July 29, 1970

Do Mystery Patterns Shape Our Lives?

Are there "mystery patterns" in life that shape coming events?

Emphatically, I do not believe in fortune telling, astrology or precognition.

Yet there are many strange reoccurrences of big events that seem to be something more than coincidence.

Have you ever noticed that air crashes seem to happen in two or threes?  Though one shrugs off these cycles as superstition, one event in the news seems to echo in similar happenings.

Scientists are beginning to study this phenomenon seriously.  Meteorologists have detected a 37-year pattern in the weather which assures us pretty much the present kind of wet summers until the year 1997.  A rhythm of sun spots and cosmic rays seem to affect our weather, and the weather effects human behavior.

Major wars appear to run in mathematical patterns.  The Boer War, for example, ended in 1902.  If you arrange the figures 1, 9, 0, and 2 underneath that year and add, you get 1914, the beginning of World War I.  By taking 1919, the year of the peace treaty and adding the figures 1, 9, 1, and 9, you get 1939, the beginning of World War II.

This same little trick would place the start of a new war in 1964, but the Indo-china war was well along by then.  The mystery patterns of life, are either non-existent or we do not understand them well.

It's a fact that all the American presidents who were elected or re-elected in the years 1840, 1860, 1880, 1940 and 1960 died in office.  However it won't necessarily take a brave man to run for election in 1980 for little attention is paid to these strange quirks of circumstances.

Todd Lincoln, eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln was urged for 25 years to run for this nation's top office.  He steadfastly refused because he had been a witness to the only three presidential assassinations up to his lifetime.  He felt he was jinxed and fated to see death in presidential office.

Todd's vaguely sensed pattern manifested itself in still another strange incident.  At a railroad station he slipped and nearly fell under a moving train.  A nearby stranger grabbed him and undoubtedly saved his life.  The stranger turned out to be Edwin Booth, the actor, and brother of John Wilkes Booth who fired the fatal bullet into Abraham Lincoln's brain.

History is said to repeat itself, and fateful patterns can be found in nearly every systematic human endeavor.  Whether these cycles are inevitable, and predictable, is a matter for speculation.

A few years ago Dr. Adam Rutherford, president of the Institute of Pyramidology, was popular on the lecture circuit with his predictions based on measurements of the great pyramid of Cheops.

Rutherford contended this largest of manmade structures was built as a divining tool.  The distance between niches in the long passageway leading to the sepulcher chamber, he said, relates to specific years of the calendar.

Rutherford said his calculations "prove" the Cheops pyramid was completed in 2141 B.C.  Archeologists generally put the date somewhat earlier but never before 2700 B.C.

The year 2141 B.C. is represented by scored lines in the pyramid's entrance chamber, declares Rutherford.  Exactly 688 pyramid inches further on is an aperture in the roof - obviously a big event is intended.  One inch to a year gives 1453 B.C., the date of the Exodus from Egypt.

This marks the beginning of an ascending passage of 1,485 inches (or years) long.  That brings us to 33 A.D.  - the Crucifixion.

Dr.  Rutherford's father, an Egyptologist who got his son interested in the subject, deduced in 1893 that an ominous event of great magnitude would occur in 1914.  He figured this from the length of the grand gallery in the pyramid 1,881 inches (or years) from the end of the passage at 33 A.D.  The event, of course was World War I.

When last heard from, Dr.  Rutherford was predicting World War III before 1979 when measurements show the start of a long, perhaps permanent period of peace on earth.  Neither Communism nor the United Nations would be around then, according to the pyramid inches; but, Rutherford added, they won't be needed.

Theologians find significant patterns in the Bible, and many an otherwise dull sermon is livened up with predictions of doomsday and eternal paradise.

The present conflict between Israel - the returned Jews - and Egypt is viewed seriously by many ministers as the fulfillment of prophesies more than two thousand years old.

Divine revelations?  Parlor tricks?  Natural patterns?

What do you think?

Author: Lindsey Williams