December 5, 2013 in the ninety-sixth year passed away the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. And literally on the same day, Internet search engines received millions of requests about whether this information was false. A huge number of people were convinced that the outstanding African died in prison in the sixties and seventies of the last century.
As you know, Nelson Mandela led the armed struggle against the apartheid regime and was arrested in 1962, after which he actually spent twenty-seven years in prison. It was in the dungeons that this fighter for human rights gained worldwide fame. However, in 1989 he was released with honors, and in May 1994 he became president of South Africa and led the country for five whole years. Why did so many people in different parts of the world have no idea about this and believed that Mandela died without ever being released?
This phenomenon has attracted the attention of participants in the American multi-genre convention Dragon Con, held annually in Atlanta. They carefully studied this issue and came to the conclusion that there was no rational explanation for what happened. Moreover, it turned out that there are a number of other facts that have been stored in the memory of many people in a distorted form. It was then that enthusiasts coined the term "Mandela effect". Fiona Broome, a congress participant, began to popularize it and collect information about other events that for some reason are incorrectly stored in human memory.
False memories in large groups of people
Thus, the Mandela effect is a phenomenon that means the emergence of memories in a large group of people that contradict the real state of affairs. It is noteworthy that false memories do not relate to any difficult to verify, but to well-known events: historical, astronomical, geographical, and so on.
In other words, checking such information is as easy as shelling pears, especially now that everyone has the Internet at their disposal. However, when faced with this phenomenon, people become somewhat confused and confused. How so? They remember very well that Mandela died behind bars! This was reported in "Novosti", wrote in numerous newspapers, and on TV they even showed the funeral of an African revolutionary!..
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But no, in fact, no one wrote anything, did not report and did not show it anywhere. Would journalists around the world decide to cook up such a duck at the same time? The question is, why? Enthusiasts have long and persistently searched newspaper articles and television reports about the event, even if done by some provincial reporters who suddenly wanted to have some fun like this. However, there have never been such publications, therefore, people could not get this information from the media.
Unexplained Details of Fake Memories
Another strange feature of the Mandela effect is that such memories are not just false information recorded in a person's memory, but a whole system of sequential memories. Here's an interesting example.
What color were Adolf Hitler's eyes? Most people swear they are brown. Moreover, many of them will tell you with confidence that they know this fact very well since school days. Like, the history teacher specifically emphasized that the Fuhrer was brown-eyed and at the same time advocated the Aryan racial purity, according to which the eyes of the "superman" must certainly be blue.
Obviously, this could not be. All contemporaries of Hitler claimed that he had blue eyes, and liked to emphasize this fact, speaking about the chosenness of the leader of the Third Reich. Below is a fragment of a rare color photograph of the Fuhrer, which clearly shows that his eyes are blue. Why is it that so many people remember not only his brown eyes, but even ridicule on this occasion over Hitler?..
Carriers of false memories often associate the incident itself with events in their personal life, for example, “my son was born on the same day,” or “this was my last school year”. That is, a false memory firmly sits in the memory of an individual and is associated with many other events, creating the illusion that in fact it was so. It is not surprising that someone can foaming at the mouth to prove to you that the Americans landed on the moon only three times, but it is worth showing him an article from Wikipedia, which clearly states that there were six landings, and the person is seriously lost … He remembers very well how the news said that NASA made its last, third, flight to the Earth satellite. And there are a lot of such people.
Notable examples of the Mandela effect
There are many examples of false memories. It is possible that you yourself will now suddenly realize that for a long time you were wrong about something.
Many believe that the fortieth President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, died after the end of his rule, although he actually died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three from pneumonia due to Alzheimer's disease.
Mother Teresa was canonized only in September of this year, although many are convinced that the canonization of the legendary Catholic nun took place much earlier.
There are exactly fifty states in America, and remembering this, it would seem, is easier than ever: exactly half a hundred. However, quite a few people mistakenly think that there are fifty-one or fifty-two.
Below are the logos of three famous car brands in two versions. A lot of people would swear that the logos on the right are wrong. Allegedly, "Ford" never had this squiggle at the letter "F", "Volvo" - arrows at the top, and "Volkswagen" - the division between the letters "V" and "W". Even the owners of such cars make a similar mistake. Despite this, the original logos are depicted on the right, and on the left are their modified versions, which for some reason many of us believe are correct.
