A Stranger In The Shop
23-year-old Melanie was working at her father's restaurant, the International House of Pancakes, in Brooklyn, when all of a sudden, a 50-year-old lady acting rather oddly approached her.
Melanie was shocked when the stranger came up to her and asked her if she remembered who she was. The truth was that Melanie had never seen her before. A few moments later, the same stranger asked Melanie a baffling question.
A Peculiar Question
When Melanie went over to the lady's table to give her the bill, she was asked whether she was adopted. Melanie was, in fact, adopted, but she found it kind of peculiar and rude for a stranger to ask her that.
Remaining distant, Melanie answered that she wasn't adopted. "I said no. I don’t know you! I don’t go around saying that information!", Melanie recalls. However, as she headed back home later that day, she couldn't get that question out of her mind. Why had she been asked that?
Second Thoughts
That same night, Melanie called her mother and asked her whether she had a long-lost sibling or twin that she had never been told of. "Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way you’re a twin", her mom answered.
There was no reason for Melanie to doubt her mother's words, so the situation was soon forgotten. However, things started getting weirder when the same stranger showed up at the restaurant two weeks later, only this time, she was carrying a very mysterious picture...
The Mysterious Picture
Melanie found it suspicious when the same lady that had asked whether she was adopted showed up at the restaurant once again. This time, however, she was carrying a picture of her niece, Ellen. I know what you're thinking: what's so strange about that?
The mystery woman showed her niece's photo to Melanie's boyfriend, who also worked at the restaurant, and his jaw dropped the moment he saw it. For some strange reason, the girl from the picture looked exactly like Melanie!
Who's That Girl?
Melanie remembers every detail about that day. ‘My boyfriend knew that I was adopted, so he showed me the picture. He said 'That's you’ and I said 'That's not me’. And he said ‘yes, that is you’. And I said ‘don’t tell me who I am!’, she recalls.
Moments later, when Melanie went over to the stranger's table, the lady asked her whether she wanted to speak to her niece on the phone. Melanie agreed, so the stranger wrote down her niece's number on a napkin and handed it over to her. Things were getting creepier by the second...
The Phone Call
Feeling intrigued, Melanie phoned that number as soon as she went back home after work. When the so-called Ellen picked up the phone, Melanie was blown away.
Melanie was shocked upon realizing that both their voices and laughs sounded exactly the same. As they started talking to each other, both women realized that they had much more things in common other than the pitch of their voice...
Mirror Twins
As the two girls got to know each other, they realized they were identical. They liked and disliked the same things and they had even been born on the same day! Curiously enough, they had both been adopted from New York's adoption agency Louise Wise Services. Coincidence?
To make things even more eerie, it seemed as if both girls were mirror twins! Melanie was left-handed while Ellen was right-handed, and Melanie had a noticeable dimple on the left side of her face while Ellen had a similar one on the right. Feeling anxious, they agreed to meet each other in person the next day.
Long-Lost Twins Reunited
Ellen was so dreadfully nervous that she actually threw up moments before meeting her alleged sibling. When they saw each other, they realized at once that they were unmistakably identical twins.
They also found out that both of them had always dreamed of having a twin when growing up. "It was like, what I always dreamed of and wanted was a reality. I couldn’t believe that it was happening", Ellen said in an interview. But what did Melanie say?
A Life-Long Dream
Melanie told her sister that when she was little, she would alway feel jealous at those who had a twin. "I went to camp with twins and I was so jealous of them and I didn’t understand why. And then, as I got older, I would say ‘doesn’t everybody want a twin?’ and my friends would be like ‘no!’, she said.
As to Ellen, she would even pretend she had a twin! "I used to pretend that I had a twin because I was fascinated by twins. I thought everybody wanted a twin sister. I thought everybody was normal", she remembers. But as exhilarated as they were, the girls' excitement didn't last long...
Sweet And Sour Feelings
By the time they met, Ellen was living with her boyfriend in Jersey while Melanie was working and dating all the way in Brooklyn, New York. Both of them had their own lives and, to their utter disappointment, they didn't really have the chance to bond that much.
In other words, the happiness of finding each other would eventually be soured by the time they realized they were nothing but strangers. "She should’ve been the closest person to me in the world, but she wasn’t", Melanie added. However, their story was about to take a darker turn...
Eerie Coincidence
A few weeks after meeting for the time, they got together for dinner and showed each other some of their old family pictures. It was then when they realized they had both experienced something rather odd throughout their childhood.
Ever since they were babies and until they turned 13, both Melanie and Ellen would have a psychologist visit their homes to perform some tests on them and ask them some questions while filming the whole process. At the time, they didn't even bother, but now, they wanted to get to the bottom of it. Why had they both gone through the same interrogations?
