Reminder: Why the Mandela Effect Isn’t Simple

This week, someone – yet again – asked me why people like me won’t declare that the Mandela Effect always reflects false memories.

Here’s my lightly edited (and perhaps redundant) reply to that comment.

(I’m placing it here so – hopefully – it’s more visible to casual researchers. Or, at the very least, I can link to it and quit using valuable time, repeating myself.  It seems so surreal that 15 years after I began talking about the Mandela Effect, there’s still so much confusion about its origins.)

Regarding the Mandela Effect:

According to some—and at apparently opposing poles—there are those who want to believe that everything that doesn’t match their memories is best explained as a changed/parallel reality.

At the other extreme, others want to insist that all conflicting memories are best explained as “false” memories.

(Yes, Wikipedia—which once had a dedicated Mandela Effect page— now labels all related phenomena as “false memories.”)

Personally, I’m somewhere between those two.

That is, I’ve seen logical explanations—usually commonplace confusions— for some alternate memories.

For example, if someone’s mom or grandfather kept calling the peanut butter brand’s name “Jiffy” (instead of “Jif”) when the child was a toddler, that name may be what they recall.

That’s especially true if the family switched to Skippy (brand name) peanut butter by the time the child could read, and—since then—the child (now an adult) never paid close attention to other brands of peanut butter… until someone in a forum mentioned the Jif/Jiffy conundrum.

I always advocate fact-checking an alternate memory, when possible.

However, in my own case, I have yet to find any multi-day, televised funeral (and its immediate aftermath) that fits the time frame and context of my Mandela-related memory.

Since my family moved every three years or so, I have a clear time frame for the memory. That makes fact-checking far simpler.

I also recall several specific images, from the slow movement of the hearse with crowds lining the streets, to the widow walking towards a podium beneath a huge tree, leaning heavily on her bodyguard’s arm.

In addition, it was a time when my family was experimenting with a “no TV” rule.

So, unless I was watching a specific, scheduled TV show, there was no channel surfing.

If the show I planned to watch wasn’t actually on—as in this case, since it was preempted—I quickly turned off the TV.

That’s why this memory is fairly clear: I was irked that my intended early morning entertainment wasn’t on at its usual scheduled time.

I still don’t have an explanation for the memory. People have suggested that the funeral was Stephen Biko’s, but he died in 1977. It doesn’t fit my history at all, and I doubt that his funeral received three days of daytime coverage in the U.S.

Even now, I can’t find a South African funeral for someone else, so significant his funeral would preempt American TV programs for three days, within my memory’s time frame.

What I also can’t explain are the reports by others—many hidden (by request) from view—that matched precise details of the funeral that I’ve never made public.

And, since I could see their IP numbers, they appeared to be in very different parts of the country.

Note: Yes, I’m aware of IP spoofing, etc. Starting around 2012, trolls were a steady problem at my original Mandela Effect (dot com) site. Every comment was moderated before the public saw it, and I did my best to be sure most comments were authentic.

So, it’s possible that those comments may have been made by people who – like my family – had moved since the years of the funeral that I recall. And we all saw the same erroneously displayed TV coverage.

However, the volume of those reports makes it unlikely that, for multiple days, a local channel (to me, at the time) was (mistakenly?) running a replay of the Biko funeral… and that we all saw it.

That’s why I don’t see the Mandela Effect as either straightforward or a dichotomy. However, I have nothing to prove and – in fact – freely admit that I have no proof to support my assertions. I’ve said that repeatedly.

If you’re more comfortable with a simple A/B answer for the Mandela Effect, and it works for you, that’s fine.

However, it doesn’t work for me.

We can agree to disagree.

If you’ve recently discovered the Mandela Effect, here’s a one-minute summary of what it is… and isn’t.