Swiss Women Got The Right To Vote The Same Year The US Drove A Buggy On The Moon (1971) Women in Switzerland couldn’t vote until 1971, largely because Switzerland requires national referendums for constitutional change, and the only people that could vote in those referendums at the time were men. That’s 65 years after Finland became the first European country to grant women the right to vote and 51 years after America made it happen. Speaking of America: in 1971, the US was up on the moon driving a “moon buggy” around. Sure, it was men doing the driving, but it’s still a shocking contrast (which was helpfully highlighted by Redditor fasterplastercaster), especially considering Switzerland’s 21st-century status as a progressive wonderland. Microsoft Was Founded While Spain Was Still A Fascist Dictatorship (1975) Reddit user ampellang drew an odd parallel: when Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates in April 1975, Spain was still ruled by fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who “presided over a regime of state terror and national brainwashing through the controlled media and the state education system,” according to the BBC. Unlike Germany or Italy, Spain did not go through a “denazification process” following WWII, meaning fascist politics reigned right up until the early years of home computing. The Brooklyn Bridge Was Being Built During The Battle Of Little Bighorn (1876) Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge – the first steel-wire suspension bridge ever – was, surprisingly, contemporaneous with “Custer’s Last Stand” at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, as Redditor LastKill pointed out. The bridge was still six years from completion when George Armstrong Custer and his men were defeated by Crazy Horse and members of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes in eastern Montana territory. Orville Wright Was Still Alive When Hiroshima And Nagasaki Were Bombed (1945) Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur are widely considered to be the inventors of the airplane – or “fixed-wing powered flight,” at least – so it’s shocking that Orville was alive when planes were used to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Wilbur died from typhoid fever in 1912, but Orville lived long enough to give an interview expressing his sadness about the destruction WWII bombers caused: “No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused.” A thread started by Color_blinded showed this strange and sad dichotomy. Ecstasy Was Invented The Same Year The Titanic Sank (1912) The year the Titanic sank, as Reddit user sobeita called attention to, scientists in Germany first synthesized MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – better known as Ecstasy – “possibly to be used as an appetite suppressant.” Merck patented it the next year but decided against marketing it. Oxford University Existed For Hundreds Of Years Before The Aztec Empire Was Founded (1428) Historians consider 1428 to be the first year of the Aztec Empire, which ruled the Valley of Mexico until 1521. Oxford University in England, believe it or not, is actually hundreds of years older than the Aztecs, as Redditor LastKill brought to light. According to Oxford’s website, “teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096 and developed rapidly from 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.” Buffalo Bill Cody Was Alive At The Same Time The Germans Were Bombing With Zeppelins (1916) Although nearing his death, the epitome of the Wild West, showman William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917), was still alive during the majority of WWI. This means that the famous cowboy, soldier, and Pony Express rider likely heard about newfangled German Zeppelins bombing Paris in January of 1916, a year before his death. This is strange to imagine given Cody is thought of alongside gunslingin' duels and Native Americans, while WWI is associated with its technological advances and initiation of weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield. Edgar Allan Poe's Macabre Tale Comes True Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, features a scene in which the crew of a ship, stranded in the ocean and starving, draws straws to see who will be sacrificed for the others' bellies. The loser of the draw is one Richard Parker. 46 years later, in 1884, a few crew members aboard the ship Mignonette escaped a deadly storm just before their boat sank. Stranded without food, the men decided to sacrifice a 17-year-old crew member after the boy attempted to drink salt water to quench his thirst, causing his health to rapidly decline. They could not wait for him die and risk his body becoming infected in the process of death, so the boy was stabbed to death and devoured. The boy's name? Richard Parker. Twins Killed By The Same Taxi With Almost Too Many Similarities This incident occurred in 1974 in Bermuda. One of the twins died when a taxi cab struck his moped scooter. One year later, the other twin, riding the exact same scooter, was struck and killed by the exact same taxi, driven by the exact same driver, who was driving the exact same passenger as in the death of the first twin. The odds of this happening might seem astronomical, leading you to believe the story was made up, but this might have really