What if you discovered you were actually an identical triplets?
In the early 1980s, Bobby Shafran left home for college. When he arrived on campus, he was confused by the warm welcome he received, and also the fact that everybody kept calling him "Eddy." Later that day, a mutual friend coordinated a meeting between the two young men, and that's how Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland learned that they were identical twins, separated at birth. Both men shared the same birthday, and had been adopted through the same adoption agency.
The story was quite a sensation. Pictures of the two men looking nearly identical were plastered in magazines and on newspapers. That's how David Kellman heard about the twins. After seeing their pictures and realizing that he looked just like them, David picked up the phone, called Eddy's house, and announced that Eddy and Bobby weren't twins -- the three of them were triplets.
The three men were immediate media starlings, appearing on Donahue and Today and a million other programs. The triplets were the talk of the town, becoming regulars on the New York City club scene. The three of them got an apartment and moved in together. Eventually they opened a restaurant together, called Triplets.
When the party ended, jubilation turned to curiosity and anger. Why would an adoption agency knowingly split up newborn triplets, keep them within a hundred mile radius of one another, and never tell the families that their adopted children had identical siblings?
This is where Three Identical Strangers turns a little dark. Spoilers ahead.
Eddy, David, and Bobby were not the only identical siblings split by the agency. There were "at least eight" sets of siblings, although nobody seems to have access to the exact information. As unbelievable as it sounds, the triplets (and all the other sets of twins) were separated at birth as part of a scientific experiment to solve the age old question of nature vs. nurture.
Eddy, David, and Bobby were all placed in specific homes -- ones with different income levels and parents with different parenting styles. How did they know the parenting styles? Because all three families had also adopted a girl two years prior. The triplets thought it was an amazing coincidence that each of them had an adopted sister two years older than they were; now, they knew why. Multiple times a year, psychologists working with the adoption agency (under the guise of keeping up on the children) visited the triplets to perform cognitive tests and film them in action. One of the researchers interviewed later in the film chuckles when he says, "Yeah, it was hard not telling those kids that I had just left another house with a kid that looked just like them!"
In the case of Eddy, David, and Bobby, the experiment had disastrous results. Although the men had similar looks and mannerisms, they quickly learned that they were, for all intents and purposes, strangers. A business venture between the three went sour, and later, things got worse.
Due to fear of backlash by the general public, the doctor who performed the experiment chose not to publish the results. His findings are stored at Yale and will be locked up until 2066. Because of this, no one knows how many other sets of twins or triplets were a part of this study, or who they are.
