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CASE #NEWA26 · 3 entities · 2 connections
The Mandela Effect
Millions of people vividly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. He didn't. He became President of South Africa and died free in 2013.
The Mandela Effect describes cases where large groups of people share a specific, detailed, but false memory of an event, phrase, or detail. Named after widespread false memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison decades before his actual 2013 death, it's since become one of the internet's most-discussed phenomena — explained by mainstream psychology as collective false memory, and by a dedicated community of believers as evidence of parallel universes bleeding into our own.
⇄disputed
Quick facts
- →Paranormal researcher Fiona Broome coined the term in 2009 after discovering many people shared her specific false memory of Mandela's funeral and his widow's public grief — none of which happened.
- →Millions of people misremember the children's book series as "The Berenstein Bears" — it has always been "The Berenstain Bears," spelled with an A.
- →Many people vividly recall the Queen in Snow White saying "Mirror, mirror on the wall" — the actual line has always been "Magic mirror on the wall."
- →A significant number of people remember a 1990s movie called Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie. This movie was never made.
- →C-3PO from Star Wars is widely misremembered as fully gold — one of his legs has always been silver, visible in every film since 1977.
- →Some believers specifically blame CERN's Large Hadron Collider, claiming its particle physics experiments are creating parallel universes that "leak" into our own timeline.
Entities on file
Nelson Mandela (person)
South African anti-apartheid leader and President; the phenomenon is named after widespread false memories of his death decades before it actually occurred.
No outgoing connections on file.
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Fiona Broome (person)
Paranormal researcher who coined the term "Mandela Effect" in 2009 after discovering her false memory of Mandela's death was widely shared.
→ coined a widely-shared false memory naming → Nelson Mandela✓documented
CERN (organization)
European physics research organization; its Large Hadron Collider is frequently, and without scientific support, blamed by believers for causing the effect.
→ blamed by some believers as the cause of → Nelson Mandela~speculative