The writer Agatha Christie disappeared briefly in December 1926. The disappearance of the famous author of detective stories caused a loud public outcry, and the police immediately began to search for the woman. Eleven days later, safe and sound, Christie was found in a remote English spa hotel. She returned home and continued to write her wonderful books. Nevertheless, a significant number of people “remember” that the writer disappeared without a trace forever.
If you think that there is an Arctic continent in the Arctic Ocean, then you, like many others, are wrong. There is only abundant ice cover.
Non-existent books, films and various works of art are generally a separate conversation. For example, thousands of Russians “remember” how in the mid-eighties they showed a very dark film adaptation of the fairy tale “Dwarf Nose” on television. It was very different from other adaptations of the same tale in 1953, 1970 and 1978. In fact, such a movie never existed, and not a single copy of it has ever been found.
Among the numerous portraits of the English king Henry the Eighth, there is not a single one where the monarch would hold a roast turkey leg in his hands. However, a huge number of residents of Foggy Albion claim to have seen such a picture with their own eyes in museums, at exhibitions and on the World Wide Web.
Probably everyone knows the American song "Only You". Many people experience a real shock when they learn that it was not the "king of rock and roll" Elvis Presley who sang it in the fifties, but the black quintet "The Platters". But many clearly “remember” how Presley performed “Only You” at his concerts, how this song was included in his official records. Needless to say, such records have never been found, despite Elvis' wild popularity?..
Russian examples of the Mandela effect
In Russia and the former Soviet Union, there are also such examples.
Many of our compatriots from school "remember" that Catherine the Great sold Alaska to the Americans, although in reality this happened during the reign of Alexander II. Therefore, the Russian empress is wrongly accused of this oversight.
Everyone probably remembers the common phrase from the movie: "Boy, get away from the car." However, for some reason the majority is convinced that this remark sounded in the film "Beware of the car". In fact, it was uttered in the film "In Secret to the Whole World", which many hardly believe.
Do you remember how Yeltsin, before his departure from the presidency, said: "I'm tired, I'm leaving"? This saying also became winged, but in reality Boris Nikolaevich only said then: "I'm leaving." Why many of us "remember" the words about his fatigue is a real mystery.
In the former USSR, everyone knows a poem that begins with the words "I sit behind bars in a damp dungeon." But many are somehow convinced that its creator is Mikhail Lermontov. Nevertheless, the real author of this work is Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
Possible explanations for the Mandela effect
So, there are several of them, and one is more fantastic than the other:
- Firstly, many researchers of the Mandela effect believe that this phenomenon is a consequence of the movement of people from one parallel world to another - the so-called quantum immortality, when a person, unnoticed by himself, moves from one reality to another, neighboring. In the past reality, the world could be somewhat different. For example, there Lermontov appropriated Pushkin's poem, Agatha Christie really disappeared with the ends (perhaps she also moved somewhere), and America grabbed a piece of Canada or Mexico, having acquired one or two new states. A person, however, has certain memories of the reality where he lived before;
- Secondly, it is quite possible that someone created a time machine and went to the past, where they accidentally or deliberately changed something. That is, an unknown inventor could trigger the butterfly effect, when even minor changes in the past (like killing an insect) generate a chain of changes that significantly affect the future. Thus, some of us still have memories from that version of reality, where the events of the past and, as a result, the present were not changed;
- Thirdly, there is also an opinion that we all live in a matrix - a simulation of reality created by intelligent machines, people of the future or representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization. This simulation occasionally crashes, certain problems occur. For example, on the same day you may meet the same stranger in different parts of your city. Or notice a car on the road that simply disappears, disappearing into thin air. Similar failures can occur in our memory, which is entirely formed by the matrix, since the real world has never been available to us, and we do not even know what it is.
The Mandela Effect has also been studied in conventional science. So, in this regard, confabulation is often mentioned - a psychopathological phenomenon of false memory, when a person is fully convinced that some fictional events actually took place. Nevertheless, scientists are unable to explain why such a false memory can sometimes be observed in tens of millions of earthlings living in different parts of the world …