Slashdot Mirror
Do You Have A Living Doppelgänger? (bbc.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger; somewhere out there there's a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother's eyes, your father's nose and that annoying mole you've always meant to have removed. Now BBC reports that last year Teghan Lucas set out to test the hypothesis that everyone has a living double. Armed with a public collection of photographs of U.S. military personnel and the help of colleagues from the University of Adelaide, Lucas painstakingly analyzed the faces of nearly four thousand individuals, measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples' faces would match. What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that's only a one in 135 chance that there's a single pair of doppelgangers. Lucas says this study has provided much-needed evidence that facial anthropometric measurements are as accurate as fingerprints and DNA when it comes to identifying a criminal. "The use of video surveillance systems for security purposes is increasing and as a result, there are more and more instances of criminals leaving their 'faces' at a scene of a crime," says Ms Lucas. "At the same time, criminals are getting smarter and are avoiding leaving DNA or fingerprint traces at a crime scene." But that's not the whole story. The study relied on exact measurements; if your doppelganger's ears are 59mm but yours are 60mm, your likeness wouldn't count. "It depends whether we mean 'lookalike to a human' or 'lookalike to facial recognition software,'" says David Aldous. If fine details aren't important, suddenly the possibility of having a lookalike looks a lot more realistic. It depends on the way faces are stored in the brain: more like a map than an image. To ensure that friends and acquaintances can be recognized in any context, the brain employs an area known as the fusiform gyrus to tie all the pieces together. This holistic 'sum of the parts' perception is thought to make recognizing friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Using this type of analysis, and judging by the number of celebrity look-alikes out there, unless you have particularly rare features, you may have literally thousands of doppelgangers. "I think most people have somebody who is a facial lookalike unless they have a truly exceptional and unusual face," says Francois Brunelle has photographed more than 200 pairs of doppelgangers for his I'm Not a Look-Alike project. "I think in the digital age which we are entering, at some point we will know because there will be pictures of almost everyone online.
I'm an asshole, why would I want to meet another me?
Table-ized A.I.
Lester and Eliza.
When I was in my early 20's I looked exactly like Papa John Phillips, the "Papa" in the band The Mamas and the Papas, when he was about the same age. I resembled him so closely that my sister presented me with a picture from his obit and asked me when I got in the newspaper and I was fooled until I unfolded the paper so I could see what the deal was.
Not a _living_ one.
I feel sorry for anyone who looks like me
Cops hassled me, thought I was him. He had a 'colorful' life. Almost got dragged in and fingerprinted, eventually they were convinced. The car was registered to me and my doppleganger could have never afforded it.
Later I met his sister, found out he died. She was freaked out by me. She was a freak show all her own.
No I didn't fuck her.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that's only a one in 135 chance that there's a single pair of doppelgangers.
Francois Brunelle has photographed more than 200 pairs of doppelgangers
Maybe his math stinks and he decided to pretend that all the variables are independent because that's easier than reality.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I've had many cases where people in stores have told me that they saw "me" a few hours earlier. This has happened to me in multiple cities. Since I wasn't there earlier, I figure I must have a doppelganger.
So, if there's 7.5 billion people, and a 1 in 135 chance of a doppelganger, wouldn't that mean there could be about 55 million doppelgangers? I'm guessing we're seeing the usual level of writing and editing from Slashdot.
When I worked a temp job at UCSD medical school, several times people said "Hi, Julian!" to me. My name is Mike.
Then one day, having lunch at the Price Center, I saw a guy who looked a LOT like me. Same profile, hairstyle, goatee, a couple inches taller.
I walked up to him and said, "are you Julian?" He said yes! I told him people kept mistaking me for him. Asked him what his background was, and he told me biology - I had to explain I meant ethnically. I'm Polish-German, but he was from an Irish family.
Before I went back to work, I said "See you around... it's like looking in a funhouse mirror." :)
Facial recognition software can be used to match publicly collected images of government employees with possible undercover officers who try to embed themselves in criminal enterprises. Since the pool of candidates is much smaller than 7.3 billion, detection would be more accurate.
Would a woman's ears sag like her tits as she got older?
My mom always told me "Son, you are one in a million."
At the current population rate, there are 7000 of me.
Be afraid.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
...that there's at least a single pair of dopplegangers, because the concept of "identical twins" is a thing that exists.
