Mirror Images

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

Chapter 1

You may see someone you know has died, and it’s not a ghost.   You may see someone walking down the street, after you just talked to them in another city, country.  You may see your spouse or someone else’s with someone other than their spouse, and thinks it is them, but it’s not really them.  You may know someone has aged 20 or 30 years but when you see them walking down the street, they haven’t aged at all since you saw them 30 years ago.  You may be accused of a crime, or even murder, and you know you didn’t have anything to do with it but the witness swears it was you!   You may hear someone call your name, first and last and see someone who looks just like you responding.  You may look in your rearview mirror and see you staring back from another truck that is exactly like yours.    You may run into yourself wearing the same clothes, same haircut, even the same tattoo.  Or stranger still, you may see two of you that look exactly like you but of a different gender. And once in awhile you see a whole family that is not the family that you know, but looks like them!!!

These are experiences people have written to me about, from all around the world.  I have had many that were just like this next experience; Dorothy McGee wrote me of hers: 

WAS IT HIS DAUGHTER?

“Well, when I was a little girl my mom used to take me to this ‘mall’, which we’d just call an oversized strip mall today, so that I could ride my bike in the unused part of the lot.  My grandmother and her would sit in the car and watch people walk by (which I never really understood).”

“One time the mall was almost closed with the exception of a High’s Convenience Store, so I rode my bike on the sidewalk that day.  I’d stopped outside the door of High’s to check on the back tire of my bike and an older man came out.  He grabbed my arm and told me that I was a bad girl for leaving the car and that he was going to give me a whooping.  I was very frightened, so I tried to pull away from him and started screaming for him to let go.  My mother heard me and came running with my grandmother behind her.  When she got there she told the man to let go of me!  He told her to ‘stay out of his business!’  Between my mother pulling one arm and him pulling the other, I felt like a rope in tug-of-war.  I don’t think he felt so good either when my grandmother started beating his back, but he wouldn’t let go.”

“Needless to say, all of this attracted the attention of a police officer who was patrolling the area.  Both the man and my mother were in a heated shouting match over whose kid I was, and the officer got me away from both of them and put me in his car until they could settle the issue.  Basically, the officer asked me who was right and I told him.  The man pulled out a picture of his daughter, and no one could believe the resemblance.  The only difference between the two of us was the hair cut!!!”

The next experience points out some of those strange similarities that identical twins will have, but these two were look-alikes.

“In 1900 King Umberto of Italy came face to face with a man who looked just like him.  The king and his aide-de-camp Gen. Emiho Ponzio-Vaglia arrived in the town of Monza, a few miles outside Milan.  The next day the king was to present the prizes at an athletic meet.  The night of their arrival he and his aide went to a small restaurant for dinner.  As the owner was taking their order, the king noticed that he and the patron were virtually doubles, in both face and build.  He remarked on this, and as the two men talked an extraordinary series of parallels emerged which caused both of them to marvel. Both were born on the same day, year, same town, and had the same name.  They were both married on April 22, 1868.  Both wives were named Margarita, and they both had a son named Vittorio.  They had been decorated for bravery together on two occasions, the first time in 1866, when Umberto had been a private and the king a colonel, and the second time in 1870, when each had been promoted to sergeant and corps commander.  With this final revelation the patron returned to his duties, and the king, turning to his aide, said, ‘I intend to make that man a Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy tomorrow.  Be sure he comes to the meet.’”

“The following day, true to his word, the king asked for his double only to be told that the man had died that day in a shooting accident.  Shocked, the king asked his aide to find out when the funeral was to take place so that he might attend.  At that very moment three shots rang out, fired by an assassin.  The first of them missed the king, but the second two pierced his heart and killed him instantly.”

Fact is stranger than fiction!!!

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