Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: UNLUCKY NUMBER DISCONECTED

by hazed

Humans are very prone to believing in luck - good and bad. We ascribe powers to affect outcomes to such things as lucky hats, lucky shirts, lucky socks... we have lucky numbers... and of course unlucky numbers which result in hotels and office buildings not having a 13 th floor!

We look for patterns, and search out cause and effect, wanting to believe that outcomes can be predicted.

And so sometimes perfectly innocent numbers have spooky powers attributed to them. A recent example is a phone number in Bulgaria that was considered so unlucky it was taken out of service.

The number is 0888 888 888. This string of nine eights has, apparently, killed three people. The first owner of the number died of cancer aged 48, while the next two were murdered, following some shady business dealings. Bulgarian mafia boss Konstantin Dimitrov was gunned down in 2003 while visiting Amsterdam with a fashion model, and Konstantin Dishliev was running an operation smuggling cocaine when he suffered multiple gunshot wounds outside a restaurant in 2005.

Clearly these three random cases prove that the number must be cursed!

The number eight is considered lucky in many cultures. Chinese Airline Sichuan Airlines spent around £200,000 buying the number 8888 8888 in 2003. But in Bulgaria it is now considered unlucky, so the phone number won't be allocated to anybody else - instead the number is routed to a recorded message.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page