The Mandela Effect, Part 2

In Part 1, I described an experience that I have shared with a couple of other people, in which we have very distinct memories of B. B. King dying in May of 2005, yet it was reported in May of 2015, that B.B. had died again, at least as far as we were concerned.

Just last week, I learned purely by accident that this phenomenon has been dubbed the Mandela Effect, and apparently a great many people have experienced it.  In particular, folks are convinced that a celebrity has died who is still alive (Kirk Douglas for instance), while others have clear memories of a celebrity dying more than once.  Even stranger is the fact that many people, who are complete strangers, share the same memories in great detail.

Across the internet, much of the discussion seems focused on movie lines or titles.  I dismiss this as either remembering a popular impression of a character's scene or just complete bunk trying to cash in on the interest.

One prime example is the plethora of videos about Interview with a/the Vampire.  A quick trip to Wikipedia shows the title as using "the." But even if later issues have changed to "a," it doesn't matter since the author can confirm the original title and there must be thousands of original copies of both the book and movie in circulation.

I call this discussion the "Play it again, Sam" theory, and it includes the Snow White "mirror mirror" and Empire Strikes Back "I am your father" branches of the Mandela Effect hype.

I wanted the reactions of people I knew were level-headed and tended to research things a bit more deeply than Google and hashtags.

Of the people I wanted a reaction from was Joseph Farrell, the well-known author and researcher whom we've interviewed a couple of times on Radio Far Side.  I sent him a note asking if he had ever heard of the Mandela Effect.  The response was nearly immediate and he wanted to discuss my experiences.

It turns out that it is a topic of great interest to Farrell and his subscribers, who have discussed it at length in member vid-chats.  According to his members, this phenomenon is global and seems to have two common factors - celebrities and a period of roughly 10 years.

I was genuinely stunned.  After learning of the name Mandela Effect, I started looking around the net for references.  It wasn't hard.  There are around 511,000 returns on Google, covering websites, blogs and videos.  From what I see, about 50% of the data centers around people misremembering movie lines.  As I said previously, I find this highly unreliable, since a lot of folks remember the line, "Play it again, Sam," from Casablanca, but that line has never existed, at least in the film itself.

The rest of the data focuses on celebrity deaths.  Farrell has specific memories of Helen Thomas, the veteran political reporter, dying during the Clinton Administration and listening to Bill Clinton deliver a eulogy at that time.  Yet, any reference to her will mention her death in 2013.

Joseph also mentioned Kirk Douglas being alive, and that caught my attention.  I distinctly remember watching an interview with his son Michael talking about his father on the occasion of his death.  Yet, according to Wikipedia, Kirk is still alive.

At this point, we discussed reasons for this phenomenon.   I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to express his thoughts, but suffice it to say that he thinks it may be an experiment in social engineering that involves manipulating quantum forces and correlating the effects with massive databases to see what has changed.  The analogy he used was overlapping multiverses with leaks between them.

I was fascinated with the possibilities, though a bit horrified to think that anyone could be mucking around with timelines and peoples' memories on a mass scale.  However, my own theories more or less have the same thing happening, but in a different way.

The Mandela Effect reminds me a lot of several different stories, both fictional and real.

The first is a book that I was enthralled with as a child.  It was "A Sound of Thunder," which introduced the concept of 'the butterfly effect' into common culture.  In the book, time-travelling hunters from 2055 go back to the Jurassic Age to hunt dinosaurs.  An accident leads to a butterfly getting crushed in the past and causes hundreds of large and small changes back in the current time, as the effects of the butterfly's demise ripple through millions of years.

Another favorite book was Robert Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast."  Here, a mathematics professor invents a "continua" device that allows the main characters to shift through six dimension of time and space (leading to the reference of 666).  The characters are deceived by telepathic overlays on reality during their journey through alternate universes.

Finally, the story of John Titor comes to mind.  This may be a bit of an obscure reference, but John Titor was a supposed time traveler who appeared on the internet in various chat rooms around 2000 and 2001.  He was supposedly from 2036, and was on a mission to the 1970s to obtain an IBM 5100 computer to help in decoding a number of old machine languages to avoid some Y2K-like problem in the future.  He described time as a cone shape extending into the past and future that allowed access to multiple timelines, which could vary greatly or very subtly from our own.

