The Fickle Finger of Fate: Some People's Luck is Off the Charts!

Imagine you're a passenger in a plane whose pilots are both sleeping while cruising at 37,000 feet. Not a pretty picture. Could such a thing even happen?

The answer is yes.

Two pilots fell asleep and missed their landing at a flight from Dudan to Ethiopia on August 15th. The ground crew was having trouble making contact as the plane soared past its destination. If not for an alarm that went off as the plane continued to go in the wrong direction everybody on board would have died a fiery death.

As it turned out the pilots woke and turned the plane around back to its original destination.

For everyone aboard it was a remarkably lucky ending. 

Talk about lucky...

One couple in Pennsylvania really defied the odds when they discovered a rare purple pearl in one of their clams.

            Photo courtesy of Scott Overland

The quahog clam they found is listed as exceptionally rare according to the International Gem Society. Its estimated value is around $16,000. Get this, they almost sent it back because the clam had a bell-pepper garnish which the couple had asked the restaurant to leave off. But they didn't, and the rest is one for the lucky files.

Despite staggering odds

I'd be remiss not to mention the lone winner of the July 27 Mega Millions $1.28 billion prize who's living somewhere in Illinois with the third largest lottery prize in American history.

As a sports card collector I was green with envy when I heard about a man from Tennessee who went into his aunt's attic and discovered baseball cards from the 50s and 60s. They turned out to be worth over a million dollars!

It's hard to get any luckier than this...

Bill Morgan was declared clinically dead in 1999 after his body reacted poorly to medication. Twelve days later, he came out of his coma in seeming perfect health.

But that's not all.

Afterwards, he proposed to his girlfriend, and won a $23,000 car thanks to a scratch-off ticket. For good measure he then won $350,000 from a second scratch-off ticket.

Finally, how the fickle finger of fate... 

touched me once while serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1970). One of my duties was to sweep for mines. One particularly hot and humid afternoon I wasn't as alert as I should have been when my sergeant suddenly shouted FREEZE!

I did. He was pointing at my right boot. There was a slight indentation in the ground and metal gleamed in the intense sun. I had stepped on a mine! Warm piss slid down my leg as I waited for an explosion that thankfully never came.

My sergeant probed around it carefully as the rest of the squad got off the road and tried to make themselves small. The tanks backed up.

Long story short; it was an anti-tank pressure mine and I wasn't heavy enough to set it off. When I stepped off of it, I exhaled deeply and realized I was one lucky guy.

So, that's about enough luck for today.

As it stands, you can't seek luck, it has to find you.