Okay, here's one for all you fringewatchers out there. Buckle up. I'm warning you ...
For the last several years, I've been aware of some general weirdness lurking out in the hinterlands of reason. I first heard about the Mandela Effect late one night (or early one morning) on Art's Bell Coast to Coast radio show. That was back in the mid-2000s when I was pulling a second job with RGIS Inventory Specialists and driving home in the wee small hours of the morning. I vividly recall tuning in mid-show and listening for about twenty minutes while trying to piece together that night's topic. Something about thousands of people mis-remembering monumental events such as 9-11, Nelson Mandela's Death or The Challenger Disaster. Bell's guest, a very intense gentleman with a reedy voice, postulated that these incorrect or false memories were proof positive that our universe - the space-time continuum, if you will - is not exactly as it seems. Every day we file memories away in our mind, and for the most part these memories jibe with humanity's recorded history and consensus reality. However, in some instances, we remember some specific event - such as Nelson Mandela dying during the 1980s while in prison - only to learn later that our memory never truly happened. Of course, Bell's guest had some theories to explain this phenomenon he eponymously labeled as The Mandela Effect:
1) We're all living inside a virtual, simulated world - a huge computer program, if you will - a la The Matrix. When confronted by an incorrect memory, like Mandela's death in prison, we are actually encountering a "glitch in the Matrix." In other words, the computer program governing our sense of reality contains an error: two deaths for Nelson Mandela, one death in the 1980s, and one death in 2013. This theory goes on to propose that numerous such "glitches" are evident all around us if we just look for them, e.g. two dates for the Challenger Disaster, 1984 & 1986; a famous portrait of Henry VIII holding a turkey leg that never existed; two different spellings for the famous cartoon Bears, Berenstain and/or Berenstein; multiple or non-existent deaths for celebrities like Ernest Borgnine, Fidel Castro, Larry Hagman and Betty White.
2) Somewhere in our recent past, the wall separating our universe from another parallel universe collapsed. Because this cataclysm occurred on a quantum level between quarks and other subatomic particles, we never consciously sensed anything. As a result of this collision, the parallel universe melded with our universe, and two divergent and sometimes inconsistent timelines now exist side by side. Whenever our minds perceive these timeline anomalies, think of the common deja vu sensation, we filter out any anachronisms and explain away the weirdness with myriad rationalizations. The further we move away from the collision, the more our universe blends with the parallel universe, and the harder it becomes to remember our own separate history before the collision.
3) Time travel exists in our future. Time travelers from our future have traveled back to the past and altered various events, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident. These changes are called Time Shifts. When we mis-remember things like Mandela's death or the spelling of the Berenstain Bears, our minds are actually recalling our reality before a Time Shift occurred. This theory of the Mandela Effect dovetails quite nicely with the concept of The Butterfly Effect, which postulates that one small insignificant disturbance in the timeline - e.g. a butterfly flapping its wings - interacts with reality in such a way as to drastically alter history and create chronological hurricanes in the space-time continuum.
Now the skeptic in me dismissed all this stuff immediately when I heard it, filing it away in my mind for future reference along with hundreds of other kooky notions I've encountered over the years: hollow earths, fake moon landings, 9-11 conspiracies, falsified Obama birth certificates. Occasionally, I'd stumble across mentions of the Mandela Effect in my online reading, but I never really gave it much thought. Then, a week ago, I found myself musing about the Mandela Effect while perusing an article on The Simulation Hypothesis, an actual philosophical argument that pretty much fleshes out explanation 1) above. Later that same week, I was researching various schizophrenic delusions - namely Capgras & Cotard Delusions - and found myself considering the Mandela Effect again. And lastly, this morning I came across the Mandela Effect on Coast to Coast AM again. My curiosity suddenly re-piqued, I decided to do a little digging and re-familiarize myself on the weirdness.
And then it happened ...
I went through Art Bell's archives and discovered that the show I remember hearing around 2005-2006 never aired. According to the Coast to Coast AM website, Art's first shows addressing Time Slips occurred after my employment ended at RGIS. Hmmm. I dug more and came up with the program I remembered, but that aired in 2009. And the guests were Whitley Streiber and Starfire Tor, two pretty famous fringe authors that I am VERY familiar with. I couldn't find my reedy voiced man unless I went to shows in 2007 & 2009 with Lionel Fanthorpe, only he has a decidedly British accent that I don't recall at all. I also discovered that Fiona Broom first began writing about the phenomenon in 2005, but the term Mandela Effect itself did not originate until much later. Once again, well after I quit working late nights with RGIS.
Weird. Or is it ..?
Looking back on my life, I've been living with the Mandela Effect since my childhood. I don't know how many times our family dinner table discussions revolved around mis-remembered events or mis-appropriated deaths. A running joke for years debated the "dead or alive" status of actor Burgess Meredith. We all "knew" the Penguin kicked the bucket back in the early 80s, but then, lo and behold, he'd pop up in another Rocky sequel. The same thing with Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Borgnine and most recently Kirk Douglas (still alive??) and Lloyd Bridges (dead??). In addition to mis-remembered deaths, my brothers and I also hotly contested the existence of TV episodes that we'd "seen at Grandma's," but never actually aired in our reality, i.e. the last Gilligan's Island where the castaways were rescued or the last Hogan's Heroes where WWII ended. I don't know why we only ever saw these episodes at my grandmother's house. Perhaps, her residence on Trowbridge Avenue existed in some nexus between parallel universes. Whatever the explanation, I'm sure my brothers and I could come up with dozens of more instances where our memories conflict with consensus reality and recorded history.
So what does this mean? Are we truly encountering glitches in a computer simulation, or remnants of a parallel universe, or time slips caused by errant time travelers? Or is the human mind just a relentless story-telling machine that continually reorganizes, revises and rewrites the interior monologue narrative we call life? I certainly don't claim to know the answer. I'm just positive Burgess Meredith died shortly after filming Rocky I. I know because I watched coverage of his funeral live at my grandma's house.
Interesting, very interesting. I have often wondered why I seem to remember something a few years ago, then suddenly it pops up now, IE the death of a celebrity. Thank you Mark for sharing.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I've thought of some of these things at times but not near the depth of your thinking.
ReplyDeleteTangentially related: within three weeks of moving to California in the fall of 1998, I began to periodically experience a bit of weirdness: I'd wake up, look at the clock by my bed, note the time, fall back asleep, and then wake up EARLIER than the time I'd seen on the clock before. This happened perhaps four times in the three months I rented a room in Santa Monica, then occurred a handful of times over the next few years in my Hollywood apartment. It's happened maybe twice in the nearly eleven years I've been back in Ohio. I phoned Art Bell during one broadcast circa November 1998 and reported this happening, and his guest dismissed it as me dreaming that I was looking at the clock. Don't think so.
ReplyDelete