happened. Twins Die On The Same Day, In The Same Manner In early 2002, a pair of 70-year-old twins died on the same day in Raahe, Finland. Not so strange, right? Wrong. The men both were struck and killed by trucks while riding their bicycles on the exact same stretch of road, about a mile apart from each other, within a span of two hours. Police did not suspect premeditated suicide, as the twin to die last had no knowledge of his brother's death before setting out on his bike. Their near-simultaneous and eerily mirrored deaths were simply a freak accident. Author Predicts Titanic Sinking Morgan Robertson published his novella Futility in 1898. In it, a massive commercial cruise liner named Titan collides with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, causing the ship to sink. 14 years later, nearly the exact same thing happened in real life with the Titanic disaster. Not only were the ships' names similar, Robertson's boat was nearly identical to the Titanic. AP writer Michelle McQuigge noted: The ships are approximately the same size, with the Titanic being only 25 metres longer than the Titan's 243. Both were capable of maximum speeds over 20 knots, and both carried only the bare legal minimum number of lifeboats for the thousands of passengers on board... Both vessels were hailed as unsinkable, and both proved all too vulnerable after striking icebergs in mid-April. The Miraculous Exploding Church Incident A church exploded in the small Nebraska town of Beatrice on March 1, 1950, at around 7:25 PM. As choir practice always began around 7:20 PM, all 15 choir members perished in the blast, right? Nope. No one died. No one even incurred any injuries. How? All 15 members were running late for their own personal reasons. They were nowhere near the church when it exploded. What could have been an utter tragedy for Beatrice ended up being relatively fine, save for the loss of the town church. Separated Identical Twins Live Nearly Identical Lives Two identical twin boys were separated at three-weeks-old and adopted to separate families in Ohio in 1940. 39 years later, in 1979, the brothers were reunited. They'd both been named James by their adoptive parents and they both went by Jim. Both became law enforcement agents as adults. Both married women named Linda, divorced, and then remarried women named Betty. Both had dogs named Toy at different times in their lives. And both had sons named James Allan (or Alan). Coincidence, a strong argument for nature over nurture, or unconscious psychic communication? The Lincoln And Kennedy's Assassinations There have only been four United States presidents to be assassinated while in office, the first being Abraham Lincoln and the last being John F. Kennedy. The similarities surrounding the men both in life and in death are rather surprising. Focusing on the assassinations alone, the coincidences are uncanny. Writes Valerie Klein of History News Network: Both Presidents were shot in the back of the head, on the Friday before a major holiday, while seated beside their wives, neither of whom were injured. Both were in the presence of another couple, and in each case that man was also wounded by the assassin. After both assassinations there were loud and insistent claims that the fatal shot must have come from a different direction... Both were succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson: Andrew born in 1808 and Lyndon in 1908, both of whom had 13 letters in their names and two daughters. Both assassins have fifteen letters in their names. Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and fled to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theatre. Both assassins were in their turn assassinated by shooters who used a Colt revolver and fired only one, fatal shot. This Bullet Had One Job This one is an oldie but goodie. It's likely not true, as there are no concrete records of the event, not to mention it's fairly implausible - but it's fun nonetheless. The story goes, Henry Ziegland left his long-time fiancée in 1893. Her brother vowed vengeance, and accosted Ziegland on the man's property. The brother shot Ziegland in the face, then killed himself shortly thereafter. But the brother's bullet only grazed Ziegland's face and lodged itself in a tree behind him. He almost literally "dodged a bullet." Fast forward 20 years, to 1913, Ziegland decided to remove that same tree from his property. Unable to do so with an axe, he decided to blast the tree with dynamite. The resultant heat from the explosion caused the bullet to shoot out from the tree and, yep, shoot Ziegland right in the head. Bruce Lee Predicted His Son's Death Never mind the coincidence that both Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, died while filming movies, there's an even freakier coincidence surrounding the deaths of father and son. Bruce's last film, which was incomplete at the time of his passing, is called Game of Death. In it, there is a scene in which a prop master explains how to properly use a fake gun for the purposes of filmmaking. In 1993, while filming The Crow, Brandon was killed in a manner almost exactly mirroring the scene in Game of Death - a gun was accidentally loaded with a dummy cartridge still equipped with a projectile and a primer, and thus the round behaved like a regular bullet, killing Brandon, who was struck in the