This is a topic which captured my interest after several remarkable occurences throughout my life. I’ll never forget the most amazing synchronicity that I ever experienced.

The year was 1993, and I’d been working and living on a small ranch 5 miles outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. One morning I noticed that my vehicle, a 1959 Toyota Land Cruiser, had a flat tire, but even worse, since the vehicle had only a canvas bikini top, I discovered that someone had stolen my tire iron from the open and unsecured back end, so I was unable to change the tire.

The ranch owner had only Fords and Chevys, so his lug wrenches wouldn’t fit the Toyota – I needed a metric size…

I was pondering what I could do about it; I didn’t know anyone else who had one that might work, had no access to a phone anyway, and any neighbors in the area lived quite some distance from his property, which would have required me to walk for miles. That was not an option at the time for me, so I was alone there all day, stranded, wondering who I might possibly get a ride from into town to purchase another lug wrench.

The ranch owner worked as a Professor at Northern AZ University all day and I was feeling a bit stressed at the thought of asking him for a ride after he’d returned from a long day’s work.

But as there was nothing else that I could do, I resigned myself to just go to work setting the fence posts he’d asked me to place for a horse corral.

He hadn’t been too particular about precisely where the posts were to be placed; he had shown me an approximate starting point near the barn – leaving just enough distance from the barn for a gate, and pointed toward a group of trees maybe 100 feet away. He just asked me to set the posts equidistantly, perhaps every 8 or 10 feet – whatever seemed best to me.

So I planned the fence line and measured and marked the locations of the holes out in the middle of an empty meadow maybe 50 meters from the house where my car was parked.

On the 4th or 5th hole I hit metal about 8 inches deep. I knelt down and dug with my hands through the soil and pulled out this old lug wrench, deeply pitted from rust – it must have been buried there for many years, if not decades! It was just a single lug wrench, not a 4-way as I had lost, and I just knelt there alternately gazing at it, then at my car in the distance, wondering if…somehow…??

I then banged it on a rock to free the dirt packed into the socket and began walking across the meadow toward my vehicle, a sense of wonder and excitement building within me. I dropped to my knees before my flat tire, popped the wrench on and BY GOD IT WAS THE PERFECT SIZE!

Is that not incredible? What are the odds that this could possibly ever happen to anyone? After all, I myself had plotted the fence line and determined the exact locations and spacing of the post holes. Had I been off by a mere few inches in any direction, I’d have completely missed the chance to unearth this astonishing Gift from the Universe! Looking back on the experience now, it was as if I had somehow unconsciously been Divinely Guided.

I swear to God that this actually happened to me.

One thing that I have often pondered regarding this mind-blowing incident is that there have been so many other problems my life previously that had been of much greater concern to me, and I had wracked my brain for hours trying to figure out a solution, but no magical synchronicity had ever shown up to resolve the issue.

Yet in this instance, which I had considered only a minor inconvenience and had used very little mental energy dwelling on it, and there really was nothing more that I could do about it anyway. So,  I decided to simply let it go and focus instead on the task at hand.

~ Lights, Camera, ACTION! ~

The other remarkable synchronicity in my life happened when I was a freshman in high school and attended my very first rock concert: Alice Cooper on the Billion Dollar Babies tour at a huge arena in St. Louis, on Friday the 13th of April in 1973.

When I was a young teen, nothing in this world was more important to me than the Alice Cooper band!

I was with a few other friends, and a couple of us had brought our cameras with us.

In the lobby during intermission, my friend gave me his camera to hold while he visited the men’s room. But we all had been smoking weed and somehow I forgot and left them sitting on the floor of the lobby when we returned to our seats.

My friends were not happy with me at all and I felt like such a total fool.

The following Monday morning at school, I was speaking with a classmate who had also attended the show but who had not been with our group. As we were comparing our impressions of the concert, he told me excitedly that he had found TWO REALLY NICE CAMERAS in the lobby! Yes, the cameras I had lost, and we recovered them! And this had happened at a sizeable auditoruim in St. Louis 30 miles from my town! This tour was at a time when the original Alice Cooper band were at the peak of their popularity, and of the thousands of people who could have found the cameras, it just happened to be a schoolmate whom I would be meeting and speaking with 3 days later!

With the odds being only around nine thousand to one (the capacity of this particular venue), it’s not quite as amazing as the lug wrench incident, but impressive nonetheless, and it seems that I may be prone to occasionally somehow unknowingly line up my vibrations, frequency, (or whatever) to experience such uncanny events, though I have no understanding whatsoever of the dynamics behind this.

~ Olive Oily ~

There was also another comparatively minor but very important one that happened recently when I was residing in Uruguay: I had visited my mechanic for an oil change on my motorcycle. But unbeknownst to me, he had forgotten to replace the cap on the oil port and I hadn’t noticed.

And just when I started it up, some guy came walking by and called my attention to the missing cap and the fact that he had seen oil spurting out.

If I had started the bike just a minute earlier and left before he came by, or if I had done it just a few seconds later after he had already passed, I might have ruined my bike by blowing out all of the engine oil on the open road in the middle of nowhere as I headed out of town driving the 5 kilometers back to my secluded cabin. ]

But the precise timing of this observant guy walking by saved me. How did this happen? Just another ‘coincidence’?

There’s no doubt in my mind that there is something very profound about the energies behind such events. Perhaps it’s some yet-undiscovered Natural Law of the Universe which we don’t fully understand? Who knows?

I’m drawn to studying these mysterious anomolies further, and I try to remain alert and observant, careful not to miss any minor ones which might normally escape my notice.

Ah, if only we knew the formula…

J.W. Peterson
Email to the Editor of Federal Observer
February 1, 2024