Secrets Untold
Later that day, both girls phoned their mothers and asked them about the reason behind these "tests". Both moms admitted that the adoption agency had asked them for permission to perform some tests on them, allegedly for academic purposes.
As Melanie explained in an interview: “Louise Wise actually called my mom and said ‘We will give you another baby if you let us do studies on how a third child adapts in a household’. So my mom was like ‘Oh, OK, I’ll do anything, I want another baby’". However, never had these parents imagined that the whole thing was nothing but a sham.
Their Quest For Truth
Melanie and Ellen scheduled an appointment with the authorities of the Louise Wise adoption agency. It was obvious that there had been something sketchy surrounding their adoption process, so they demanded being told the truth.
While the agency was initially reluctant to give in any information, it was only a matter of time before the truth was finally uncovered. Little did these girls imagine that they had been subject to one of the cruelest and most top-secret experiments ever...
A Spine-Chilling Study
Melanie and Ellen were shocked to find out that they had been used as laboratory rats in a secret study performed on twins separated at birth by their adoption agency. The study was aimed at finding out whether a person's life is shaped by nature or nurture.
This hideously grotesque experiment had been designed by a renowned psychiatrist named Dr. Peter Neubauer. But had the girls' adoptive parents been told about this? Had they also been complicit in this unethical experiment?
Sheer Rage
The true purpose of this study was kept secret from the twins' adoptive families, meaning that they never imagined their daughters were being used as guinea pigs for a long-term psychological experiment.
When both families found out the truth, they were enraged at having been so cynically used and tricked. "We were treated not like humans but like animals," said Ellen.
Unmeasurable Damage
As to Melanie and Ellen, not only were they duped at never being told the truth, but they were heartbroken by the fact that they had missed out on the chance of bonding during their childhood years.
According to twin studies expert Nancy Segal, the damage done by having separated them at birth is unmeasurable. "These individuals were deprived of what could’ve been the closest of human social relationships, and to know that you could’ve had that is devastating”, she claimed. But this isn't even the worst part...
All For Nothing
To make matters worse, the results of the investigation were never en published. Up to this day, the records of their lives are kept secret at Yale University and the girls are still fighting to gain access to those files.
"There is no real end product here. Nothing that we can say that we’ve learned. We’ve only learned how not to do research", Segal said. "So much sadness, and for nothing", said one of the girls. How did the twins process this harsh reality?
They Won't Forgive Or Forget
While Melanie and Ellen feel blessed that they finally got to meet each other, they can't help but feel resentful. "We’re identical and he robbed us of our childhood. He robbed us of our closeness. He took away something from us that we will never ever experience or have in our entire lives", Ellen said.
"They acted like they were doing it for our benefit, but it was for their benefit, not ours", she added. But this didn't end there! A few months after their discovery, Melanie and Ellen found out that they weren't the only victims of this doctor's unethical studies...
Three Identical Strangers
It so happens to be that a pair of male triplets were also ripped apart in the name of science, and by the same adoption agency. Identical triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman were separated at birth but met by chance at age 19.
Unlike Melanie and Ellen, the triplets became major media personalities ever since the moment they met, to the point that everyone in America knew who they were. Therefore, when they found about they had also been separated for the sake of an experiment, the news made the headlines worldwide.
Another Long-Lost Pair Of Twins
In 2017, two documentaries about Dr. Neubauer's experiment were made, both focusing on the triplet's story: The Twinning Reaction and Three Identical Strangers. And guess what? After the documentary was aired, another pair of twins separated by the Louise Wise agency found each other, too!
Michele Mordkoff knew she had been adopted out by that same agency, so after watching the documentary, she took a DNA test and discovered she had an "immediate family member". After looking her up on social media, she realized that it was her identical twin sister she had never known she had!
Cruel And Unethical
All in all, four pairs of identical twins and one set of triplets were separated and adopted out to different homes so that Dr. Neubauer's team could study their differences and similarities as they grew up.
While the team members that are still alive claim that their study had good intentions, there is no doubt that it was cruel and unethical. "He got all of the data in real time, which in many ways is the ideal experiment, but it’s also a forbidden experiment". "It was cruel and unethical", she added.
Fight For Justice
While Melanie and Ellen managed to cope with the harsh truth, some of the separated twins faced separation anxiety as kids and major mental health issues as adults. In fact, three of them committed suicide.
Nowadays, Melanie, Ellen, and the rest of the separated twins continue to fight for the disclosure of Dr. Neubauer's investigations. While they can't change back the past, the least they can do is fight for justice.