For the first time since a player’s strike 40 years prior, the NFL cancelled a game this past season, owing to the on-field collapse of Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin. The Bills safety drilled Cincinnati receiver Tee Higgins in such a way and place that it caused Hamlin to succumb to commotio cordis. A heroic response from the Buffalo medical staff restarted his heart and a long recovery process commenced.

While Hamlin was recouping, his teammates began their next game with a rousing 96-yard touchdown return. This prompted the first of many overexcited proclamations that the Bills were destined to win their long-awaited first Super Bowl championship. Other supposed clues were that Josh Allen threw three touchdown passes and Bills defenders snagged three interceptions, both matching Hamlin’s jersey number. There were also inaccurate reports that it had been three years, three months since the Bills’ last kick return TD.

There are some starry-eyed types who insist there are no coincidences. But for the stodgy skeptic, a more measured approach is taken. Skeptical Inquirer’s Timothy Redmond quoted Michael Shermer as saying that those in the former category “look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives, then weave narratives around those patterns to bring them to life and give them meaning.”

So while the first game after the near-death experience may have had significant emotional impact, there was no need to ascribe a higher meaning to anything that happened that day.
If 500 million Powerball tickets are purchased, the chance of the one in your front jacket pocket being the winner is extremely minute. But the chance of a ticket somewhere having the winning numbers is quite large. Similarly, Redmond wrote, while the odds of a specific stat from a game would match an injured teammate’s number may be low, the odds that some statistic would match the number is high. A quarterback of Allen’s caliber throwing three TDs is relatively common, and while three picks in one game is higher than the norm, it is a reasonable occurrence.

As Redmond put it, fans were “looking for ‘3,’ and they found it. It is the endless number of improbable coincidences that renders such a coincidence so probable.” There were far more non-coincidences failing to incorporate the numeral, such as Buffalo winning by 12, the victory giving the Bills a 7-game winning streak, and Buffalo recording 1 sack. And the supposed inevitability of a Bills Super Bowl championship wilted in their lackluster three-score loss to Cincinnati in the divisional round.

While some have ascribed heartfelt and positive meaning to the occurrences, there are those who produce a malevolent spin. Anti-vax conspiracy theorists made the highly improbable claim that Hamlin’s collapse was unrelated to the violent impact in the precise place on his body that would cause commotio cordis, and that the culprit was an unspecified COVID vaccine injury, which impacted only Hamlin and none of the NFL’s 5,000 other vaccinated coaches, players, and support staff.

This required ignoring previous commotio cordis cases and the medical understanding behind a heartbeat stopping after a blunt blow to the chest at a certain time in the heartbeat cycle.

An even more extreme position holds that Hamlin died or is comatose and has been replaced by an imposter, an assertion void of all facts and reason. This idea would be comical were it not for the trend of anti-vax conspiracy theorist violence and confrontation, such as accosting California legislator Richard Pan and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, and death threats phoned into Australian doctor Wilson Chin. This brings up chilling thoughts as to what they may have in mind for Hamlin, who endured a life-threatening condition, is still fighting to recover, and may have to deal with being stalked by deranged persons intent on harm.

Baron Doctor (Or possibly Doctor Baron) Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach thought he had discovered an basic force in nature, which he dubbed the “od.” But the best evidence shows that rather than this being a groundbreaking advancement, this was instead an instance of a revered scientist wasting his years by becoming fixated on an idea that only he can validate.

Reichenbach had made numerous contributions prior to becoming fixated on his subjects, which he called “sensitives,” and their claims that they perceived things that others were unable to. He spent his last three decades researching and defended his discovery of this unknown physical force, detectable only by him. When his subjects failed in their tests to, say, detect positive currents from negative ones, von Reichenbach retorted with an ad hoc claim that a known current was impacting the “odic” one and confusing the sensitives. There was no way to test this claim.

That the baron doctor thought his odic force explained dozens of unrelated items, while never backing any of this with a controlled study, speaks to egomaniacal thinking. He insisted the odic force ran through everything, yet no machine detected it. Only sensitive people, that is to say those so labeled by von Reichenbach, could do so. In a precursor to Feng Shui nonsense, he suggested buildings face a certain direction to gain odic benefit. Similarly, Southern hemisphere sleepers were advised to lie on their left side, while northerners do the opposite.

While conducting what passed for an experiment, the Baron adhered to a diet and rest regimen and ensured that he never touched metal. At the end of the day, he touched the subject’s hand, while he or she noted when they detected odic force movement. This was not a scientific study and certainly not of the double blind variety. There were no controls, no stated guidelines, and no way of confirming this.

Still, believers insisted the force emanated as aura, yet only they could see it. Scientists of the time almost uniformly rejected the concept, owing to the lack of data and use of established protocols.