Research conducted in National Archives, University Libraries and Presidential Libraries often unearth documents of great interest, but of uncertain historical validity. Are these random documents important, or incidental to the events of their time? It can be hard to tell. Sometimes it is impossible to know for sure. Often, they appear to explain unexplained events. They can even appear to add the dot to the “i” or the cross to the “t.” But without corroborating documents they might be “false flags.” Or perhaps even complete forgeries, with the sole goal of deceiving and throwing researchers off the trail. How can one tell the difference?

Collected in this short book are 21 examples of “coincidental” history. Many were originally classified, or simply buried deep in archives. These historical tidbits were gathered during almost 40 years of research, in such unlikely places as the Lenin Library in Moscow, the Peking University Library in Beijing, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry Archives in Tokyo, the UK National Archives at Kew and the British Library in London. Within the United States, I conducted research at the Herbert Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Presidential Libraries and Archives, in approximately that order. I have also used both the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, plus at the downtown Manuscript Collection of the Library of Congress. Many personal papers were left to institutional archives, like the Hoover Archives at Stanford, the Rare Book Library at Columbia and the Houghton Library at Harvard.

After a 40-year career, I have visited dozens of archives, libraries and private collections. To date, 34 books have already been published including the fruits of my labors, with another 8 volumes (including this one) on my to-do list. Many of the stories in this book do not fit seamlessly into regular histories, because they are not provable. Rather than allow these historical tidbits to be lost, however, I have decided to publish them as a set. Twenty-one seemed an appropriate number, since in many world cultures the combination of three “7s” are deemed lucky; for example, Japan attacked China on 7 July 1937, or 7-7-7.