Introduction
I’m a rational adult. I’m nearly 50 years old and I’ve never seen a ghost or anything that I would think is in any way paranormal. I’ve been a huge fan of horror movies since I was a kid and I’ve watched more hours of ghost hunting television shows and the like than I could ever possibly count, but I’ve still never seen anything that made me believe in ghosts, spirits, demons, or anything of that nature. I would love to believe that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are real, and I’ve looked for evidence of such, but I’ve never found it. Based on the size of the universe and the number of exoplanets that have been discovered in recent years I definitely believe in life outside of this planet, but I’m not absolutely convinced that we have been visited by aliens. I’ve seen some fairly compelling evidence that we have had otherworldly visitors, and I think it’s likely, but I’m not completely convinced yet. That’s not to say I think any of those things are impossible, I just haven’t seen any hard evidence of them. I think most conspiracy theories are nonsense. I believe we landed on the moon. I know the earth is a globe, not flat. I do not believe that 9/11 was an inside job, but I know that the US government and the governments of nearly every country on this planet are corrupt and have done terrible things in their citizens’ names. If I see an intriguing headline in a news article, I actually read the article rather than making assumptions based on the headline. I follow that up by reading other articles by other writers and other publications about the same events to fully understand rather than allowing myself to be sucked in by one person’s opinion or take on an event or idea. Although I was raised in the church, I am no longer religious. Most religions are not compatible with rational thought. In other words, I am not easily fooled.
I know that my memory is not infallible. There have been plenty of times that I have gotten events confused, and certainly times that confabulation has gotten the best of me and convinced me that multiple things were in some way connected or part of the same event, only to learn later that it was merely a trick of the brain.
I also know that there is a difference between what humans remember and what humans know. I don’t remember my name; I know my name. I don’t remember the alphabet; I know the alphabet. I don’t remember where I was and what I was doing when I witnessed the second plane hit the World Trade Center; I know where I was and what I was doing.
I remember that somewhere around 1986 I got a new bike. It was a white Huffy with neon green highlights. I don’t remember if I got it for my birthday or for Christmas or if my parents bought it just because I needed a new bike. I’m not sure if I got that bike when we were living in the first house that I remember my parents owning or the next house. I think it was the second house, but I’m not sure. I know that I got the scar that is still on my left arm from wrecking that bike by sliding on loose gravel riding around an unfinished cul-de-sac in my neighborhood. That event is an “anchor memory” involving that bicycle. I would not remember that bicycle as vividly as I do if it had it not been for that event.
Many of you will not believe the story that I’m going to tell. You will think I am either confused, a lunatic, or a liar. I can fully understand that. As you’ll read in the opening of this story, I was beyond skeptical when I first discovered what many people refer to as the “Mandela Effect.” I could never have imagined that I would believe what I do today when I first learned of it. I cannot prove any of what I’m about to tell you. By using what most people would refer to as reality, you will easily be able to disprove everything I’m going to tell you. All I ask is that you read my story in its entirety and then ask yourself if it’s really possible that all of this is just bad memory. If that’s not possible, I hope that you can rule out the possibility of me being a lunatic or a liar and can understand why I am left with no other reasonable explanation for the things I have seen other than, that in fact, “reality” has somehow been altered.
I do not claim to have an explanation for this altered reality. I have some theories, but I don’t think it’s likely that I will ever truly understand what has caused this. In fact, I would be beyond skeptical of anyone who claims to know for certain what has caused this. Even after the events that I have witnessed, I am not concerned about my mental stability. I am not crazy or insane or delusional. If I ever claim to have discovered the answer to what has caused this, I hope that I shall, at that point, begin to question if I’ve gone over the cuckoo’s nest.
This is NOT a work of fiction. Everything I’m about to tell you happened to me. I have changed some names and locations to protect the privacy of other people, and even myself. I have not changed or exaggerated any of these events. This is a subject that receives ridicule on the level equal to or possibly even greater than that which is laid upon the Flat Earth believers. It’s a subject that I rarely discuss with people that I know unless I have felt them out and know that they have experienced at least some of the things that I have and will therefore be open to discussing this rationally rather than just assuming I’m a lunatic or a liar. If I complete this writing and choose to publish it, I will do so anonymously, or at least under a pseudonym, and I will distribute it electronically for free. I am not trying to get famous or make any money by telling this story. It seems like everyone is always trying to sell a book when they tell an unbelievable story. I am not selling anything. My goal is simply for you to hear this story and hopefully be able to conclude that I am indeed as rational as I claim to be, but that this story is not possible in the reality that we understand.
Chapter One
Discovery
I suppose that the best place to start this story is in the winter of 2015/2016. In some ways it begins around 1980, but I’ll get there later. I wish I could tell you the exact date that I first heard the term Mandela Effect, but I cannot. It seemed irrelevant at the time. I had no reason to think that this moment was going to alter my understanding of reality and even my life in the way that it has. There was no reason for me to commit that date to memory and I formed no significant anchor memories around the date.
Although it has never been my sole source of income, I have worked as a musician in many different forms since 1989. On the night that my discovery began, I was playing an acoustic duo show with an old friend that we will call Eddie. Eddie and I had played in a couple bands together previously but were in different groups at the time. If we both happened to have an empty date on our calendars, we would often play one of these acoustic shows together. We had been doing this for about a year and a half at the time.
It was cold that winter night. As is customary when playing guitar in a local bar, once or twice a night we would take a break so that we could refill our beverages, use the restroom, and go outside to smoke cigarettes. I don’t remember the name of the venue that we were playing. I think it was the only time I ever played that venue or was even there. It was on the east side of town closer to where Eddie lived. While I don’t remember the name of the venue, or even what it looked like inside, I have a clear visual memory of the outside area where we were standing and smoking when Eddie asked the question.
“What do you think about the Mandela Effect?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Mandela certainly had a huge effect on global politics,” I replied.
“Wow, you’ve never heard of the Mandela Effect?”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a phenomenon where a large group of people remember an event or an object differently than what history says it is.”
“Well, no one’s memory is perfect.”
“Yeah, but this is different. What do you remember about the death of Nelson Mandela?”
“Not a whole lot,” I said.
“OK, a better way to ask the question… what do you remember about Nelson Mandela’s life story?” Eddie asked.
“Uh, he was in prison when I was young. I’m not sure exactly what he was in prison for, but it had something to do with apartheid. At some point he got out of prison and later he was elected president of South Africa. It was a pretty big deal that had seemed unlikely to occur in the years prior. He became important on the world stage and then he died, I don’t know, sometime in the last five years or so,” I replied.
