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You'll no doubt have heard this story before on your quest for more information about the 23 Enigma. The author William Burroughs is living in Tangiers, Morocco - he knows a Captain Clark who runs a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. Clark proudly tells Burroughs that he's been running the ferry for 23 years without an accident only to have the ferry sink on him that same day, killing everyone on board. In the evening, Burroughs switches on the radio and hears a news report about the crash of a passenger plane on a flight between New York and Miami, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23.

Very bizarre indeed. It led Burroughs to become fascinated with the theory that the number 23 had some strange significance, and as he delved deeper he discovered that the number began cropping up by coincidence in alarmingly regular fashion. Cynics have dismissed his theory as the ramblings of a mad old drug addict, claiming that if you think of any number, then you will subconsciously be looking out for it all the time, and it will keep cropping up. But this just isn't the case - try it and see for yourself. Choose any number at random - make a concerted effort to look out for the number you have chosen over the next few days and see how often it crops up compared to this special number. The 23 Enigma's existence has been the subject of much theorising and debate - some explanations are fantastic, some extremely silly, whilst others will take even the most hardened cynic's breath away. For example, the numbers 2 and 3 have held powerful significance in countless cultures and spiritual ways since the dawn of civilisation, such as the Marassa - the Divine Twins in Haitian Voodoo, and the Holy Trinity in Christianity. Maybe the coming together of two such spiritually powerful numbers creates something new and even more powerful. Others have linked it to an astronomical significance - the earth is tilted on its axis at an angle of 23.5 degrees - 2 + 3 = 5, another powerful number. Then there is the theory that mass extinctions occur every 23000 years. Some people even claim it as a code from an extraterrestrial entity - who knows? One thing is for sure - the evidence is overwhelming and warrants much further investigation.

I was introduced to the theory in the mid 80s via Lustmord after having experienced some bizarre coincidences involving the number during a particularly unpleasant period in my life. It's been with me ever since and won't go away - even renaming my work as CUT 23 was to provide an unexpected revelation.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, the 23 Enigma has now become a fashionable entity causing the true impact of the phenomenon to be increasingly diluted. In addition to this the release of the Hollywood blockbuster The Number 23 starring, of all people, Jim Carrey may well have sounded the final death knoll for the phenomenon's credibility.

This part of the website isn't designed to provide a detailed guide to the 23 Enigma, as there are many websites worldwide that already do an excellent job of that, and the best of these can be reached via the Links section of this website. Instead, this is just a personal record of some of my own favourite experiences of the number 23, which hopefully may get newcomers to the theory looking beneath the surface and accepting it as very real.

Gary Cut

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