The Mandela Effect

By: S. Fregonesi

The Mandela Effect refers to a situation in which many people believe that an event occurred when it actually didn't.
It all started when Fiona Broome published a website detailing her observance of the effect. She mentions how she was at a conference talking with other people about the death of South African president Nelson Mandela in the 1980s. However, in fact Nelson Mandela did not die in the 1980s, but passed away in 2013. She realized that she was not alone on thinking that he died in the 1980s as other people remembered seeing news coverage of his death. Following her observation, a large mass of people also remembered the same event in detail when in reality it never happened. Thus beginning the phenomenon of the Mandela Effect.
As the concept of the effect grew, other false memories began to emerge by people. An example is the “Mirror, Mirror on the wall”. You might have remembered this from the classic Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when the evil queen looks in the mirror and says, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” when in reality the line is “Magic mirror on the wall". Also, another false memory is the Darth Vader line “Luke I am your father”, but contrary to what everyone believes, the line is actually “No, I am your father.” Another shocking example would be from the movie the Silence of the Lambs, in which viewers remember the creepy line of Hannibal Lecter’s “ Hello, Clarice”, but when watching back on it, he never actually said that and instead said a simple “good morning".

This then leads me into asking: why does this keep happening? Do we all just have really bad memories or Is it more than that? There is one theory that is connected with quantum physics in which there are alternate realities and universes that are taking place and mixing with our timeline and as something changes in that universe, our current timeline is changed like a parallel universe. However, the idea of alternate universes is unfalsifiable, and that there is no way to disprove of this idea. It is safe to ask yourself: “is the Mandela Effect real?”