“Interesting,” said Eddie. “A lot of people, myself included, remember him dying in prison in the 80s.”
I literally laughed out loud at this. I knew that this was absurd. I have been an active observer of politics and world events since my early childhood. I attended presidential candidate rallies before I was even old enough to vote, not because my parents dragged me to them, but because I was intensely interested. I wrote papers in school and joined the speech team just so that I could talk about politics. I convinced my father to vote for a candidate of the opposing party for the first and only time in his adult life as a result of those papers. I knew for a fact that Nelson Mandela did not die in prison. It was a ridiculous notion.
“No. That’s wrong,” I said.
“OK, hold on, here’s another one. Do you remember those bears that had a series of children’s books? There was Papa Bear and Mama Bear and Brother Bear….”
“Do you mean the Berenstain Bears?”
“Huh… Yeah. That’s what they are called but many people remember them as the Berenstein Bears.”
“That seems reasonable that people would get that confused,” I said, “Berenstain is an odd name, and many names end with ‘stein.’ I even remember less intelligent kids calling them the Berenstein Bears or even the Bernsteen Bears, but it was Berenstain.”
“OK, one more. Can you describe the Monopoly Man?”
“Sure. He is an old guy with a round face that wears a suit, a top hat, and a he carries a cane.”
“Anything else?” Eddie asked.
“He has a mustache.”
“You don’t remember him with a monocle?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure,” I said.
“Well, he doesn’t have one.”
“Really?”
“Nope.”
“Well, there’s been hundreds of different versions of the Monopoly game, so I’m sure there are multiple versions of the Monopoly Man as well,” I said.
“True, but not a single one has a monocle.”
“Hmm, that seems odd, but also easy to confuse. He’s a rich guy and that’s a common trope in media for a rich guy to have a monocle.”
Eddie went on to quiz me about many other so-called Mandela Effects. Most I got right, and some I got wrong. A few rubbed me the wrong way, but nothing that he brought up that night gave me any kind of existential crisis. I was easily able to write them off as my memory being imperfect. But this conversation did intrigue me, nonetheless. It wasn’t because I was suddenly convinced that reality had somehow changed, but I thought the idea sounded like an interesting concept for a Sci-Fi story. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing and have even started a couple novels, but I was never happy with them and abandoned the ideas before completion. As I sit here eight years later writing this, the irony of the situation does not escape me. I intended to write a work of fiction on the subject, and instead I’m telling you my true story.
When I got home that night, I poured myself a drink and sat down at my computer to start looking into what people online had to say about “The Mandela Effect” to start gathering information for my upcoming writing. I quickly found Fiona Broome’s website, which at the time was mandelaeffect.com. It has since been converted to a YouTube channel and redirects to that channel. Of course, the first two things I read about were the death of Mandela and the Berenstain Bears.
Many of the other things that Eddie had quizzed me about earlier in the evening were listed as well. Again, many seemed wrong to my ears or eyes, but in most cases I remembered reality just as it was right now. I thought most of them were rather silly. It seemed absurd that someone would get worked up over the spelling of Oscar Mayer or Oreo Double Stuf Cookies.
It seemed even more absurd when I read the possible explanations for these “changes to reality.” It seems that many people were convinced that this was all proof that we are living in a simulation similar to what is portrayed in The Matrix movies. Others thought that it was proof of alternate dimensions collapsing on one another or even our consciousness moving from one timeline to another, possibly as a result of what CERN is doing with the Large Hadron Collider. Some thought this was proof of time travel. Some thought this was somehow all being manipulated by their God or Devil.
Even though I thought all of these “explanations” were preposterous, this was gold as far as Sci-fi plots go, so I continued to read.
That’s when it happened. It would be many months before I understood how important the next passage that I read would become.
“Many people remember seeing a painting of King Henry VIII of England holding a turkey leg. That painting does not exist,” the post read.
Wait a second. Hold on. What do you mean that painting doesn’t exist? Of course it does. I remember seeing that painting years ago. I even know why it was made in the first place. Turkey was not native to Europe, only the Americas. Because England had colonies in America, turkeys had been imported into England. It was considered a delicacy and could only be afforded by the rich and powerful. Henry commissioned this painting of himself with a turkey leg to flaunt England’s power and money in the face of its rival, France. I didn’t use the term at the time, in fact I had never even heard the term, but this knowledge of why the painting exists is what’s called an anchor memory. All the other things that I had read about on this website up to this point that didn’t seem right to me were easy to write off as bad memory because I had nothing else to tie it to. This one was different. This wasn’t something that I remembered; this is something that I know. This also wasn’t just a misspelling or a different word in a song that could be easily misheard. This is something that I am very familiar with that you are now trying to tell me just doesn’t exist and never has. Nope. It wasn’t possible that this painting didn’t exist. It’s clearly been lost to time somehow. I’m not sure how that would happen between 1980 and 2016, but I suppose it’s possible.
I headed to Google. This had to be wrong. Poor Fiona is just confused. The painting exists. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation that can easily be found. It didn’t take long before I found myself on Reddit looking at people talking about the missing painting and other supposed changes to reality. I wasn’t alone. Lots of other people know that this painting existed, a few even remembered the same explanation that I knew about why it was painted.
There is a similar painting in existence. It was painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, likely in 1537. It was hung in Whitehall Palace which was destroyed by fire in 1698. All the surviving copies are just that, copies made by other artists. There are plenty of them and they all differ a bit, but not a one of them portrays him holding a turkey leg. In most cases, he is holding a pair of gloves in place of the turkey leg.
This is where it gets complicated. I already know what you’re thinking. You think that I, and thousands of other people, saw the gloves and thought it was a turkey leg and just got confused and have been carrying around wrong information for decades. I would love to believe that, honestly. But that is not the case. The gloves look nothing like what I saw and learned about years ago. It also makes no sense whatsoever that I, and thousands of other people, would insert a turkey leg of all things into this memory. It’s absurd for a painting to show the King of England holding a turkey leg. That’s one of the reasons this painting is remembered so vividly by so many of us, because it seemed so out of place. In addition, you won’t find anyone that remembers him holding a pork chop or a slice of pizza. It’s ALWAYS a turkey leg.
This is when I learned about what we that experience this phenomenon refer to as “residue.” Residue is a reference to a reality change that appears in popular culture, writing, or even news stories. There is plenty of residue for the existence of this painting. There was a Happy Days episode where the father dressed as Henry VIII for Halloween but referenced that his costume was not complete until he had a turkey leg in his hand. There is an image of Cookie Monster from Sesame Street also dressed as Henry VIII holding a Turkey leg. There are dozens of other ridiculous cartoon images of the same thing. Most of these were not created until well into my adulthood so it’s not possible that I saw these images as a child and confused them with what the actual Holbein really looks like. It also certainly does not account for my knowledge of the history behind the decision to create the painting. Most of you will ignore that and continue to believe that I’m just confused, but that’s not the case. I knew about this painting well before I had ever found any of those images.
