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World’s largest astral twin experiment underway
Back in 1973, paranormal columnist Allen Spraggett published an article on astral twins, in which he lamented that the only way to settle the question of whether astral twins exist would be to collect personal data from several hundred cases and run them through a computer to see if any extraordinary similarities showed up. A project like this would have been difficult to accomplish with the technology of 1973, but thanks to modern software programs, and an ambitious website called Journal of the Bizarre, this is no longer the case.
For hundreds of years, mankind has speculated that people born on the same day of the same year share many eerie similarities. A famous example is that of King George III, who shared a birthday with a commoner named Samuel Hemmings (June 4, 1738). Both men were married on the same day and died on the same day. Spragget’s 1973 article mentions several cases of astral twins which he has investigated, such as the case of John M. Brown, a Toronto resident who worked with a man born on the same date in history. After comparing notes, these men discovered that their lives ran parallel in at least ten different ways, with both men having worked in army orderly rooms during WW2, both men having wives who were born in February, and both owning the same model of automobile.
Journal of the Bizarre decided to settle the question of whether astral twins exist once and for all by launching an ambitious research project, in which the site’s founders hope to receive survey responses from 100,000 individuals. To accomplish this task, the website has posted a 100-question survey uniquely designed to measure the degree of similarities and coincidences between people born on the same day of the same year.
“To the best of our knowledge, this will be the largest research project of its kind,” explained Anna Newburg, one of the founders of Journal of the Bizarre. Newburg, who holds a degree in psychology, has spent the previous six months compiling questions for the survey– questions that range from the obvious to the oddly specific. “Our survey is designed to conclusively and definitively prove or disprove the astral twin theory, so long as we have a large enough sample size,” explains Newburg. “Since 1935, a little more than 29,000 days have elapsed. That’s eighty years worth of birthdays. The reason why every other astral twin research project has failed is because a scientifically viable experiment would require an extremely large sample size. Assuming that our oldest respondent is eighty and the youngest is eighteen, we estimate that for every 100,000 participants, we’ll only find 4.4 other individuals born on the same day in the same year.”
Anyone interested in taking the survey and participating in the 2015 Astral Twin Research Project can do so by visiting: http://www.journalofthebizarre.com/2015/08/the-astral-twin-experiment.html
