NIAMH GEANEY OF KERRY, IRELAND, FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT SHE HAS SEVEN DOPPELGÄNGERS LURKING SOMEWHERE ON THE PLANET—LEADING TO TWINSTRANGERS.COM, WHERE PEOPLE CAN FIND THEIR OWN LOOK-ALIKES FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD!
Truly Twin Look-Alikes or DNA Doppelgängers?
Imagine how surreal it would be to meet someone that looked exactly like you. Niamh Geaney set out to do just that. Using social media, and receiving hundreds of submissions from around the world, she found an uncanny match in just two weeks—but she wasn’t finished looking! Niamh has found two more Twin Strangers since and, through her website, is helping others find theirs.
Each time Niamh reveals a match, the obvious question arises, “Are they related?” With countless requests to get DNA tests done, Niamh obliged. Niamh and her third doppelgänger, Irene, took swabs of their saliva and sent the samples off to a lab to be tested for the probability of the two being sisters, half-sisters, or even being related at all based on lineage traced up to 20,000 years ago!
Since publishing Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Unlock the Weird!, the results have come in, and they are very surprising!
Since the chances of sisterhood were slim, the girls were confident that they would have a common ancestor, but that wasn’t the case! The lineage test provides users their haplogroup, which is a letter assigned to a genetic population group of people who share a common ancestor on a patrilineal or matrilineal line. Geaney had Haplogroup H, and Adams had Haplogroup T!
Geaney said that she believes the test has “fascinating implications” and that the test could suggest “doppelgängers really are, in fact, a mysterious phenomenon!”
First, Niamh found Karen, who lives just an hour away in Louth, Ireland.
Niamh’s second twin stranger was Luisa from Genoa, Italy. First, she met with Luisa’s family and friends to get a feel for what she was like—her mother even thought Niamh was her daughter from a distance.
Irene from Sligo, Ireland, was Niamh’s third match.