On a side note, if you Google “Henry VIII Turkey Leg” today, you will find plenty of recreations of what I and others remember. Those are not real. All of them are photoshop recreations created by people that remember this painting to represent what it looked like. Unfortunately, these recreations now exist for almost every reality shift in existence, and it only serves to further confuse the issue.
I ended the night confused, but not in any way convinced, or even humoring the idea, that reality had somehow changed. I was confident that this painting was merely lost. For days, I didn’t look any deeper into “The Mandela Effect,” but I did spend countless hours online reading everything I could about the painting. I found scans of old textbooks that I had used in school. In one of those books, I even found the Holbein painting. No turkey. This confused me even more. This was a high school textbook. I had known about this painting since elementary school. How is it possible that I had seen the “real” painting in High School but didn’t realize the turkey leg was missing at that point? How was I in my 40s walking around with all this information about a painting that didn’t exist?
Chapter Two
Exploration
I called Eddie the next day and told him about my night. He was surprised that I had given the subject any more thought after how I had responded the night before. Over the next few months, we talked repeatedly about the subject, including the missing turkey leg painting and many more things that just didn’t seem right. Neither of us were at this point convinced, or even seriously considered, that this was in any way paranormal or beyond rational explanation. I was still sure that the painting existed but had somehow been lost. All the other things that seemed wrong to me were easy enough to find reasonable explanations for, taking the mystery out of them.
So many of the examples that people would cite on Reddit or other places online just seemed ridiculous. They were easy to rationalize with confabulation, poor spelling, or other normal explanations. Also, this wasn’t consistent across the board, not everyone agreed about all of these changes which surely makes it seem like this whole thing really is just poor memory. After all, not even Eddie and I could agree on what seemed like it had changed and what didn’t. He remembers Mandela dying in prison, I do not. Things have either changed, or they haven’t. If reality has changed and some of us remember some changes but not others, then this must be a memory problem. It’s not like that ridiculous old phrase printed on the passenger mirror which read “OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.’ They either are closer, or they’re not. There’s no room for MAY in that sentence. The same concept applies here.
Not to mention, some of these people seemed truly insane. We were now learning about something that these believers called a “flip-flop.” A flip-flop was described as an event in which a person would discover that something they remember is not the same in current reality, but later would revert to what they originally remembered it being, while at the same time all evidence that it had ever been anything different was wiped from existence. Crazy. This is too much. These people were either lying or lunatics.
Additionally, these supposed flip-flops would happen for different people at different times. You would see them discussing it and one person might say that it just reverted for them today whereas others would say that they saw it “flip back” a year ago. The one thing that was somewhat interesting about this supposed part of the phenomenon was that it was always the same few Mandela Effects, it was not widespread across the entire collection of things that people say they remembered differently. Mostly, it was people that would say that they grew up with Froot Loops, had then witnessed it being Fruit Loops for a period of time, sometimes years, and then suddenly switched back to Froot Loops. (There are also plenty of people who say they grew up with Fruit Loops, but it has since changed to Froot Loops.) The other one that you would see commonly was people saying that they grew up with the Flintstones, then it became the Flinstones (which doesn’t even make sense, Flint is a type of stone), and then it changed back to Flintstones. (There are also plenty of people who say they grew up with Flinstones and watched it change to Flintstones.) Again, this is too far gone for me to consider a possibility. Spoiler alert, I have never seen anything other than Flintstones and Froot Loops. These people are nuts or they are online trolls. We both completely discounted this part of the phenomenon.
The next time that both of us were totally taken aback by a reality shift was when we discovered that Dolly, a character from the James Bond movie Moonraker, didn’t have braces. Neither of us are what you would call James Bond fans. I haven’t seen very many of those movies. My dad was a huge fan when I was a kid. I was more of the Star Wars type. When Moonraker was released in 1979, he thought that maybe I would enjoy the movie since Bond was going to space, so he got me to watch it with him on VHS. I really don’t remember very much about the movie at all. I didn’t enjoy it the way he had hoped. I found it cheesy, and there were no lightsabers.
There was only one scene in the movie that struck a chord with me. The villain, Jaws, a menacingly large figure whose teeth had been replaced by huge metal “jaws,” portrayed by Richard Kiel, had just been in an accident and was covered with debris. Enter Dolly, a nerdy tiny, cute girl with glasses and pigtails portrayed by Blanche Ravalec. She helped Jaws to free himself from the mess he was buried in. Once he stood up and brushed himself off, he looked down at Dolly and smiled, his silver teeth gleaming in the sunlight. She slowly began to smile, revealing a mouthful of braces. This was still cheesy, but because of their shared metal mouths, the pair instantly falls in love. It’s quite an absurd scene around a silly joke, but I laughed hard at that, and the scene stuck with me.
Eddie remembers exactly the same thing and so do thousands or possibly millions of others. The problem with this is that Dolly does not have braces, so the scene doesn’t even make sense. She doesn’t have braces in modern streaming copies, not on older DVD or Blue Ray copies, not even on VHS copies that Bond fans have had since the 1980s. Some people have tried to claim that it was in the original theatrical version but removed from all subsequent versions, but that’s not possible. First, they didn’t have CGI in 1980 that was capable of doing such a thing realistically. Also, Eddie and I watched this movie for the first time on VHS, not in theatres. It even came up on a James Bond forum online that is filled with hardcore Bond fans that know these movies inside and out. Huge numbers of those people agreed, Dolly had braces. But she didn’t. The actress was even asked about it in an interview and confirmed that the character never had braces, nor was it ever considered.
Many people will claim that the explanation for this is that Richard Kiel did a commercial in a foreign country and language in 2006 that referenced this scene from Moonraker. He is shopping in a supermarket and asks the cashier, a very much grown adult woman, if they accept the Sempo Mini Visa Card. She says that they do, he smiles and says he’s going to get a few more things. As he walks away, she smiles revealing a mouth full of braces. This is a ludicrous explanation. Eddie and I saw the original scene around 1980, twenty-six years before this commercial was created. Also, it was never shown in the USA, and I don’t speak the European language used in the commercial. I certainly never saw this prior to researching Dolly’s braces. Additionally, this commercial would make absolutely no sense if Dolly didn’t have braces. The commercial was made in 2006, three years before Fiona Broome started popularizing the idea of the Mandela Effect online, and many years before it became even slightly well known, so it doesn’t make sense that this was Visa trolling the reality shift believers either.
