Robert Shafran had no trouble making friends on his first day at college in 1980. Fellow students were falling over themselves to be friendly to the 19-year-old.
‘Guys were slapping me on the back, and girls were hugging and kissing me,’ he recalled. It was all very welcoming — except for the fact they insisted on calling him Eddy.

His new room-mate, Michael Domitz, was able to enlighten him.

The previous year, Domitz had shared a room at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York with a student named Eddy Galland, who had subsequently transferred to another college.

Eddy and Robert looked uncannily similar — not just the same face and build but the same hair, and even the same expressions, Domitz told Robert.
Everyone had noticed — and assumed that Eddy was back at Sullivan County.

When Domitz discovered that the young men had been born on the same day — July 12, 1961 — and were both adopted, he lost no time in getting them together.

Eddy and Robert found they talked and laughed the same way, had identical birthmarks and IQ scores of 148 (over 140 is categorised as genius). They were both college wrestlers and had the same fighting techniques. They liked the same films and could quote the same lines from them.
The pair had even lost their virginity at the same time.

‘It was just wild, surreal,’ says Robert today.

Hospital records duly confirmed what everyone could see. The teenagers were identical twins. Newspapers and TV shows were fascinated by their extraordinary chance reunion. But then the story became even more extraordinary.

David Kellman, a student at a different New York college, saw the pictures of Robert and Eddy in the newspapers and tracked down the Galland family and phoned them. ‘You’re not going to believe this . . .’ he began. He explained that he looked exactly like the ‘twins’ — 5ft 9in, with a dark complexion and curly brown hair.

It soon emerged that the teenagers were, in fact, three surviving brothers of a rare set of identical quadruplets — the fourth baby had died at birth — according to the Louise Wise adoption agency in Manhattan.
The agency revealed that Robert, David and Eddy — born in that order within 27 minutes of each other — had been separated soon after their birth on New York’s Long Island.

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Their remarkable story is the subject of a fascinating new documentary, Three Identical Strangers, which details how the initial joyful reunion took a distinctly darker turn as the brothers discovered that they had been unknowing participants in a cynical sociological experiment.

At first the triplets were utterly delighted to have discovered each other, and absorbed by their similarities. They all smoked the same brand of cigarettes, loved Italian food and preferred older women.

And they revelled in their fame — appearing on TV, answering questions in unison and finishing each other’s sentences.

‘Once we got together, there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life and it lasted a really long time,’ Robert says.

The handsome, grinning hunks became celebrities on the New York club scene and caught the eye of Madonna, who got them a cameo role in her 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan.

They took acting lessons and appeared in the hit TV comedy series Cheers, although Hollywood never quite beckoned.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5337323/Triplets-separated-birth-sinister-social-experiment.html

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