Buzz
For every 135 people worldwide, one person is prone to being mistaken for another.
It was a late day in 2016 when Santana Gutierrez was strolling through Fashion Valley Mall, the renowned and largest outdoor shopping center in San Diego. On the pathway leading to the Apple Store, the 17-year-old girl constantly had to navigate through pedestrians walking against her.
But that didn't stop a teenage girl from occasionally glancing over. Santana wanted to pay attention to her reflection in the glass of the storefronts. Today, she wore blue shorts, a red V-neck T-shirt, and carried a black canvas backpack.
Santana saw her confident shadow striding, albeit briefly, just behind her amid the countless passersby. But suddenly, there was a moment that made the girl startled.
The shadow, unannounced, advanced towards Santana. It changed attire, transforming into a girl wearing a red polo shirt, ankle-length jeans, and a chest-worn ID tag. Strangely enough, the shadow introduced itself as Isobel and was working for Save The Children, a volunteer organization.
She presented to Santana what the organization was doing and then asked if she was interested in contributing financially or dedicating her efforts to it.
But Santana had tuned out everything Isobel said. Her entire focus was now tightly drawn to the face of the person in front of her. For a moment, Santana almost mistook Isobel for her own reflection stepping out of the mirror.
In real life, they resembled each other like two peas in a pod.
'All that was in my head at that moment was: Oh my, this girl looks exactly like me,' Santana recalled. Isobel also took no time to notice the peculiar situation: 'I'm thinking the same as you.'
The two girls burst into laughter, rushing to the nearest mirror and taking a memorable photo together. Santana later shared their picture on Twitter: 'Hey everyone, just met my long-lost twin sister.'
The coincidental story left people intrigued. 'Your parents surely have some explaining to do,' commented one of Santana's friends. But what the two girls didn't expect was that their photo quickly went viral, extending beyond their circle of friends.
After that evening, Santana's tweet garnered over 1,000 shares. And the strangest part was only just beginning.
Nearly 20,000 retweets helped the photo reach two more girls with faces resembling Santana and Isobel. These new girls commented their photos under Santana's tweet. The online community even discovered another girl with an indescribable resemblance to all four.
Santana was now in shock. She showed the pictures to her parents. But both Santana's mom and dad insisted it was just a random coincidence. Santana doesn't have any twin siblings. The similar-looking girls are not her half-sisters or sisters with the same father and different mother, or vice versa.
So, if these girls didn't step out from a parallel universe, there's only one possibility left. All five girls are Doppelgängers, a strange phenomenon also known as look-alikes.
Doppelgänger is a German-origin term, combining Doppel (double) and Gänger (walker). It means 'individuals coexisting, possessing identical appearances but having no familial or blood relations.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term was first used in 1796 by writer Jean Paul. In his novel Siebenkäs, Paul describes a main character who exchanges identities with a friend who looks exactly like him.
Although the term Doppelgängers gained widespread usage only after the 18th century, legends of look-alike individuals have emerged for thousands of years. In ancient Egyptian civilization, those with identical appearances were called 'ka.' They were considered omens, as a soul carried the same physical form.
For the Chinese, look-alike pairs were known as 'ying-tsu.' In the past, those resembling the emperor were even brought to the royal court. They were trained to impersonate the king as doubles, guarding against emergencies or when the emperor faced life-threatening situations.
In Norse mythology, there's a term called 'Vardøger' that also refers to look-alike individuals. The tale recounts that Vardøger entities often precede humans by a step. They arrive at a location humans intend to go, mimicking their appearance, voice, gestures, and even their scent.
Later, the original person arrives at that location, but witnesses claim they've already encountered him before. They are unaware it was just a mimicking Vardøger. Vardøger in Norwegian also means 'premonitory sound or the image of a person before they arrive.'
The people of Scotland in the Orkney Islands have a story about 'trow,' a supernatural creature often giving birth to weak offspring. Thus, when a human woman gives birth, trows usually sneak into their homes, stealing healthy babies and replacing them with their own.
The 'trow' will then grow up and transform into an exact replica of the stolen children. Consequently, when pregnant women in Orkney give birth, they are often guarded very carefully.
Similarly, many myths of Native Americans also touch upon the concept of look-alike individuals. For instance, Hopi legends mention those with similar appearances, considering them as Children of the Sun and Children of Water.
In folklore, they also believe in the balance between the earthly realm and the underworld. The Hopi believe that whatever happens in the mortal world, the opposite occurs in the underworld, and the existence of look-alike individuals aligns with this belief. Not just in folklore, doppelgängers are also a fantastic idea for modern literature and cinema. Numerous recent works have contributed to embedding the concept of Doppelgängers deep in the minds of the public.
For example, the 2019 film Us directed by Jordan Peele tells the story of the main characters being pursued by identical Doppelgängers called 'the Tethering.'
This concept is borrowed from an Andersen fairy tale where, when a person observes their shadow under the light, the shadow separates from the body and becomes a Doppelgänger.
Notably, the shadow's copy possesses ethical qualities entirely opposite to the original version, and it can kill its original counterpart, then replace him to continue existence.