It is quite different thing if some key features have been determined with for example 1 mm, 5 mm or 5 cm measurement error. A statement like "likelihood that two people share the exact same face is in excess of one in a trillion" may be valid only if the measurement error magnitudes do not differ.
I am often mistaken for an Italian Dwayne Johnson.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There can be only one.
Please learn how to use them. They improve legibility considerably.
From approx 1984 - 1995, I worked in various hotels & restaurants in a big city and I lost count of the number of people who mistook me for another guy who also worked in the biz - one person came right up to me, shook my hand and said it was great to see me again and how he'd enjoyed working with me for several years.
I had no idea who the hell he was or who he thought I was. But after that, I started being much nicer to people because my double seemed to have left a really positive impression on people in a rough & competitive business so I thought he was doing me a favor and I should at least try to return it.
Since I left that city and got out of hospitality, it's never happened again.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I was thinking the same thing. If I calculate it correctly, that means it only takes a group of about 1.2 million people to have a 50% chance of having a single doppelganger pair.
I couldn't find the paper in a quick search, but this smacks suspiciously of poor journalism.
The researcher probably stated "1 in a trillion that *you* have a doppleganger", and the journalist extended it erroneously.
There's a further complication, in that we don't know the distribution of values within any measurement, nor the granularity.
Measurements of distance between eyes might be gaussian, so their system could have a range of 100 values, but a handful in the middle are much more common than the outliers.
You can only "just multiply the ranges" of measurements if they are evenly distributed, as in an N-sided die.
(And of course features may be conditionally related, which reduces the odds even further.)
Resolution is probably also a factor. If their measurement system is accurate to 1/10 millimetre, it might *seem* as if features mismatch, when in reality the human observer can't distinguish to that level of granularity.
And we don't know how much the human visual system weighs any of the measurements he took. Shape of the nose might be rated highly in the human recognition system, but distance between the eyes less so (because your friend might not be facing you head-on). Some of the measurements might not contribute to the human recognition system at all, and we wouldn't know from this study. The human system might use measures that the researcher didn't take in his study.
The right way to do it is to measure the descriptive distance between one face and another, then define an arbitrary lower limit that signifies being a doppleganger.
If the amount of extra description needed to describe one face in terms of the other is smaller than the limit, then you can say "they look alike". You can even identify a probability (or amount) of "look alike" from the differential number of bits.
That lower limit for dopplegangerness sounds like it's arbitrary anyway.
I have systematically elimintated them all over the years.
"Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger; somewhere out there there's a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother's eyes, your father's nose and that annoying mole you've always meant to have removed."
Whose "folk wisdom" is that supposedly referring to? Because I've never even heard this ludicrous notion mentioned anywhere.
Are "researchers" so hard up for new topics anymore that they're just making crap up and pretending it existed before it sprang from their desperate (and addled) brain?
#DeleteChrome
This sounds like being too clever by half to come up with numbers that are bunk. In fact, that are so bunk we already can figure out relatively easily that they are indeed bunk. How does that "1:137" chance for any one doppelganger among the total world's population relate to the known number of celebrity look-alikes, for example?
Using this as justification for the efficacy of surveilance is even iffier, of course. To the point that a little "follow the money" on the funding of this bs in faux-science sauce seems to be in order.
When I was in my 20s, I was in a fast food restaurant across town from my house. Some guys started calling out a name I forget. Let's say, Mike. I eventually started looking to see who they were calling to, and was very surprised to find out it was me. The conversation from there was very surreal.
Me: Uh, sorry. I'm not Mike.
Them: LOL. What's up, man! We haven't seen you in ages.
Me: I don't think I know you.
Them: LOL. Seriously, where've you been?
Me: Uh, no, really, I don't know you. Who's Mike?
One of them, as confused as me: What are you talking about?
Me: I'm not Mike.
The guy: You're serious?
I pull out my driver's license, cover up most of it with my thumb, and show him my name. The guy mildly freaks out.
Guy: Whoa, this isn't Mike!
They all rush over to look, then stare at me like they're seeing a ghost.
Guy: We've gone to school with Mike since elementary. I swear to God you look like him. Do you have a twin?
It turns out their buddy was a year or two younger or older than me. I don't have a twin - I'm absolutely certain about that - but there's someone out there approximately my age that looks similar enough to me that his childhood friends couldn't tell the difference between us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What about a 5% difference? 10%?
