In fact, mathematicians were hired during the Battle of England to estimate whether the Germans were aiming for specific buildings (“why is there a cluster of bombs around this church???” or around some secret offices) or just spreading randomly. Verdict: They weren’t aiming, it was random chance that bombs made some clusters onto some buildings. This is what random looks like: No even distribution, sometimes you get a cluster which looks like a series.
I think it depends on how frequent the thing in question is. If an engine losing parts is something that happens yearly, twice in one day is still pretty rare.
But then you have to deal with degrees of freedom as well. If your search space is just 'two uncorrelated ~yearly events', there's enough of them that you'll always find false positives.
For independent, random occurrences, the probability distribution for delta-T follows an exponential decay. I.e. the most likely time is "right after". Of course, that "most likely" can still be small.
Fun fact: This is true for any chosen point in time, i.e. the prob that this happens exactly one day after your birthday is higher than that it happens two days later.
In fact, mathematicians were hired during the Battle of England to estimate whether the Germans were aiming for specific buildings (“why is there a cluster of bombs around this church???” or around some secret offices) or just spreading randomly. Verdict: They weren’t aiming, it was random chance that bombs made some clusters onto some buildings. This is what random looks like: No even distribution, sometimes you get a cluster which looks like a series.