By this time, Eddie and I were starting to get pretty involved in this topic. We were both looking at online forums and discussing things nearly daily. We had both found many things that seem to differ from our memories, but neither of us were too freaked out by it at this point. There still had to be some rational explanation, especially since the vast majority of things that seemed wrong to us were just things from movies, TV shows, advertisements, and the like. It seemed very feasible that this could all just be online manipulation. Maybe this was a test the government was doing, some kind of Psy-Op… That seems reasonable. Even the turkey leg fit into this category, it was still just all online. I hadn’t seen any physical object in my daily life go through a change like this. At least I hadn’t realized that I had yet.
It was then that I encountered the Mandela Effect that changed everything for me. Dolly and the turkey leg had already had me convinced that there was something more to this than just bad memory, but up until this point, I was still confident that there was a rational explanation for all of it. That was about to change.
I was a child in the early 80s. It was a different time. We didn’t have cell phones or handheld video games that could keep your interest for more than a few minutes. If you were taking a long car ride with your parents, the only entertainment we had to pass the time was the radio, conversation, and the scenery. Inevitably, I would eventually get bored with all these things. It was then that I stumbled onto something that would go on to fill my mind for countless hours of car rides with what I would consider to be the first somewhat philosophical question that I ever pondered. It happened when I was old enough to read and first discovered that warning on the passenger side mirror of the cars that my parents and grandparents owned. “OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR,” was the phrase that was engraved permanently in those mirrors. It was an odd phrase. How is it possible that objects MAY BE closer than they appear? They either ARE, or they ARE NOT, it’s not possible that they might be closer.
I spent countless hours over the years looking at that phrase and pondering its meaning. I had conversations with family members and friends about it. I know I asked my father why it was worded that way. He explained to me that the passenger side mirror is a convex mirror, and that it can distort images. This was not true of the driver’s side mirror, just the passenger side. He told me that it was probably worded that way because lawyers were involved. Somehow this wording would protect manufacturers from legal trouble. That didn’t make sense to me. It seemed that such an inexact phrase would make it more likely, not less likely, that someone would get confused and possibly cause an accident. Just like the oddness of the turkey leg in a king’s painting, and braces on an adult woman in a James Bond film, the strangeness of this wording stuck out, stuck in my head, and caused me to have deep thoughts about it. But this one was on a level many, many degrees higher than Henry or Dolly. Those were things that I saw, accepted, and moved on. The mirror was different. I spent a large amount of time thinking about it for years on end.
In the final days of July of 1992, just after my 17th birthday, my parents came home with a new (to me) car. It was a used 1986 Mercury Cougar. I had been driving my grandmother’s Buick for the previous year when I first got my driver’s license. The Cougar was a coupe, so it had a far sportier feel than the old lady car that I had been using. It was also the newest car that anyone in the house had at that moment. I’m not sure of the exact year and models of the cars my parents were driving at the time, but they were from the early 80s or very late 70s.
I sat down in the driver’s seat and fell in love with the vehicle. Compared to everything else I had driven at that point, it felt like a spaceship. It had a digital display for the speedometer and the gas gauge. It had a cassette player! The speakers sounded good! This was a dream come true. Before I even put it in gear, I glanced over at the passenger side mirror that I had spent so much time pondering over the last ten years, and there it was. “OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.” Hallelujah! They finally fixed that stupid warning! I didn’t know if there had been a change to the law or if this was something that Mercury had done on their own, but regardless, it was fixed. I was very pleased with this.
Just under a year later, the first Jurassic Park film was released. In one of the most iconic scenes in the movie, the T-Rex is chasing the main characters that are trying to outrun the dinosaur in a jeep. The camera cuts to a shot of the mirror, which is on the wrong side of the car in the shot. In the movie, it’s the driver side mirror, not the passenger side. I have never seen any warning on the driver’s side as it is not a convex mirror. But hey, it’s just a movie, I guess. But regardless, the warning I remembered with MAY BE was there. It solicited a huge laugh when the monster’s wide-open mouth was displayed in the mirror just above the well-known warning.
Just under a year after the release of Jurassic Park, in April of 1994, one of my all-time favorite recording artists released a new album. Meat Loaf was introduced to the public with his debut in 1977, Bat Out of Hell. I didn’t discover that record until 1992. I heard it for the first time driving that 1986 Mercury Cougar. My girlfriend at the time had been a fan for years already and she popped the cassette into the tape deck one night when we were out on a date. I fell in love with the record, and I still listen to it frequently. So, to say that we were excited a couple years later when it was announced that he was releasing a new record would be an understatement. The first single from Bat Out of Hell II, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” only served to add to that excitement. When the album was finally released, we went to the record store to buy it the first day it was available. We cranked it up and I fell in love with this album as well. I quickly decided that my favorite song on the album was track 6, “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.” I thought this was wonderful that Meat Loaf’s writer, Jim Steinman, had referenced the now outdated language from the warning label. It wasn’t a direct quote, but it captured its essence poetically. After that day, I never gave any further thought to the old warning, except when I would listen to that song, until 2017.
I’m sure by now you know where I am going with this. The original version of this warning never existed. You can scour every picture online that you want, and you won’t find it (unless it’s a recreation.) You can go to junkyards and look at old cars going back for decades and decades, and you won’t find it. You can go to car museums; you won’t find it. You can watch Jurassic Park again or find the old Far Side comic that made a similar joke, but you won’t find it. I know because I have done all of this.
I have spent more time researching this missing warning than anything else I have studied for the last several years. It’s simply impossible that the warning featuring MAY BE never existed. Yet, in this reality, that is a true statement. When I first saw the changed warning in 1992, I had assumed that either the law requiring it had been changed, or that the manufacturer had done it on their own. None of this is true. Passenger mirrors were not standard equipment on vehicles until the 80s when the requirement was added to the Federal register, however, they were available on many models before they were required by law. The first passenger mirrors were not convex, they were normal mirrors. I can’t find a definitive answer as to when the first convex mirrors were used, but I guess it caused some problems because they originally had no warning labels. The federal government got involved in 1968 when it modified Title 49 of the US Code and began requiring the warning. The law took effect in 1971:
This is described in 49 CFR Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS)
Section 571.111 — Standard №111; Rearview mirrors has the following:
S5.4.2Each convex mirror shall have permanently and indelibly marked at the lower edge of the mirror’s reflective surface, in letters not less than 4.8 mm nor more than 6.4 mm high the words “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”
That’s right, since the very beginning of the law, the very beginning of the warning’s existence, the US Federal government has required that any convex mirror placed on a motor vehicle must include the warning that says ARE CLOSER. A vehicle could not have been legally sold in the United States with a convex mirror that said MAY BE. The law has been updated many times since then, but this section has never changed. Yet, I’m not the only person who remembers the old warning. We are everywhere.