Starts looking pretty similar then...
And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be clicking the same bait.
Why the long summary? Nobody reads that crap.
Faker
Ten years out of college I met one of my classmates in Brazil. He had not aged a day, with the same height, same voice, same mannerisms, and exactly the same face. But he had a different name, spoke different languages, and had never been outside Brazil. I could not stop staring in open-mouthed astonishment -- of course I took pictures to show to his original back in the USA!
Remind me why we don't count identical twins again? And if they ever start human cloning, it's only going to get weirder.
But I killed it and consumed its flesh. There can be only one.
I recognised someone on the tram, she recognised me, so we started to talk and found out that we don't know each other.
Apparently even identical twins, maybe even identical twin babies, would fail this test. I'm so glad there's nobody out there who could fool a guy I've know literally since we were infants into walking right up to the wrong person before realizing he'd made a mistake.
I suspect they're unaware that actual humans (and probably most animals) don't necessarily use the same criteria to judge whether somebody is familiar to them.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Bizarrely, mine used to work for the same company but in a different country. I never met him, but it was a bit of a surprise for some people from my branch when they visited his office.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Patty Duke Show owns both your sorry asses.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
His name is Jeff Foxworthy.
Eyes of both animals and humans simply do not, and cannot, make precise physical measurements. They use *edge detection*, and have to recognize the same objects or events in a variety of lighting, background, and physical conditions. Relying on an overly precise model of a face or of anything else would generate way, way to maniy failures to recognize any object. It's nonsensical: Neurons, and memory, are *analog* and are also holographic. There is no one clear "image" of a face that new views are compared.
That said, do not get me *going* on the errors of modern facial recognition tools.
I have face blindness, you insensitive clod!
To me, everybody is a doppelgänger of everybody.
This is founded on a false premise: that these eight measurements must be identical for humans to look alike. This is false. I have seen people who look alike, it's weird. Moreover I don't think any of them have identical spaces between eyes, etc.
What I don't get is how educated scientists can come up with such wrongheaded premises to start with. These people are smart, how do they keep on doing this? What happened to the Republic of Rationalia?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
> with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that's only a one in 135 chance that there's a single pair of doppelgangers.
*cough* twins *cough*
I have a celebrity doppelganger, but he is a bit of a dick so we don't mention him.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
There is no choice between us,
If you had ever seen us,
You'd rejoice in your uniqueness
and consider every weakness something special of your own
Being a clone, I have no flaws to identify
Even this doggerel that pours from my pen,
has just been written by another twenty telepathic men
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but having lived in so many places, i have met many people who were personality wise just like others i have known. I know its wrong, but after awhile in a new place, i cant help but think, ok Jim is a Chuck, Doreen is a Kathy...ect.... for the most part, i TRY not to put my own preconceptions on new people, but some people ARE really just like others i have known the past, and i mean down to even small idiosyncrasies.
The world isn't big enough for more than one perfect human!
Indeed I do.
Defence rests, M'lud.
At the bottom of the
That woukd make the actual chances much better.
He has the same name as me.
And yes, he's *very* close to me that his friends confused me for him, and vice versa.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
BZZT. A doppelgänger isn't related to you. Besides, Patty Duke played both roles, she can't be her own double.
Another case, just yesterday.
Saw a guy who looks exactly like a distant cousin of mine, just younger (no grey hair) and a little balder.
I knew it could not be him, since that cousin lives in a third country, and would not be here without telling me. So, I walked up to the doppelganger, and ask him which country he is from. He turned out to be from a distant country altogether. Told him that he looks like my cousin from a different country than him ...
But the resemblance is far too weird ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Bzzzzt yourself.
They're all... wait for it... fictional characters!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
At least I know what a doppelgänger is...
Paper is behind a paywall. But, it's published in "forensic science." Another word for that is "voodoo," as we have seen with retractions of hair evidence, bite mark evidence, bogus DNA evidence, and even fingerprint evidence.
To really do this kind of research correctly, you would need a far larger sample, you would have to be able to estimate the statistical distribution of the features, and you would have to estimate the statistical distribution of measurement error. If you also wanted to know if a machine could do it better than a human, you would have to do the measurements under huge variations in lighting and pose.
In all likelihood, this paper is just a shill to help face recognition companies get their results admitted into evidence at trials.
