Imagine boarding a plane, walking down the narrow aisle toward your assigned seat, and discovering that someone is already sitting there.
It is an ordinary travel inconvenience. Maybe the passenger has misread the seat number. Maybe he has deliberately moved so that someone else can sit beside a friend or family member.
You expect a quick conversation, a check of the boarding passes, and perhaps an awkward shuffle before everyone ends up where they are supposed to be.
But when Neil Thomas Douglas approached his seat on a flight to Ireland in October 2015, the situation took a turn he could never have anticipated.
The stranger sitting there looked up.
And Douglas was suddenly staring at a man who looked remarkably like himself.
The same ginger hair.
The same large red beard.
A strikingly similar face, smile and build.
They were not brothers. They were not cousins. As far as anyone knew, they were not related at all.
In fact, they had never met before.
Yet somehow, out of all the people who could have boarded that flight, these two strangers had ended up face-to-face.
And the airplane encounter was only the beginning.
An Ordinary Journey Turns Extraordinary
Neil Thomas Douglas was a photographer from Glasgow, Scotland. He was travelling to Galway, Ireland, via London Stansted, where he was due to photograph a wedding.
Nothing about the trip initially suggested that it would become an international viral story.
Then Douglas reached his seat.
There was already a man sitting in it.
Douglas later explained that when the passenger turned toward him, he immediately noticed the resemblance.
The other man was Robert Stirling, a Londoner who was also travelling to Galway.
According to reports at the time, Stirling had moved seats so that another couple could sit together. It was a minor act that would normally have gone completely unnoticed.
Instead, it helped create one of the internet's favorite travel coincidences.
Douglas and Stirling looked at one another and began laughing.
The resemblance was difficult to ignore.
Both men had similar ginger hair, prominent red beards and facial features that made them appear, at least at first glance, like brothers.
Other passengers noticed it too.
According to Douglas, the people around them joined in the laughter.
So the two men did what almost anyone living in the smartphone era would do when confronted with such an unlikely situation:
They took a photograph.
The resulting image showed the two bearded strangers sitting together on the plane, smiling at the camera.
It would soon be seen by people around the world.
The Photograph That Went Viral
The image eventually made its way onto social media.
Lee Beattie, a friend connected to Douglas's wife, posted the photograph on Twitter, pointing out the extraordinary fact that the two men were complete strangers.
People immediately understood why the picture was so funny.
Without context, Douglas and Stirling could easily have been mistaken for relatives.
With context, the photograph became even better.
They were simply two unrelated men who happened to meet on an airplane.
The post spread rapidly, attracting thousands of shares and reactions.
ABC News reported on the encounter the following day, identifying Douglas as a photographer and describing Stirling as a man from London whose resemblance extended from his haircut and smile to his bright red beard.
Douglas told ABC News that Stirling's face appeared "almost identical" to his own and described the experience as strange and difficult to explain.
But despite the attention the photograph received, Douglas seemed amused rather than overwhelmed by the situation.
It was, after all, a wonderfully harmless viral story: no scandal, no controversy, just two strangers who looked surprisingly alike.
Had the story ended when the airplane landed, it probably still would have been memorable.
It didn't.