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.