The chances of anyone in particular having a doppleganger may or may not be one in 137, depending on how you define it, but the chance of there being dopplegangers is about 100%.
To oversimplify a bit, there could be millions of them in fact, because there's billions of people, and EACH of them have a 1 in 137 chance of having a doppleganger.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So it doesn't sound like their software is very good.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"This flies in the face of common sense (hehehe).
Say you have an identification tupplet (a1,a2,..., aN) of bio measures. If two people match in a2 to aN, but a1 is different, would they be assumed to be different or the same person?
There's the saying: "if it walks like a duck...". Automatic systems -- just like people -- would pinpoint a possible terrorist based on a 85% match. It's painful to remember the recent cases of people being killed based on looks.
So, yes, we have Doppelgänger.
This is even the basis of some widely known fiction stories.
I could cite some further enlightening facts, but considering the incentive here to register and post bullshit, I guess I'll save it for elsewhere.
Straight to it then. The similarity measure this researcher used has not been shown to be what humans use when they, for instance, falsely identify someone in court or mistake two people on clear video.
The similarity measure she used is designed to detect the differences between very specific and quantifiable points on the human face (interpupilary distance for instance). These landmarks are (largely) immutable over time and anyway amenable to analysis by computers scanning hi-res images.
However, these quantifiable landmarks have not been shown to be the same as the features humans use to distinguish two faces. It's not just likely, but 100% certain, that two faces which are virtually indistinguishable to humans - "my god, it's the same person!" - would be clearly distinguishable to a computer.
At least in this context, ourb cultures definition of doppleganger is up for grabs. Is it two faces so similar that they look the same to humans - a low and easily met criteria - or is it two faces so similar that a computer cannot tell them apart.
There is a real moral issue at stake here and that is what shall we let pass into general consensus regarding this new concept of facial "doppleganger"? Because if it comes be an accepted fact, thanks to this study or others like it, that dopplegangers don't exist then that has consequences. For instance, it is much more likely that false eye-witness identification will be accepted by prosecutors asnd juries and much harder to claim misidentification .
That's why I say the characterization of this study is misleading. In fact, I'll go further and say this Guardian (sorry, rag) headline downright dangerous.
Numerically, we have dopplegangers in exactly the number of people whose faces are practically indistinguishable to our own- as judged by other people. We know for a fact they exist, and they probably for exist everyone.
It's even more complex than that, since the judger is very heavily influenced by their familiarity with the race of the judged. How many Chinese of Japanese or Korean faces would the average caucausian confuse with each other even with a sincere, best effort in the best of circumstances ?
Of course, it works the other way also. One of the complaints of the father of a friend of mine who is first generation American and of Middle Eastern descent is all Americans men look exactly the same to him. It's amusing when you're the target of such confusion, like a parlor trick in reverse: "Wow, you can't do that. Are you serious? "
When I was 16 a friend of mine from another town insisted that I looked, talked and walked EXACTLY like a friend of hers. Of course I had to meet that person and, even by my own standards, it was shockingly true. I had the thought at the time that I hoped he was well behaved or at the very least, inclined to lawfulness.
We are very easily fooled depending on the context and we are fooled even outside of any judgement compromising context:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Future direction for reaseachers could productively include:
Just how different can two faces become before humans finally pick up on the it?
How do the landmarks used in this study relate - or not- to the features humans use when recognizing faces?
How do computers fare when using only those landmarks which humans use?
There are people, maybe a lot of them, that look exactly like you. They are your "dopplegangers". It would take a computer to tell you apart. You should hope they are well-behaved.
There are even more, perhaps multitudes, that are very very very similar. It's mostly an entertaining fact, but in some contexts, someone's life and freedom may hang in the balance.
n/t
Then I suggest that she comes to the UK to find the two blokes who look so like myself that my long term partner nearlybwalked up to him,wondering why I was not at work and another that good long term friends argued with me about and insisted was my absolute double,it was only because I had my coach ticket in my pocket as proof andbwet concrete on my clothes and boots that they believed I had only got back to my little home town at 1.30 on a Saturday afternoon to find them having goes at me for supposedly ignoring them at 11 am that same morning,he was only 4-5 feet from many of them and they insisted that he was identical,except he had an ear pierced for an earing.even very similar voice and weird mixed accent !! Pity it happened before there was so much cvtv about,I would have liked to see him,by the time I got home that day,but only a few hours later,he seemed to have vanished,it's only a small town,4000 inhabitants,more folk had seen him when I went looking for him,but I couldn't find him..
