Many synchronicities seem unique to the person experiencing them. Is their unique-seeming coincidence also rare among the broad range of meaningful coincidences? Or are some of them like black swans in that one rare synchronicity points toward many of the same type?

Black swans are native to Australia and were first documented by Europeans in the 17th century. Their discovery challenged the long-standing European belief that all swans were white. This discovery led to the metaphor of the “black swan” to describe an unexpected event that can signal a large number of the same type.

Are certain improbable coincidences, like black swans, harbingers of much larger numbers? Or do some of them represent a very small number of reported synchronicities? I selected two seemingly rare types of coincidences and asked the AI bots ChatGPT and You.com to find similar stories. If AI could not find many more, then these coincidence types would likely be rare.

Reciprocal life-saving events are among the more compelling forms of coincidence: One person saves another’s life, only to have their life saved by the rescued person later on.

One Good Tourniquet Deserves Another: Allen Falby was a highway patrolman in Texas. One night on duty, he crashed his motorcycle and lay bleeding to death, having ruptured a major artery in his leg. Alfred Smith arrived, quickly put a tourniquet on his leg and saved his life.

Five years later, Falby was again on duty and received a call to go to the scene of an auto accident. There, he found a man who was bleeding to death from a severed artery in his leg. He applied a tourniquet and saved the man’s life. It was Alfred Smith. (1)

The Policeman and the Paramedic: A police officer saved a man’s life by applying a tourniquet during a severe........

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