dismissed as co-
incidence - foreigners taking fly-
ing lessons - we would have found
they weren't coincidence at all. You
become paranoid. You have to be."
DON WILEY'S BODY was finally
found on Dec. 20, near Vidalia, La.,
about 300 miles south of where he
disappeared.
The Memphis medical examiner,
0. C. Smith, concluded that yellow
paint marks on Wiley's car suggest
that he hit a construction sign on
the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, as
does the fact that a hubcap was
missing from the right front tire.
Smith's theory is that heavy truck
traffic on the bridge can set off
wind gusts and create "roadway
bounce," which might have been
enough to cause Wiley to lose his
balance after getting out of the car
to inspect the scrapes. He was 6-
foot-3, and the bridge railing
would have only come up to mid-
thigh.
If Dr. Wiley were on the curb
trying to assess damage to his car,
all of these factors may have played
a role in his going over the rail,"
Smith said when he issued his re-
port. Bone fractures found on the
body support this theory. Wiley
suffered fractures to his neck and
spine, and his chest was crushed, in-
juries that are consistent with Wi-
ley's hitting a support beam before
he landed in the water.
The Wiley family considers this
case closed. "These kinds of the-
ories are something that's always
there," says Wiley's wife, Katrin
Valgeirsdottir, who has heard all the
rumors. "People who want to be-
lieve it will believe it, and there's
nothing anyone can say."
The Memphis Police also con-
sider the case closed, and the local
office of the F.B.I. has turned its at-
tention to other odd happenings.
The talk of Memphis at the mo-
ment is the bizarre ambush of the
city's coroner last month. He was
wrapped in barbed wire and left ly-
ing in a stairwell of the medical ex-
aminer s building with a live bomb
strapped to his chest.
Coincidentally, that coroner,
0. C. Smith, was also the coroner
who did the much-awaited, some-
what controversial autopsy on
Don Wiley.
What are the odds of that?