If you look at online forums, or ask people in your real life, you will not have any problem finding plenty of people that remember MAY BE. If you do ask them, don’t feed them the line, just ask if they remember the warning being different when they were younger. You will find plenty of people that can quote the exact wording that I remember. If they are unfamiliar with this phenomenon, they will simply not believe you when you tell them such a thing never existed and could not have existed based on Federal Law. Many will say that there must have been certain manufacturers that used that warning. That can’t be true as the cars could never have been approved for sale if they didn’t have the exact wording of the warning correct. Additionally, if that were the case, these mirrors should be easy to find in junkyards. There should be millions of them. There is not one.
I will never forget the sinking feeling that enveloped me when I first read that the warning that I had as indelibly engraved into my brain as it was into the mirrors had never existed. This was, quite simply, impossible. This would be as impossible as learning that the alphabet really went “H, I, J, K, M, N, L, O, P…” Yet here it was. It was a fact. For a moment, I did not believe it. Someone was playing a trick on me. Someone has hijacked the internet; this must be some Psy-Op by the government to see how we will react to such a preposterous notion. But honestly, after Dolly and the turkey leg, not to mention dozens of other things that felt very wrong to me but that I had previously written off as just my bad memory, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was not prepared for the straws that would crush that camel’s skull and flatten that camel.
The residue that surrounds this reality change is overwhelming. I could not possibly list all of it here, and others have done a far better job of compiling it online. Just google the phrase, it’s everywhere from David Lettermen’s Top Ten Lists, to the sitcom Cheers, to advertisements, news articles, and cartoons. Some of you will decide that all of these references in media to a warning that never existed is what makes me think that it did exist. I find that line of thought to be beyond insulting. I wasn’t having those deep thoughts about the ridiculous wording because of jokes on TV or advertisements that I never saw until 2017, I was looking directly at the mirror. Every mirror, on every car, for a decade. Besides, why would all those references get it wrong but every single one matches exactly word for word?
When I told Eddie about this, he was shocked. He remembered the original warning just like I did, and had the same thoughts as I, wondering why in the world the phrase would be so imprecise. However, it didn’t seem to impact him in quite the same way that it had me. I was fully onboard with some kind of “spooky” explanation for the entire phenomenon at this point. He was still just very intrigued and seeking a logical explanation. I had moved beyond that line of thinking.
It got crazier when I started talking to people online, as well as in person, about the mirror warning. As I said earlier, I know almost the exact date that I became aware of the change in wording. Very late July 1992. I don’t ever recall seeing the original phrase after that. If I did, I would have just assumed that it was an older model car and had been produced before what I had guessed was a change in law. However, I have talked to people, both online and people that I know in real life, and some of these people claim to have seen this warning as recently as a few months ago on their vehicles. I have seen people say that their car currently still has the original warning, only to walk outside and be flabbergasted when they see OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR engraved on their mirror. It seems like most people that recall the original warning haven’t seen it since the 80s or 90s, but I have even talked to relatives that I love and trust that weren’t even born in 1992, yet they also remember the old warning. How is any of this possible? Could these people be lying? Yes, some of them could be, especially faceless, nameless strangers on Reddit, but not everyone.
Reality is not what we think it is. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not this firm thing that we have believed. Reality is malleable.
Chapter Three
The Missing Chapter
After I graduated from High School in 1993, I didn’t read a book until 2007. I’m not proud of that but it is relevant to the next part of my story. High School teachers had sucked all the enjoyment out of reading for me by forcing me to read things that I had no interest in. Unfortunately, as a result, I lost all interest in reading altogether.
In 2007, I was working for a local courier service. A friend of mine, Charles, who I had also gotten to know a little from playing music in bands, also worked for the same company. Both of us were assigned to running routes for specific companies. Charles drove for an auto parts dealer, and I drove for a hospital. The company had provided us and every other driver with those old Nokia brick-like phones that could act like long-range walkie-talkies. Since Charles and I were assigned specific routes, we never had to use that walkie-talkie function to talk to our dispatchers the way that other couriers who were open-ended and could be working for any company throughout the day did. We used those walkie-talkies to talk to each other all day, every day. We became very close friends even though we had started as more or less acquaintances.
Charles was a big fan of a series of books called The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. He had read the seven-book series several times over the years. Charles had always wanted to talk about his favorite book series with someone, but since the series was far less known than the authors’ highly successful Dragonlance Chronicles series, he had never met another person that had read them. Charles was not very internet savvy, so if forums about the books even existed in 2007, he never found them. His solution was to ask me if he could pay me to read the books so that he could talk about them with someone. I decided to read the books, but told my friend there was no way that I was going to let him pay me to read them.
Before he brought me his copy of the first book in the series, he read it again himself, which was at least the third time he had read them, possibly more. When he finished book one, he brought it to work and handed it to me. That night I started reading for the first time since 1993. It was the day after Thanksgiving. He started reading book two as I was reading the first one. He was always one book ahead of me, refreshing his memory of the details of the series. Every day I would come to work, and we would discuss what I had read the night before, often for hours on end before turning our conversation to other things. I quickly became as much of a fan as he was.
I will try to go light on spoilers for this series just in case you decide to read it, but there is one major spoiler that I must reveal for this story to make any sense. One of the main characters in the series is Dog. Dog is a dog. He has no name other than Dog. He belongs to Haplo, a powerful magic wielder known as a Patryn. From the beginning, it is evident that Dog is not just a normal dog. Haplo had the ability to see and hear through Dog’s eyes and ears, making him a perfect spy.
The series is written mostly in third person. Occasionally it would shift to first person, mainly when sections from Haplo’s journal, or another character’s journal, were inserted to fill in part of the story. Somewhere in book five or six, I’m not sure precisely when because at the time I had no reason to commit the exact location to memory, a new literary device suddenly appeared for a single chapter. The chapter was clearly not from a formal journal the way that other first person sections had been. The chapter told a story of someone who was roaming the deck and cabins of the ship that they were on looking for something. For several pages it was unclear which character this was and what they were looking for, but the character was determined to find it. After a while, it finally becomes evident that the character is Dog and that he is searching for sausages. It seemed like just a fun little unique chapter up until the last page when Dog overhears Haplo’s master talking to one of his other minions. It becomes apparent at that point that Haplo’s master is not what he seems. Since Haplo can see and hear through Dog, this is a turning-point in the story. Haplo begins to question everything that he knows, and the story goes in a new direction.
