by Joyann Dwire, in Pop Culture

My blog last week about false memories made me think about the Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon in which large groups of people remember something specific about a fact of history, a person, the way something was spelled or a detail about a TV show or movie. Others remember it in a different way, and often the documented facts prove on or the other to be wrong.

 The Mandela Effect was named after South African President Nelson Mandela. There are people who remember hearing that he died in prison. One of them is Dr. Joseph P. Farrell, who is very well educated and a student of history. He says he vividly remembers hearing that Mandela had died. Others remember that he was released from prison, ended Apartheid and became the President of South Africa. This is the version that history records. By the way, you can see by the first sentence of this paragraph where I fall on this debate.

A Google search for the Mandela Effect brings up more than two million results. One of the sites claims to have 100 examples of the Mandela Effect. I have no desire to go through all of these. The few that affect me personally are disturbing enough.

If you are interested in the phenomenon you may want to check out the many videos on YouTube about the Mandela Effect. I forced myself to watch one video. Quite frankly I find some of the examples unnerving, although the majority of the cases mentioned are of no interest to me. In fact, there are many cases that have reasonable explanations for the false memories, including the fact that memories – especially childhood memories – can be very fickle.

In last week’s blog I shared an incident in my life that felt very real to me. You can read it HERE. As an adult I was shocked to find that what I believed had never happened. It may have been a recurring dream. Or as I jokingly suggested, perhaps I had slipped into another dimension.

I was only halfway joking. Alternate dimensions are often presented as explanations for the Mandela Effect. I can’t completely stand behind it though. But one has to wonder . . . .

Here are three examples from the video I watched that I could relate to.

The first comes right out of the world of Disney. In all Disney movies the opening animation shows a dot or star tracing the arch over the castle. But some people (like me) distinctly remember that it was Tinker Bell who traced the arch with her wand. I KNOW it was Tinker Bell. I saw it every week on my TV. 

I was distressed about this for several days. Then I went back and rewatched the video and read some of the comments. In the paragraph above I said I saw Tinker Bell every week on my TV. Here's the explanation. I didn’t pay attention to the opening when I watched a Disney MOVIE, but I loved watching Tinker Bell in the opening animation of television’s Wonderful World of Disney. I rest easier now.

Remember John Denver? He died in his experimental airplane. But do you remember him dying over Monterey Bay or over the mountains he loved so much?

I would have said he died in the mountains, but the truth is he crashed into the ocean. This one didn’t disturb me as much as the previous example. I always assumed it was over mountains because of his song “Rocky Mountain High.” I also believe the bio movie that appeared on TV many years ago showed him flying over the mountains. This could have created the false memories. I’m fine with that. Still love his music.

Many of the other examples all over the internet probably have innocent explanations, too. 

But not all . . . 

This last one I want to focus on also goes back to my childhood. I grew up thinking my heart was on the left side of my body. If you’re a baby boomer, you probably learned that to be true as well. It makes sense. We put our hand on the left side of our chest to pledge allegiance. And we see people on TV or in the movies clutching at the left side of their chest when they have a heart attack.

For quite a few years I’ve been noticing that when police or the bad guy shot someone in the chest (on TV of course)  the bullet hole and blood was in the center of the chest. This mystified me. Why the center of the chest rather than the left side where the heart was?

The reason is that the heart is not on the left, but in the center of the chest. Is this something new? Why do they tell us that pain down the LEFT arm is a symptom of a heart attack? Have our hearts moved? I can feel my heartbeat on the left side of my body much stronger than on the right. Was everything we were taught in school wrong?

We’ve just entered a new year, so I thought I’d bring you a fun topic this week (except for Tinker Bell. That really threw me for a loop until I saw the explanation!)

What do you think? Have you found memories, like my childhood memory of my Dad being lost in the woods that now seem to be untrue? Are there other Mandela Effects that you’ve noticed?

Feel free to contact me and share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

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Copyright 2024 Joyoann Dwire All Rights Reserved

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