So that's probably two dopples,the two were 20 years and a hundred miles apart,but these were both very close meetings with folk who knew me really well and they fooled them,my partner only noticed at last minute before talking to the second one that his pony tail was much shorter than mine...
I've long been compared to a handful of celebrities but I remember back during the daya of MySpace this one guy in LA looked *identical* to me. I don't recall his name though.
Then another notable one, when I was a teenager working at a local store, on my first day a coworker said "I thought you were fired?" I laughed it off and didn't make much of it. Then I was getting more comments along those lines. Turned out I looked like some guy who had just gotten fired.
What's even crazier is I started seeing a cashier who I was really attracted to. Then one day she starts bawling and says she has to end it. She says my lookalike (thr guy who had gotten fired) is her boyfriend and she can't believe we're two different people.
I have lived all over the U.S. and I have met 5-6 Dopplegangers of people I know and I have been surprised by how similar their voices and personalities are. I was walking in New York City when I heard a very distinctive loud voice right behind me talking to his friends and I turned around knowing this voice and the boisterous way he talked expecting to see my abnormally tall red headed friend from Texas. It was him alright, abnormally tall, red headed, with a very distinctive face, except it wasn't. Very eerie. I've also been told 4 times I have a Doppleganger including by my ex-wife who met one -- in two cases the people who told me I looked exactly like a friend told me it was quite a compliment to me because he was an awesome guy -- obviously we shared the same personality. ;-)
Since the incidence of identical (monozygotic) twins is a lot higher than that (about 3 per 1000 births)(for fraternal twins it's even higher), there's a math error someplace. Possibly in the assumptions.
The bad news for law enforcement is that not only will identical twins match on facial recognition (barring some environmentally caused disfigurement, eg scars), they'll also match on DNA evidence. (They won't, however, match on fingerprints.)
-- Alastair
The "one in a trillion" claim by Teghan Lucas is outrageous.
First, only eight facial metric traits were considered. Second, they are not strictly independent. Third, the resolution (the minimum difference detectable in a single metric trait) is probably quite poor.
Even if we ignore the second, and assume a resolution of 16 differentiable values for each trait, we only get 16**8 = 4,3*10**9 possible unique faces.
If we assume a generous 200 differentiable values, we get 2.56*10**18 possible unique faces. That is as sensitive as color perception (humans can typically discern about ten million colors, and 200**3 = 8,000,000). That is definitely an overestimate in my opinion.
Also, 2.56*10**18 unique faces does not mean you have 1/(2.56*10**18) chance of having a doppelganger. Look up the Birthday paradox!
In a set of N people, each having one of B possible differentiable faces, there is a likelihood of
P = 1 - B! / (B-N)! / B**N
of there being at least one pair of doppelgangers.
If we make a ballpark estimate of 100 differentiable values per metric trait, we have B=100**8=10,000,000,000,000,000. At N=304,000,000 we get P = 0.99, or 99% chance of there being at least one doppelganger in a set of 304 million people. At N=118 million, P âf 0.50, so there is a 50% chance of there being a doppelganger in a set of 118 million people.
Although single trait metrics may be that differentiable, I'm certain not all of them are. So, if we make a completely unfounded assumption that there are B=56**8 = approx. 1e14 = 100,000,000,000,000 possible unique faces (which is about 13,000 times the number of people currently alive), we have an over 99% probability of there being at least one doppelganger pair in a set of 31 million people. That means several hundred doppelgangers alive currently.
Even with the assumption of the metrics being independent (and they are clearly not for biological reasons alone), the "one in a trillion" claim is certainly hogwash; based on bad math.
https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
Of course, Russian Federation is building a bomber. It can't manufacture cars, planes and despite its vast territory is forced to import food. But they are building technology more advanced than all industrialized countries can manage to, at this moment. I am guessing it's going to be manned by volunteers from RF who occupied Crimea. Didn't they say they were going to mars within 5 years at some point in the previous year? This is just another attempt at distraction or attention grabbing when the world's still shell-shocked from the events of the past week. Technologically, they are just coasting on the accomplishments of the past century. They still have designs of nuclear reactors, so they sell them states around the world. They still have tanks, so they use them to threaten their neighbors. It's highly doubtful that they can still mass produce tanks (something they were capable of 50 years ago). No brilliant scientist would work for RF government today. They don't have the money to pay them and they don't have a base cadre of scientist left to train new ones.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'm white. I never figured out who this "John" was.
