  We have attempted to establish an observational evidence for presence of
distant companions which may have acquired and/or absorbed the angular momentum
during evolution of multiple systems thus facilitating or enabling formation of
contact binaries. In this preliminary investigation we use several techniques
(some of them distance-independent) and mostly disregard detection biases of
individual techniques in an attempt to establish a lower limit to the frequency
of triple systems. While the whole sample of 151 contact binary stars brighter
than Vmax = 10 mag. gives a firm lower limit of 42+/-5%, the corresponding
number for the much better observed Northern-sky sub-sample is 59+/-8%. These
estimates indicate that most contact binary stars exist in multiple systems.