abdomen. Tamerlane's Prescient Words Military leader Tamerlane's body was exhumed in 1941 by a Soviet scientist. Inside his tomb, a message read, "When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble," and, "Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I." Two days later, despite having signed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union. Man Survives Atomic Blasts At Both Hiroshima And Nagasaki Tsutomu Yamaguchi happened to be on a business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day US bombers dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered severe burns, but was otherwise okay in the end. He returned to his home in Nagasaki, where the US dropped a second atomic bomb just days later, and he managed to survive that attack as well. 9/11 'Predictions' In Media While conspiracy theorists will insist that certain members of Hollywood had prior knowledge of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, the truth is that instances where 9/11 seemed to have been "predicted" by movies and television shows are mere coincidences. Even still, the connections between fiction and real life are startlingly eerie. Take for instance the 1997 episode of The Simpsons, "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," which features a bus pamphlet advertising a trip to NYC for $9. The positioning of the number 9 next to a silhouette of the World Trade Towers seems to spell out 9/11. Then there was this Pakistani airlines advertisement from 1979, showing the shadow of a large jet flying toward the towers. Perhaps the eeriest of them all came from the TV show The Lone Gunmen, a spinoff of The X-Files. The series featured an episode involving the titular trio thwarting a terrorist attack that involved crashing a plane into the World Trade Center, even suggesting the plot was an inside job carried out by a small faction within the US government. The episode aired in March 2001, mere months before the very real September 11 attacks. The Erdington Echo Murders On May 27, 1817, a woman named Mary Ashford was assaulted and murdered in the small English village of Erdington. A man named Abraham Thornton was charged and tried for the crime, but he walked due to lack of evidence. Mary's brother William refused to accept this verdict, and appealed for a retrial, to no avail. On May 27, 1974 - 157 years to the day - Barbara Forrest was assaulted and murdered in the same village, her body dumped several hundred feet away from the spot where residents discovered Ashford's body. A man named Michael Ian Thornton was charged and tried for the deed, but he walked due to lack of evidence. Forrest's sister, Erika, refused to accept this verdict. In 2012, she appealed to have the case reopened so DNA evidence could be better examined. In both cases, the victims were said to feel apprehensive days before they were murdered. The Two Michael Foxes Michael J. Fox original wanted to register with the Screen Actors Guild as Michael Fox, but they already had an actor on the books with that name, thus the addition of his middle initial. Years later, Fox starred in Back to the Future, in which he plays Marty McFly, a high schooler who travels back in time to 1955 and meets his parents as teenagers. His father, George (Crispin Glover), tells Marty he's a huge fan of a show called Science Fiction Theatre, which was an actual show that aired in the '50s. Oddly enough, the original Michael Fox starred in numerous episodes of that show. Neil Armstrong Had To Go Through US Customs After Returning From The Moon Oxford University Was Founded Before Aztec Civilization Began Saudi Arabia Imports Camels From Australia Tiffany & Co. Was Founded Before The Country Of Italy Shakespeare Created The Name Jessica In 'The Merchant of Venice' The Current US Flag Was Designed By A 17-Year-Old For A School Project. He Got A B- Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, And Barbara Walters Were Born In The Same Year France Was Still Using The Guillotine For Executions When 'Star Wars' Hit Theaters More People Have Been Killed By Molasses Than By Coyotes Bananas Are Actually Berries, But Strawberries Are Not The T-Rex Lived Closer In Time To Us Than To The Stegosaurus Cleopatra Lived Closer To The Moon Landing Than The Building Of The Great Pyramid Of Giza If Cars Drove Upwards You Could Drive To Space In An Hour Pluto Was Made And Unmade A Planet Before It Completed One Orbit Of The Sun Mankind Put A Man On The Moon Before We Put Wheels On Suitcases Harvard Was Founded Before The Invention Of Calculus Alaska Is Simultaneously The Most Northern, Western, And Eastern State In The US William Howard Taft Was The Last US President With Facial Hair There Are Whales Alive Who Are Older Than The Book 'Moby Dick' The YKK On Zippers Stands For 'Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikigaisha' Betty White Was Literally Older Than Sliced Bread Nintendo Was Founded In 1889 as a Trading Card Company You're Twice As Likely To Be Killed By A Vending Machine As By A Shark The Nursery Rhyme Never Says Humpty Dumpty Was An Egg Will Smith Is Now Older Than Uncle Phil In The 1st 'Fresh Prince' Episode Your iPhone Has More Computing Power Than NASA Used For The Moon Landing More Photos Were Taken In The Last 2 Minutes Than In The Entire 19th Century There Are More Plastic Pink Flamingos Than Real Ones In The US