All three stories are worth reading, so do make use of the links, but the salient point is that they all involve time travel and in some way mirror the Mandela Effect.  My operating theory is that our timeline has been changed in some way, either in a single event, or in several, and may be ongoing.  I suspect that easiest way to do that would be to manipulate very small and discrete parts of the past to change something in the future.  The double death/not yet dead phenomenon may be an incidental or intentional result for whatever purpose(s).

And yes, I know this sounds far out.  And I do have a much more mundane, though nefarious means of achieving the same result: Winston Smith.  If you recall in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the protagonist's job is to literally rewrite history.  He spends his days at MiniTrue making people appear and disappear in history, changing narratives and making sure that the past matches the official party line du jour.

It's not an easy choice, and any of them require a very large departure from what we fondly refer to as "reality."  Whether it's Farrell's multiverse leaks, Bradbury's ancient accidents, Heinlein's continua machine, Titor's military time missions, or Orwell's MiniTrue, something is causing an actual phenomenon in which a large number of people "misremember" historic events, but do so in a way that complete strangers "misremember" with exactly the same details.

There is no natural phenomenon that can explain this, and it has only come into the public consciousness with the past two decades.  Most of the reports that I find credible more or less occur between the mid-1990s and today.  Nor can I find any reference in older texts to similar documented phenomena in the past, so this seems to be something completely new.

If you have experienced it, then you know the very strange and other-worldly feeling you get when it happens.  It can literally leave you vexed and paralyzed for a few moments as you try to process the discontinuity in your clear memories.

Either we are all being manipulated somehow (real or perceived), or accidents are occurring (likely in the past) that are changing our current timeline.  No matter how you slice this, the implications are truly unsettling.

One way to find out is to bring the topic to wide public attention.  By making it a major item of conversation, perhaps we can at least stop it from happening, and perhaps even discover why it's happening.  I suspect we will not like the answers behind the Mandela Effect.

There is no reason in physics that time travel is impossible.  When we peer into the Universe, we are travelling backwards in time, as we see the Universe only as it was anywhere from minutes to billions of years ago.  It is also quite possible that aspects of physics that allow time travel have been hidden from the general public for just the sort of reason we are discussing here.

What is most disturbing, and implied by the Mandela Effect, is that we may be unaware of just how much our lives have been changed.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Part 3

The Mandela Effect, Part 1

The other day, a colleague out of the blue asked me if I remembered when Nelson Mandela died.  "It was 1998, or so, I guess," I replied.

"Would it surprise you if I told you it was 2013?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah.  Why?"

And that is how I discovered the Madela Effect.  Or at least that it had a name.

Did you know Kirk Douglas is still alive?  I distinctly remember his son Michael being interviewed on the occasion of his death.

Do you recall Helen Thomas dying during the (first?) Clinton Administration in the 90s?  It was actually 2013.

And wait till you read my experience.

Google defines the Mandela Effect as:

[a] term for where a group of people all mis-remember the same detail, event or physicality. It is named after the instance in which a large group of people all shared the same memory that Nelson Mandela died prior to his actual 2013 death, usually some time in the 1980's.

Nelson Mandela died in 2013, at least according to Wikipedia, but a lot of people, including me, remember him dying a fair time earlier, thus lending his name to the effect.  For a fairly succinct summary of what all this is about, take a look at Fiona Broome's website.

If you look up all the YouTube videos, you'll find that the term has been around for a while.  A lot of people experience these kinds of things, though not necessarily everyone having the same experience.  I never had a term for it until now.  If you read George Ure at UrbanSurvival (link in right column), he's discussed this effect for some time, though I've never seen him call it the Mandela Effect.

According to the data I've found, most folks experience it with celebrity deaths or movie lines.  Frankly, I dismiss the movie lines as completely unreliable.  For instance, one of the most famous movie lines of all time, "Play it again, Sam," never existed.  It's been quoted in cartoons, books, other movies, hell Woody Allen even named one of his plays after the line.  It supposedly comes from the film Casablanca, and was supposedly uttered by Humphrey Bogart, but if you watch the movie, you will not hear the line spoken by any character at any time..

When I see all these folks getting all worked up about things like Snow White's "mirror, mirror" and "magic mirror," or what Darth Vader said to Luke in Empire Strikes Back, I have to wonder how many of them actually watched the movie, and how many just remember the line from a popular impersonation or other reference?  After all, when was the last time you watched Snow White?