In 2019, after the release of the movie Us, Google searches for the keyword 'Doppelgängers' suddenly surged. Previous films exploring this phenomenon were also brought into comparison, such as Enemy (2013) directed by Denis Villeneuve, The Double (2013) by Richard Ayoade, and The Prestige (2006) by Christopher Nolan...
Notable literary works include The Outside (2018) by Stephen King, where antagonists can use DNA to transform into Doppelgängers of others through scientific techniques.
A decade earlier, American-Jewish writer Tana French penned The Likeness (2008), a murder mystery where the victim and the detective are two Doppelgängers of each other.
Going back another 10 years, we have Glamorama (1998) by Bret Easton Ellis, a satirical work on celebrity culture and consumerism. Victor Ward, the novel's main character, is an A-list actor and model who gets replaced by his Doppelgängers.
What's intriguing is that the entire Glamorama is narrated in the first person by Victor. Yet, in some chapters, the plot is so peculiar that readers still wonder whether it's being told from the perspective of the Doppelgängers.
It must be noted that it's no coincidence that a phenomenon as supernatural as Doppelgängers can emerge from folklore and deeply root itself in popular culture. It can only be the result of a fact that in today's world, pairs of look-alike Doppelgängers with inexplicable resemblances do exist.
And the easiest place to find them, no doubt, is on social media platforms, where people are uploading billions of photos and videos featuring their own faces every day.
In 2021, Swifties - the Taylor Swift fan community, enthusiastically shared a TikTok video, showing the pop star doing laundry in a traditional way.
In the video, Taylor is seen washing her clothes in a bathtub with a bottle of Tide detergent beside her. Many assumed she never used a washing machine. However, the most surprising revelation was that the person in the video wasn't Taylor at all.
In reality, the TikTok account belonged to Ashley Leechin, a nurse from Utah. Leechin bears such a resemblance to Taylor Swift that her own daughter once mistook her mom for being on TV. Even patients at the hospital were astonished when they saw her for the first time.
Even Taylor Swift's mother had to admit the uncanny resemblance but clarified there's no blood relation. Leechin is simply a Doppelgängers look-alike of Taylor.
Similar to Taylor Swift, many other celebrities have found their doppelgängers online. There's an extensive list with hundreds of names, including Tom Cruise, Lady Gaga, Johnny Depp, Justin Timberlake, Daniel Craig, and Ariana Grande.
Actors, singers, football players, politicians, famous TV hosts around the world often discover doppelgängers who bear an astonishing resemblance to them.
Whenever you search for the keyword 'Doppelgängers' + a famous person's name, you might just stumble upon a look-alike that is so striking, they could build an entire career as a stand-in on Instagram or TikTok.
Let's explore some examples:
Famous TV host Steve Harvey even met and conversed with a Doppelgängers right on the set of Family Feud that he was hosting. This man's name is Olden Thornton, now a pastor.
Now, let's go back to Santana Gutierrez's story, the American teen who accidentally encountered her doppelgängers while walking in the mall.
Unlike the famous figures in the media, Santana's case is unique. Both she and Isobel, her doppelgängers, are ordinary people. They should have led separate, ordinary lives, never crossing paths in real life.
Imagine if Barack Obama weren't the U.S. president, what are the odds that he and his doppelgängers, Ilham Anas, would ever meet when one lives in the U.S. and the other in Indonesia?
Even other famous stars have done the same. They've found their doppelgängers mainly because of their fame, and their faces appearing frequently in the media.
According to that notion, the world might have more doppelgänger pairs than we know. They simply haven't met yet, as they're unaware of each other's existence in real life.
Perhaps, you also have your own doppelgänger out there, someone living somewhere in the world with a face and physical features similar to yours.
But if that's the case, what are the chances of you encountering that person in real life?
In 2015, a study in the International Journal of Legal Medicine attempted to answer that question. A team led by biologist Teghan Lucas from the University of Adelaide, Australia, examined 4,000 faces in the U.S. Military Anthropometric Survey (ANSUR) database, a record used by the U.S. military to track soldiers' physical characteristics.
Lucas selected 8 facial recognition features and calculated the probability that two people would match these 8 features randomly, unrelated by blood, as 1 in 1 trillion (0.0000000001%).
You're not mistaken; that's an unimaginably small number. 1 in 1 trillion means that if the world always had 8 billion people, we'd have to wait for 125 generations, equivalent to around 2250 years, to find someone with a doppelgänger.
Lucas's calculations show us mathematically that doppelgänger pairs can exist in the real world. Yet, it leads us to a concept known as the 'Infinite Monkey Theorem.'
The statement of this theorem is as follows: If you give a monkey a computer keyboard with a text editor open, it will randomly press the keys and produce random characters.
However, if you could keep the monkey immortal, allowing its typing process to continue indefinitely, eventually, the monkey would produce a complete literary work by William Shakespeare.
Now, let's simplify the problem a bit. Calculate the probability of the monkey typing the word 'Banana.' If its computer keyboard has 50 keys, and the keys are pressed independently at random, the chance of the letter 'B' appearing is 1/50. Then the probability of the next letter 'a' appearing is also 1/50, and so on, until the probability of the monkey typing the word 'Banana' is (1/50)^15,625,000,000.