I loved this chapter. I found it to be an incredible choice of plot device and entirely unique to anything I had ever read or seen in a movie. I will never forget the beginning of the conversation that I had with Charles the next morning.
“Dude, Dog in first person,” I said.
“I have been waiting for weeks for you to get to this,” he replied.
I cannot quote you the rest of the conversation word for word because we talked about this for hours, if not days. This was also his favorite chapter in the entire series.
I finished those seven novels before New Year’s. I went on to become an avid reader. I have still never encountered a similar storyline in anything else. Most of what I have read since then have been Star Wars novels, and there’s no dogs in space. I also have read a lot of spy novels, and though there have been plenty of dogs in those, there were no magic dogs. Sometime later, likely in 2009, I borrowed Charles’ copies of the books again and read the series for the second time. Again, we discussed them as I was reading but not in the same detail as the first time. But we did still talk extensively about the “Dog In First Person Chapter” as we came to call it when I read that section again.
In 2010, I started a new job in a different industry. I remained close with Charles until he died of a heart attack unexpectedly at the young age of 42 in early 2015. Just after he passed away, I decided that I wanted to read the series again. This was at least six months before I had ever heard of the Mandela Effect. Since Charles was no longer around to loan me his copies of the books, I had to find my own copies in second-hand bookstores. They might have been available on Amazon in new condition, but at the time it never occurred to me to try that. Nonetheless, I had no problems finding the full series used.
Again, I started reading the series from the beginning, thinking of Charles and all the hours that we spent talking about this wonderful story. I got the most excited when I started book five for the third time. I knew that the chapter was coming soon. I finished that book and had not yet encountered the chapter. Obviously, it must be in the sixth book. It wasn’t there. Huh, maybe I’ve been mistaken and it was actually in the final book. Of course, it was not there.
At the time, none of this struck me as too crazy. Clearly there were different versions of the novels in print. It seemed very odd, but I knew this chapter existed and I had not yet learned that reality could be rewritten.
By May of 2017, I had already discovered the mirror warning when suddenly the missing chapter came to mind. I decided to look further into it. I scoured the internet for any reference to it and found nothing. I looked for variants of the series in an attempt to find it, but I found nothing. As a last-ditch effort, I went to Margaret Weis’ website and located an option to email the author on May 30, 2017. I didn’t think it was possible that she would read it or write back, but I decided to give it a try. I asked her about the missing chapter and how I could locate a copy of the book that contained it. Much to my astonishment, when I woke up the next day and checked my email, she had replied. This is that email:
On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 8:21 AM, Margaret Weis
<margaret@margaretweis.com> wrote:
Xxxx,
Thanks for the question. That would have been interesting, but, no, there was not a chapter from the vp of the dog.
The dog was Haplo’s soul, so, like I said, would have been very interesting!
Thanks,
Margaret
—
www.facebook.com/margaret.weis
Flyball Titles:
Dixie, Iron Dog, Flyball Grand Champion 60K
Joey, Iron Dog, Flyball Grand Champion 50K
Clancy, Flyball Dog Master Champion
Margaretweis.com
Apparently, reality was telling me that this sacred memory of mine, discussing the Dog In First Person Chapter of my favorite series of novels, which occurred fully in my adulthood a mere ten years prior, never really happened. I didn’t really have hours of conversation with Charles about it. I didn’t read it twice. Charles was dead, so he wasn’t going to be any help here. The camel’s skull was crushed.
Chapter Four
Eddie’s Revelation
By 2018, I was fully convinced that this phenomenon could not be explained by rational means. Eddie was also convinced that it was real and not just unreliable memory, but he had not yet accepted that it was beyond anything explainable by our current understanding of reality.
We still talked regularly about dozens of Mandela Effects. There were many, like the turkey, Dolly, and the mirror, that we were both confident had changed from what we remembered. There were many, many more that both of us discounted entirely as people just not remembering correctly. There were some that seemed wrong to us, but neither of us were confident that we could trust our own memories of these. I’m not going to go into detail here about all of these, individual reality shifts are not what this story is about. But there are three that fit into that final “unsure category” that I am going to discuss in detail; you will see why later in this section. (If you have been googling any of the changes that I have mentioned previously in the story, please refrain from doing that with the ones I am about to talk about until finishing the chapter. That request will make sense later.)
In the reality that Eddie and I were experiencing at the time, one of the main changes that was being discussed on Reddit and other places online revolved around the movie Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks. It was a change to what people remembered as the most iconic line in the movie. The line was in all the trailers and even on the poster for the movie. At the beginning of the crisis in space, Tom Hanks’ character looks at the camera and delivered the famous line, “Houston, we have a problem.” At least that’s what many people in these online forums remembered. But by all accounts, that had never existed. The quote from Mr. Hanks now said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” We watched people argue back and forth about this for months. The most compelling argument that most people made was that it wouldn’t have made sense for Tom to say “we have” since there was actual audio from the real event, and it was clear that the Astronaut Jack Swigert had said, “uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem, here.” Many people argued that this had been a point of contention with the movie version, because Tom had misspoken when they shot the film and simply got the line wrong, so it had not previously matched what Jack Swigert had said to mission control in the real event.
Eddie and I thought that “we’ve had” sounded wrong but we also could not be sure. We both watched YouTube clips of the scene. I watched the full movie. Every version clearly said, “we’ve had.” It sounded wrong, and it even looked wrong. It was a different angle than what we thought we remembered. But we still were not convinced. Nevertheless, we talked about it multiple times from 2016 to 2018.
Another change that was often being discussed in these groups at the time was from the original Back to the Future movie. In the scene where Doc Brown is telling Marty about his time machine, after he had already tested the device on his dog Einstein, the Libyan terrorists show up and shoot Doc dead just before Marty gets in the DeLorean and accidentally ends up in 1955. At the time that I first discussed this with Eddie, many people on these forums were discussing that they remembered the terrorists driving a VW Microbus, when in fact, they were driving a silverish Toyota van that had hard angles and not the flowing curves of the blue VW microbus that many remembered.
When I asked Eddie what he remembered about this, he had no opinion. He remembered the scene but had never paid any attention to what kind of van it was. I was on my own with this one. And honestly, I could not be sure of what I really remembered. I was fairly confident that I indeed remembered the blue VW that others did, but I wasn’t positive. My father had owned a VW Microbus in college, and he talked about it incessantly. It was very feasible that he had mentioned it on the way to the theatre to see that movie or on the way home. Hell, the way that guy would just talk through a movie, I couldn’t rule out that he yelled out at the top of his lungs, “That reminds me of my VW!” right in the movie theatre. Such an event could easily cause confabulation.
