Conspiracy theories are a fascinating topic and chances are that if you’re a regular user of the internet, you have stumbled across a few conspiracy theories or if not, at least heard about them from your friends and family.
There are many different conspiracy theories out there such as the US government secretly working with aliens, that all major celebrities are a part of a secret organization called the Illuminati and even conspiracy theories about a reptile royal family however, one of the most interesting ones is called the Mandela effect.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon which describes a large number of people sharing a collective false memory of a past event.
The theory was first described online by a blogger named Fiona Broome in 2010. The effect is named after her misremembrance of Nelson Mandela (the former South African president) dying during his imprisonment in the 1980s. She discovered that herself along with other people at a Dragon Con convention she was attending, have a false memory of this event. Nelson Mandela had actually died in December 2013, even though Broome claims to have remembered the event clearly and even remembers the clips of his funeral shown in the news.
Another example of the Mandela effect is with the film Star Wars. The film has the iconic line “Luke, I am your father” but did you know that the line is “no, I am your father,”? The line “Luke… I am your father,” has never actually been said despite the fact that everyone remembers it as that.
Another misconception is the spelling of a children’s book named the Berenstain Bears which has commonly been falsely remembered as the Berenstein Bears.
Other examples include people remembering Rich Uncle Pennybags-the monopoly man-to have a monocle when he doesn’t.
Also, remembering the famous KitKat logo being spelt with a hyphen even though there isn’t one in the name.
And, that at the end of Queen’s song, we are the champions to end with the line “we are the champions… of the world” however, “of the world” isn’t included in the original song.
Mandela effect enthusiasts claim that the reasoning behind these misremembrances is that we are all living in a parallel universe. That these collective experiences are true and that the fabric of reality must have been shifted at some point in the past. This may have been due to the existence of parallel universes that intertwine and collide therefore causing, the Mandela effect.
Many believe that the theory of parallel universes also explains Déjà vu. They say that this is the sensation you get when you supposedly communicate with an alternate version of yourself. The theory of this goes that every so often, you and an alternate version of you perform the exact same task or react to the exact same thing at the exact same time in your respective universes therefore, causing the feeling of Déjà vu.
There are many people who strongly believe conspiracy theories to be true and although this theory may appear to be strange, it certainly is interesting.