The Mandela Effect

In 2010, Fiona Broome coined the term Mandela Effect to refer to an episode in which a large group of people similarly remember past events incorrectly. At a convention that year, she learned Nelson Mandela was still alive even though she, along with several other people, remembers his dying while in prison in the mid-80s. A number of people even remember watching his funeral on television. Since her introduction of the term, several examples of the Mandela Effect have surfaced on the internet:

When Darth Vader reveals the truth of his relationship to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, he does not say, “Luke, I am your father.” He actually says, “No. I am your father.” But, dadburnit, I remember him saying Luke!! You know what else is crazy? James Earl Jones (the voice of Vader) even remembers saying “Luke, I am your father.”

How about this one; fill in the blank from Isaiah 11:6- And the ____ shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid…. Lion, right? Nope, if you look it up, you’ll see that it says that “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.”

Here’s one from the land of cartoons: did Mickey Mouse wear suspenders? Nope, he just had the buttons for them. I can recall him both ways, so this one doesn’t blow my mind like the others.

But one from the cartoons that does blow my mind is the fact that during all of those Saturday mornings as a wee lad, I never watched the Looney Toons because they didn’t exist. It was the Looney Tunes, but not in my mind.

Here’s one that has to do with cartoons and children’s books: Remember the family of bears that lived in the treehouse? Yeah, the Berenstein Bears. Except, it was the Berenstain Bears.

One last cartoonish one: does the character on the Monopoly board game wear a monocle? In my memory, he definitely does; in reality, he doesn’t. Stop messing with my mind!!

If this intrigues you, you should do an internet search- there’s scores of other examples. You’ll probably also be entertained with the explanations for why the Mandela Effect occurs; some of those explanations are, uh, out there. Maybe we should tackle that together in a later post. That is if the internet actually exists in reality and not just in some of our memories in a few years...

Photo by Tommy van Kessel on Unsplash