But it did not sit right with me, it felt very wrong. Again, I watched multiple versions of the clip on YouTube. They all showed the silver Toyota. I decided it was time to introduce my kids to the films, so we watched all three of them. There was the silver Toyota. I started looking at blogs dedicated to Back to the Future. I remembered when Bond fans were arguing on their own blogs about Dolly’s braces. Were the BTTF fans doing the same thing? Yes, they were. A Lot of people also remembered the VW. These people were thoroughly ridiculed.
I finally gave up on this notion of it being a change after I read a post on one of those blogs and confirmed its accuracy by rewatching clips of the opening of the film. It seems that the director had put in a very sneaky Easter Egg in the scene where Marty is holding on to other vehicles while on his skateboard on the way to school in the beginning of the movie. The silver Toyota that the terrorists were driving is in that scene. It’s parked just around the corner from the strip that contains Cupid’s Adult (presumably a Gentlemen’s Club) and other shops that mostly appear to be out of business. It is closest to the former movie theatre that had been converted into the Assembly of Christ Church. Since it’s safe to assume that the Libyans are Muslim, they’re obviously not at the Church, so it’s implied that they are taking in some naked ladies before going to murder Doc. Okay, that’s a damn good Easter Egg. I must be wrong about this one…
The third change that I will mention is much easier to explain. Tidy Cats cat litter was called Tidy Cat in our version of reality from 2016–2023. Eddie and I discussed it several times. Neither of us own cats. We are both dog people. We both confirmed in stores while shopping for our dogs that it was indeed called Tidy Cat. Whatever. We clearly just had this wrong. We don’t care about cat litter. It felt wrong, but it was more logical that we were remembering it wrong.
As you can see from these three preambles, neither of us are irrational. Although by this time I was completely convinced that something spooky was going on, I still looked at anything that seemed wrong to me and tried to find a reasonable explanation. I still do that to this day if I discover something new that seems to differ from my memory. We do not automatically assume that reality is out to get us, we first assume that we are wrong and work from there. We still do that even after the following occurred.
In the summer of 2018, I did what I do every day. I opened Reddit to see what people had discovered about this phenomenon or what they were discussing today. And there it was, a post stating that Apollo 13 had flip-flopped and was now back to saying, “Houston, we have a problem.” I quickly headed to YouTube. It was true! There it is! That’s the scene that I remember! Every single version was now what I had expected to see in the first place. I went back to Reddit and did a search for “Apollo 13” in both the r/MandelaEffect subreddit as well as the r/Retconned subreddit. Gone were all mentions of “we’ve had a problem.” In their place were people saying that they had grown up with Tom saying “we’ve had,” and they were confused that he was now saying “we have.” The arguments about how the movie line differed from the actual words that the real astronaut spoke were back. I was back home. All was right with the world! That was my reaction. Eddie’s was different.
I called Eddie immediately. It was midafternoon. I was ecstatic because I knew that Eddie would be fully with me after this. He could no longer pretend like any of this was reasonable or rational. He would now be forced to grapple with the undeniable fact that something supernatural or otherwise unexplainable by anything within human understanding was indeed at play here. I guess I was right, he would be forced to grapple with it. I didn’t intend for it to turn that grapple into a Full Suplex Body Slam of a moment.
“Hey man, what’s up?” he asked.
“You need to go look at Apollo 13 right now.”
“Huh?”
“You just need to go look at it.”
We ended the call and within just a few minutes, Eddie called me right back. He was slightly chucking when he asked, “What is that all about?” Eddie had apparently thought that the scene he had just watched was another recreation of what people remembered before a reality shift.
“No, it’s back. Houston, we have a flip-flop,” I said.
The line was silent for a long moment. I could hear the panic setting in from the other end of the connection. I believe he asked me to clarify, so I did. I’m not sure of the exact conversation after that, but I know it didn’t last long. He cut me off and abruptly ended the phone call. I was perplexed. Here it was, this was the evidence that we had so long sought after. It was undeniable now, something bigger than anything we understood had to be responsible. Why wasn’t Eddie as excited as I was?
Later that evening, Eddie finally called me back. He told me how he had experienced a full-on panic attack during our last conversation. He told me how he immediately went back to YouTube and watched several clips and saw that everything was again as we thought we had remembered, but instead of reacting with elation, he was horrified.
Eddie’s wife had been asleep taking an afternoon nap throughout all of this. Suddenly it hit him. “Is she even real? Am I even real?” he asked himself in a terrified panic. He sprinted down the hall and threw open the door to their bedroom. She was there. He broke down in tears.
I apologized to Eddie for the way I had presented this to him. I was inconsiderate. It had not occurred to me that he could react negatively.
I guess all those people that we had previously mocked weren’t such liars or lunatics after all. Although I am still regretful for the way I presented this mind-altering moment to Eddie, I will be forever grateful that we experienced this together. I don’t think either of us could possibly have maintained our sanity had we gone through this alone and didn’t have someone else to confirm that indeed, this REALLY happened. I will be life-long friends with Eddie for more reasons than I can count, but this shared experience is at the top of the list. I know that no matter what we go through, what disagreements we will someday have, this moment formed an unbreakable bond between us.
A few months later, it happened again. But this time, Eddie wasn’t involved. He hadn’t had an opinion on the Back to the Future terrorist van. He hadn’t rewatched the scene countless times and all three of the movies. He hadn’t read the blog posts. I had.
It played out much the same way for me as it had the first time, but I wasn’t quite as excited because I had no one to share this with. I opened Reddit and there was a post about BTTF flip-flopping. Sure enough, I went to YouTube and saw the blue VW Microbus with the white top that was what I remembered before I had talked myself out of it. I pulled up whatever streaming service had the movie at that time and confirmed it there as well. I found the blog where I had read about the silver Toyota being parked near the strip club. The blog was still there, but that post about the Easter Egg was gone. There were still people arguing about the van, but now it was all people saying that they grew up with the Toyota van and suddenly it was a VW. Those people were soundly ridiculed. There was also a new post. I wish I had written down who it was in my previous temporary reality that had posted about the Easter Egg, but the name of the poster didn’t seem important at the time. Looking back, I would bet that it was the same person who in this reality pointed out that the silver Toyota that those people remembered was indeed in the movie. It was parked just down the street from Cupid’s Adult, near the church. I watched that scene again. That’s correct, it’s still there as of the moment that I’m writing this. I checked twice today. Naturally, that detail is used to try to explain the memories of the people that had never seen the VW in the scene before, which is ridiculous. The silver van can only be seen for a moment and it’s not in any way the focus of the scene. It’s unreasonable that anyone would mistake this brief shot with the terrorist scene. I believe those people that say they grew up and always saw the silver Toyota in the terrorist scene. It’s not my experience at all, but I believe them.
