I'm reading a book by Stephen King called "The Stand" and one of the characters named Glen discusses something similar to your experience. Apparently, the sociological study he refers to was real.
From Stephen King's "The Stand":
“Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle.”
“Don’t see what he was trying to prove,” Stu said.
“To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer—this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn’t meet with disaster.”
Mark nodded. “A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough.”
“What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It’s a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact.”
“What fact?” I asked.
“Full planes and trains rarely crash,” Glen said.
“Oh fucking BULLSHIT!” Harold just about screams.
“Not at all,” Glen sez calmly. “That was Staunton’s theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61% capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don’t, the vehicles are running at 76% capacity. That’s a difference of 15% over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3% deviation would be food for thought, and he’s right. It’s an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton’s deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash... that they are unconsciously predicting the future.
“Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego. And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, ‘Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God.’ But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches... or headaches ... or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course.”
“I just can’t believe that,” Harold sez, shaking"