(||) Nehmo (||)
There's a concept that there is someone like you in China who has the same kind of living situation, same kind of job, same kind of lover, and so on. These are more interesting.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Given my experiences, I assume that it's a lot more common than people think. I have never seen anybody who looks exactly like me, but years ago when I was at university, I thought I saw my sister walking past me wearing brightly-coloured clothing that she would never wear. I realised that it was not her, and other people thought my sister had gone to another school that she had never attended. I have discovered that the family of a girl that I went to school with seems to have an amazing amount of coincidences relating to birth and death dates that correlate either closely or symbolically with our family's. Her daughter, a first-born like me, has a birth date very similar to mine and her first and middle names are exactly the same length as mine. Even more strangely, her husband has a birth date very similar to my father's and her parents died on similar dates to my grandparents in New Zealand. In a world of over 7 billion people I guess that there are lots of Doppelgangers, it's just that they are very spread out and it's rare to encounter them.
I found out I had a doppleganger 20 years ago. Never met him, despite the fact that we lived in the same neighborhood – just ran into a lot of people who thought I was him.
Almost cost me a relationship, too. The woman I was dating at the time was out with friends on a Friday night and saw my doppleganger having dinner with another woman. She immediately called me up to bitch me out. Even though I was at home when she called, it took forever for me to convince her that it wasn’t me.
But, the craziest bit was that my doppleganger was apparently dating my girlfriend’s doppleganger. One of the last mistaken identity events we had was when another couple who was seated next to us at a restaurant thought they had just seen us at an open house. After talking to them for a bit, they said my girlfriend even looked more like the other woman than I did the other man.
Crazy.
A living doppelgänger? Nope, I don't have one of those.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
I saw a picture of my doppleganger. He was/is a musician (small time) playing at some joint in the city I live it. His poster was up at a few places where I would frequent. Went to meet my friends for lunch & they come running up telling me they saw 'me on a poster'...of course the first thought is 'well its just a guy that kind of looks like me' but we go over & look at the poster & I SWEAR it was like looking in mirror...way freaky!
I actually met the guy. He looks exactly like me and has a tall lean build just like me as well. Here's the story best as i can type it. This absolutely true but no one really believes me so i don't tell it anymore to avoid the 'yep, you've finally gone nutzo looks'.
In the early '90s i moved up to Toronto, where after work i would often go to a well known local bar. It was a bit of a rough one, no real problems tho with cheap beer and good country music. Some months later a girl i had never met before comes up to me and says her guy friend looks exactly like me and he wants to see me. I just figured sure honey, i hear all kinds of crazy ass talk in this bar, so of course i just forgot about it.
A couple weeks later i'm back at the bar after work and this guy walks up and says something like, "hey we look exactly alike, i look just like you". I looked up and holy smokes he did too!!, Kinda weird, felt like i was looking into a live mirror. Well it was interesting for a few minutes until it turned out we were quite people different people. I am a basic working stiff, no angel but i stay mostly within the law. No jail time ever, just fines and silly stuff when i was younger.
My Evil Twin not so much. Turns out he is a thug type, and attempted to strong arm me for my ID. He was gonna beat me if i didn't hand it over. There was brief face off (no pun intended) after i refused and he eventually walked out empty handed. Never saw him again, tho i regularly went to the same bar for a couple years following.
Story doesn't end yet. About a year or two after this, I had moved to a different part of town and was walking home past the shops on a main street when i saw three or four guys about my age hanging around in front of a shop. They sorta looked at me as walked and as i looked over, one guy jumps up and says "hey!, how's it going?". I says "pretty good" and kept walking, but he steps up and says to me, "I remember you from the Don Jail" (the major detention jail in Town), and "yah, you're all right" then proceeds to ask me if want to buy any pills. I just said nope, i'm broke, gotta meet the old lady and kept on walking.
That's the story .I never knew his name, so i can't google him, but I do often wonder what's up with the guy now. Is he serving time or maybe changed his ways and became a priest? Likely he's dead by now i think. I am 58, so it's very possible but if he's still around i wonder if we still look alike..
Bruce McCullough's doppelganger