Samantha Futerman and Anaïs Bordier — The Face in the Video (2013)

In late 2012, a friend sent Anaïs Bordier — a French design student living in London — a screenshot from a YouTube video. The American actress in it looked exactly like her. The actress was Samantha Futerman, and she was Bordier's identical twin. The two had been born on the same day in Busan, South Korea, and adopted as infants to different continents, neither knowing the other existed.

Bordier recognized the same face again in a trailer for the film 21 & Over and identified Futerman by name. On February 21, 2013, she sent a Facebook message: 'Hey, My name is Anaïs, I am French and live in London.' They compared notes — the same birth date, November 19, 1987, both born in Korea, both adopted, Futerman to New Jersey and Bordier to Paris. A DNA test, evaluated with the help of twin researcher Dr. Nancy Segal, confirmed they were identical. They met in person in London in May 2013, filmed the reunion as it happened, and released it as the documentary Twinsters, which premiered at South by Southwest on March 15, 2015.

The Case For and Against

This is a Mode B claim — a naturally possible chain of events where the question is whether it amounts to more than coincidence — and the natural reading carries it, though not all the way to nothing. The discovery, however moving, is the kind of event a globally networked world now produces at a rising rate. Identical twins look alike by definition, so a chance image of one seen by someone who knows the other is exactly the trigger that becomes more likely as billions of faces are posted online. Futerman was a public-facing actress with videos in circulation, which raised the odds that her face would reach someone who knew her twin. And every step after the first — a message, a DNA test, a flight — is an ordinary action following from the one before it. The shared birthday and Korean adoption are not extra coincidences either; they are facts entailed by their being twins, expected the moment the resemblance prompted contact.

What the natural reading still has to hold is the front of the chain: that of all the strangers who could have seen that particular video, one of them happened to know Bordier and happened to be struck enough by the likeness to send it along. That single contingency is where whatever residue exists lives — not in the DNA, the birth date, or the meeting, which all followed once the first spark caught. The women themselves treat it as astonishing good fortune rather than as a sign. We put the probability that their finding each other was more than the coincidence a connected world increasingly produces at 8 percent, concentrated entirely in that first forwarded screenshot.