However, I am one of those people who remember Nelson Mandela dying some time ago, not in 2013.  And I've had the feeling before.  Even when other people have agreed with my memory, I've usually written it off as a strange sort of coincidence.

I have had two experiences that I cannot dismiss.  One I won't go into because I have no witnesses nor any way to corroborate it.  The other, though, I have four witnesses (one unfortunately died several years ago) and we all remember the same event the same way and we were all spooked by it.

In ancient times, the four of us worked together as stage hands at the old Tower Theater in Houston.  The place was a fun but small house, which made for some great shows with very intimate settings.  I got to meet a lot of names there, including one of my favorite authors, Hunter S. Thompson (on two occasions).

A frequent visitor was the blues guitar master B. B. King.  He came there on probably six or seven occasions.  My group and I were big blues fans and we loved working those shows, and even hung out together at a tiny blues club in the Houston Heights, called The Ready Room (now a tavern).

The Ready Room had a great house band and we talked about bringing B.B. there to gig one night.  The chance came in 1990 or '91, when B.B. had an entire weekend gig at the Tower.  He was doing three shows on Friday and Saturday.  We approached him and he agreed to come to The Ready Room on Sunday night.

Just for fun, we didn't tell the owner or anyone else at the club.  We just showed up on Sunday night with B.B. in tow, and it turned into a magical evening, with a crowd of about 25 people.  As a bonus, the owner comped our table for the night for bringing B.B. in.

More than a decade later, news came that B.B. had died on May 5, 2005.  Needless, to say, it was a sad day for blues lovers the world over.  The four of us got together and went to Fitzgerald's up the street from where the now-defunct Ready Room used to be (it had closed some time earlier).  One of our gang was now a producer for the overnight shift at the local classic-rock radio station (107.5), and we worked together to build a playlist for a B.B. tribute that night.  It ran at midnight for an hour and drew a slightly better rating than the usual fare.

On May 14, 2015, I read the headline that B. B. King had just passed away.  I sat stunned.  I stared at the headline for a long time, flashing back to our beer-drinking session years before and the playlist and my explicit memories surrounding B.B.  I checked the article's date and found articles on other services, so it wasn't a fluke or misprint.

I clicked over to email and sent the link to the other two remaining cohorts.  Within several hours, the responses came.  They were both as befuddled as I was.  We all had distinct memories of B.B.'s death and the beer-fueled wake and the playlist.

The guy who had been the on-air producer went back to the station to try and find the log sheets for that night on May 5-6, 2005.  Since the FCC only requires public broadcasters to keep logs for five years, they had unfortunately been destroyed quite a while before, though he was able to track down the Nielsen's from that night, which showed a fair bump in the overnight ratings (something like a 2 to a 5) due to the tribute, but no mention of the content.

I haven't talked to either of the remaining guys since early last year.  We were all quite rattled by the experience, since we all shared the exact same memories.  There is no doubt in any of our minds that B.B. died on May 5, 2005.  We commemorated the event both together and publicly on-air.  And what was even stranger was that the "second" death was almost exactly 10 years to the day after the "first."

Needless to say, this was a profound experience.

I'm not the only one who has had this experience, apparently.  There are hundreds of references on YouTube, more on blogs and websites, but most I consider to be spurious at worst, and mismemories at best (to coin a term).  The best I can find so far is that the Mandela Effect was named about 15 years ago, or so. I guess I'm a little slow on these things.

Movie lines are unreliable.  Folks remember a lot of things that were never said in movies, but are still deeply associated with them.  Other types of events are hard to document, since something has obviously changed in our perception of events.  We tried to find the air logs, but were about five years too late.  We know what we did and none of us had different or conflicting memories of the events surrounding B.B.'s "first" death.

One often-mentioned event is the Interview with a/the Vampire name change.  I'm not much of an Anne Rice (Anne Rampling maybe) nor Tom Cruise fan, so I don't have any specific memory of the titles of the book or movie.  However, it seems to me that there must be a lot of folks out there with old/original copies of both who can confirm or deny this one.  If it's any comfort, Wikipedia lists the book/movie as Interview with THE Vampire.

The common thread, from what I can find, is these things surround celebrity deaths, have time lapses of roughly 10 years or so, and can involve either someone still alive who one thinks died some time back, or someone who died twice.

Tomorrow, I'll explore more of this topic, as I've been talking to other folks who have had this experience - and it's becoming a genuine phenomenon.  Stay tuned!

Part 2