A number smaller than 1 in 15 billion. But obviously, it still has a chance, right? Now, let's try calculating the probability for William Shakespeare's Hamlet with 130,000 letters. Luckily, we don't have to do the math ourselves as scientists have tackled this problem before us.
Their result is staggering: For a monkey to have a 1 in 1 trillion chance of writing Hamlet, it would need to type continuously from the Big Bang to the present day, roughly 14 billion years, and live continuously through 10^360,641 universes. In each universe since the Big Bang, a monkey only has a 1 in 1 trillion chance of typing 79 letters.
All leads us back to the 1 in 1 trillion chance, where random genes in your body will arrange in some way that matches someone unrelated to you. These genes will then manifest externally in all 8 facial features identical to your doppelgänger.
But if the research in the International Journal of Legal Medicine is correct, that we have to wait at least 2250 years to find an identical doppelgänger, then why did Santana meet Isobel, Taylor Swift have a lookalike on TikTok, and Ilham Anas - an unknown man from Indonesia - have the chance to travel the world due to his resemblance to his country's president?
We continue to follow what happened in the later part of Teghan Lucas's study. When she and colleagues at the University of Adelaide ran a second experiment, they reduced the 8 matching factors on each face to just enough to make the faces perceptually similar to humans but not identical enough to confuse a facial recognition system.
Strangely, the probability of anyone finding a doppelgänger living somewhere on Earth has increased from 1 in 1 trillion to 1 in 135. And that is even a chance they could meet in their lifetime.
This is equivalent to 0.7%, meaning if you are a university student and there are about 3,000 students in your school. The chance of you encountering a doppelgänger during your college years will be 0.2%.
The number isn't high enough, but it can explain the story of Santana Gutierrez meeting Isobel, her doppelgänger, at a shopping center in the city of San Diego with over 3 million people.
So, the explanation for the doppelgänger phenomenon is that our intuition has been wrong in identifying similar faces. To understand where we went wrong, let's compare the two images below:
If only from the first image, you might think these doppelgänger girls look identical. But switch to the second image, where each facial feature is analyzed independently, suddenly, we see they are slightly less alike. Turns out, the left girl has larger eyes, and the right one has thinner lips.
This happens because every time we look at someone's face, vision scans the entire facial ensemble, in order from each part like hairstyle, forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, chin...
When there are enough shared features, our brains are drawn to those features. It automatically averages the differences in the remaining features. This leads us to hastily conclude that the two doppelgänger faces are identical.
Facial recognition machines, on the other hand, are programmed to analyze and measure each part like eyes, nose, mouth of our faces separately. Thus, doppelgängers can deceive human intuition but cannot fool computers.
This is why Face ID systems are still used in security, and forensic science relies on facial identification of criminal suspects.
Despite the existence of doppelgängers, scientists state that each of our faces remains as distinctive as fingerprints and DNA. Even the faces of identical twins differ if they have different behaviors and lifestyles, such as one smoking and the other not.
This has been explained through epigenetics, stating that the human body is shaped not only by a set of genes but also by epigenetic mechanisms, including environmental factors like diet, illness, and lifestyle affecting the regulation of DNA, activating and deactivating different genes.
In a pair of identical twins, if one smokes, the chemicals absorbed by the body may activate some genes differently from the non-smoking twin. If this is a gene regulating facial features, they will appear different.
This is also true for doppelgängers. In a recent study published in the journal Cell Reports, scientists selected 32 pairs of doppelgängers for DNA testing and lifestyle interviews.
The results showed that 16 pairs of doppelgängers had more similar DNA than the remaining 16 pairs. These individuals also had more alike appearances, according to computer scoring.
However, among the 16 most similar doppelgänger pairs, their lifestyles still differed, leading to variations in their gut microbiota. This crucial feature demonstrates the diverse genetic expression of these twin pairs, and in reality, they are not exact 1:1 copies of each other.
In summary, the probability of encountering a perfect doppelgänger twin in real life is exceedingly small. It's 1 in a trillion, equivalent to a monkey typing Shakespeare's play Hamlet in 10^360.641 universes.
But if you let your intuition decide, there's about a 0.7% chance out there that someone has a face and appearance relatively similar to yours.
This is the doppelgänger, someone whom others might say, 'I just met someone who looks exactly like you the other day.' They are the person who might leave you stunned in the shopping mall when you accidentally cross paths. The one whom others might greet with your name.
However, if you try to use your iPhone's Face ID to recognize your doppelgänger, almost certainly he or she won't be able to unlock your phone.
So, is the phenomenon of doppelgängers real, or is it just folklore? That entirely depends on the standards you set, whether based on measurements, figures, or simply intuition, something humans are easily deceived by.
Explore sources such as Atlasobscura, Nytimes, TheLocal, Sciencepeople, Smithsonianmag, Science, Forensis Science International, The Scientist, Medium, Insider, Scienceline, The Guardian for valuable insights.
