The Mandela Effect is a hypothesized effect whereby numerous people share a memory, usually something they can provide a fair amount of detail about or are almost religiously certain about, but never actually happened. Why this happens is disputed and ranges from weird pseudo science about timelines and multiple dimensions to shared delusions.
The name comes from the idea that a ton of people clearly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the mid to late 1980s. They remember the funerals, the banners there, the general cause of death and even remember a court case about his wife and her book rights afterwards. Hundreds of people seem to all have very similar recollections of this event. Some even recall being shocked when he was released from prison.
Of course Mandela died in 2013.
There are numerous examples in film and TV.
Two that have affected me have been the films Shazaam and Interview With The Vampire. Neither these films exist. The Vampire movie is inexplicably called Interview With A Vampire which is an odd mistake for me as I used to sleep with the VHS spine on a shelf facing me. The Shazaam film was about the black comedian Sinbad, who becomes a genie. It's a kids movie.
Well it's not, the film never existed. Sinbad was never in a genie film although I swear I can remember the cover crystal clear including the costume, the font, everything.
Other ones are somewhat famous. Neither "Luke I am your father", the Oscar acceptance speech declaring "you love me, you really really love me" or Forrest Gump saying "Life is like a box of chocolates" ever happened. Oh and what lay down with the lamb in the Book of Isiah in the Bible? It wasn't the lion. The lion never lay with the lamb. The wolf lay with the lamb.
Anyway, thoughts on this or examples of others you may have come across?
I find it really interesting how hundreds of people can all misremember or confuse things in the exact same way. It's fascinating how our brains work and how similarly people from the same culture can merge various different parts of separate objects to create the exact same misinformation.
