Three Phases of ME

Thousands of people have the sense that something in their past has changed and only a few other people have any sense of it happening. The phenomenon has been labeled "Mandela Effect" by Fiona Broome.  To them the question becomes: did something alter mine and many other peoples' memories or did the Past actually change. For them there is only those two possibilities.

A third explanation emerges which is equally able to describe and explain the experiences people have with respect to the Effect. Briefly the Mandela Effect is a memory fluke which is derived from the reports that when Nelson died on December 5, 2013, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, South Africa (Wikipedia) people surfaced who said they thought he had died in prison many years earlier. To them Mr. Mandela never was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and the man who presided over the dismantling of the Apartheid government. While they "clearly remember" him dying in prison, they have no idea who was the President during the years 1994-1999 in South Africa. Basically, they were not paying close enough attention to African politics at the time.

This third explanations requires a large communication portal wherein large numbers of people can read what others say and post their own responses to either agree with or disagree with what is said. The Internets create this great filter through which the information flows. Many hundreds if not thousands of participants add their part to the collective recollections. Without the ability to communicate with large numbers of people who appear to have the same recollection there could be no body of knowledge we now call the Mandela Effect. Each person would casually dismiss their own recall as being faulty with no corroboration from others to validate the error of that memory.

Now that the phenomenon has a name, multiple Youtube channels and a presence on Facebook and Twitter, many more people are able to validate their faulty memories.  The erroneous memories seem to only manifest in pairs. It was THIS way or it was THAT way as in Berenstain and Berenstein Bears, or Fruit Loops vs Froot Loops. In this manner the cause in not likely a merging of quantum realities since many other permutations of the alternate spellings of word choices would have equally probable presence. We should see many different appearances.

Should some time traveling adventurer return to our past and make changes, he or she would be wasting massive amounts of high-energy resources to Punk us here in the early 21st century. Adding a dividing line in the VW logo, a curly F in the Ford logo or the "male arrow" to the other circular Volvo logo, would be playing silly buggers with us here for no apparent reason.

The ability to aggregate opinion via a massive telecomm system facilitates the Mandela Effect. Cartographers have from time to time emphasized and deemphasized the presentation of the spherical planet onto a flat piece of paper. Until an accurate time piece was made which remained accurate during turbulent sea voyages, longitude was a "best guess" by the navigators who were on the exploratory trips around the globe. As their skill improved as well as the accuracy of their clocks, so were their maps.

Ship's Captains commissioned by Kings were not adverse to stretch the extents of their travels with deceptive maps. After all there was no one to challenge their veracity. Recall that Christopher Columbus was not looking for two new continents but a westward route to the India and China. Imagine Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand saying," But I always thought the world was flat and resting of the back or a turtle. Something must have changed."

So now is it that the person feeling the Mandela Effect is merely being wrong or did someone tamper with his brain?  Next up: Mass brainwashing.