I shared this experience with Eddie. He believed me, but it didn’t have much of an effect on him since he didn’t experience it himself. He remembered talking to me about this change, but he couldn’t remember what I had said about it previously. He had no opinion.
A few months ago, I looked at Reddit and saw that Tidy Cats was back. I was quickly able to confirm that by looking at Amazon and other retailers. I forgot about it for a week or more. It dawned on me one day, so I sent Eddie a text.
“Do you know Tidy Cats is back?”
He didn’t reply. I got a little concerned that I had sent him into another panic, but somehow, I forgot about that quickly. A couple weeks later we were talking on the phone, and he mentioned it.
“I saw Tidy Cats in the store today,” he said.
“How did that make you feel?”
“I just kind of thought, ‘huh, it really is back.’”
“Yeah, that was my reaction.”
Every time that I’m in a grocery store now, I am always sure to take a good look at Froot Loops cereal and Flintstone vitamins, just in case. The camel doesn’t even exist anymore.
Chapter Five
Why Does it Even Matter?
There is an aspect of this story that I have skipped over up to this point to keep the narrative flowing, but it is an element that I find to be just as intriguing and confusing as the rest of it. To put it simply, many people will react with extreme anger to this entire subject.
By the time of Eddie’s revelation, my wife had essentially forbidden me from bringing up the subject in any way. When I first encountered these reality shifts, I was excited to see what she remembered. I would ask her about various changes much in the same way that Eddie did with me that first winter night. Sometimes she remembered things like I did, sometimes she didn’t. The subject seemed to make her uncomfortable. Eventually, she just started saying, “I don’t know,” to every single question that I would ask her about her memory of reality.
One night, Eddie and I were both at a party with our wives hosted by our friend Chip. Eddie knew Chip far better than I did, and apparently, they had also discussed these changes. Just as the sun was setting on us sitting on Chip’s deck, Chip decided to bring up the topic. “What do you guys think about The Mandela Effect?” he asked.
It was like he had just proposed having an orgy and posting it on Facebook. My wife, Eddie’s wife, and Chip’s wife collectively lost their minds. They all got so viscerally angry at the mere mention of the subject that we immediately changed the subject. It nearly ruined the entire night.
When I had my own revelation the day that I discovered that reality may be different than it appears, I thought for sure that when I brought this stunning evidence to my wife’s attention it would force her to take this seriously and start to talk about it. I was living under the false premise that everyone had studied the passenger side mirror the way that I had as a kid. That is not the case. It has never dawned on me until this moment, but maybe the reason that Eddie and I studied it so carefully is because we both grew up without any siblings. My wife comes from a larger family, so she probably did not sit in the front passenger seat anywhere near as often as Eddie and I did. Regardless, my wife got very angry with me when I brought up the mirror. That was the last time that we ever spoke about any of this in any detail. She doesn’t know about the flip-flops. She doesn’t know about the missing chapter. Recently, there have been a few things that have come up where it’s clear that she remembers some things the way that I do, and I have lightly brushed the topic, but I’m still careful not to push it too hard and I certainly don’t use the dreaded “Mandela Effect” term at all.
Eddie’s wife reacted the same way the day that he charged into the bedroom to ensure that she still existed. Rather than trying to calm her husband in the middle of an existential crisis, she berated him. She mocked him. And she capped it off with the same question that my wife asked the day that I told her about the mirror. It’s the same question that I’ve heard from others when I’ve tried to discuss the subject.
“Why does it even matter?” they ask.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN, WHY DOES IT EVEN MATTER?!? This is the most important thing that anyone has ever discovered. Reality is not what we think it is. Sure, it’s still “real.” We still have to work and eat and pay taxes. We still have to deal with everything in our daily lives, but this changes everything that we thought we knew about the world and the universe. The concept that someone could possibly not care at all about the fact that reality can be retroactively rewritten by some unknown force is inconceivable.
I’ve encountered similar reactions from others as well. Mark is a good friend of mine. If I catch him off-guard and can ask him what he remembers about something before he realizes that I’m talking about a reality shift, he’s happy to have the conversation and most of the time he remembers things the way that Eddie and I do. But the moment that I reveal that reality disagrees with his memory, he always has the same reaction. He pauses for a moment, gets a distant look in his eyes, and then says, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I was wrong,” every time. If I try to push the matter in any way by pointing out that he just quoted or described something exactly the way that I and other experiencers remember it, and that he came up with that completely on his own, he will begin to get uncomfortable and angry.
I don’t understand the psychology behind this reaction. It gets far more vehement online. The r/MandelaEffect subreddit is the best example of this. It is almost overrun by people who are just there to berate anyone and everyone who thinks there is anything more to this than just bad memory. It is so bad there, that others created the r/Retconned subreddit which enforces rules against that, to the point that you’re not even allowed to say “bad memory” in that group. That’s also not good for the conversation, but I understand why it is necessary after years of reading posts in the main r/MandelaEffect group. While I can understand not believing in it if you haven’t lived through the things I have, and even laughing about it the way that I did when Eddie first asked me about it, I cannot understand the level of anger which borders on hate that is expressed by these people. It’s bizarre how determined some people are to try to shut down any conversation about this topic.
Another curious aspect of this is evident if you look at online discussions about other unprovable theories. For instance, in forums where people are discussing their experiences with hauntings, UFOs, or Bigfoot, it’s not hard at all to find others debunking specific videos or stories, but it is incredibly rare to find people that seem to have as their main goal to disprove the entire concept. While I have never seen a ghost, I would not waste my time in those forums trying to prove that everyone who does believe in them is wrong. Why are there so many people in Mandela Effect forums that feel compelled to disprove it? The only other subject (outside of political conspiracy theories) where I can find this type of contempt for believers and the overwhelming urge of so many people to disprove it, is in Flat Earth forums.
Chapter Six
Conclusion
The only conclusion that I am comfortable with drawing from all these experiences is that reality is not what we think it is. It’s malleable and can be rewritten retroactively. I don’t know why or how it is happening, but it is happening. It’s likely been happening for a very long time, possibly forever. It’s been going on for at least fifty years. Author Philip K. Dick spoke about the phenomenon publicly in the 1970s although he did not call it The Mandela Effect. He also referenced someone from the 11th Century that described the same thing. Art Bell even took a phone call from someone in 2001 that was confused because they believed that Nelson Mandela had died in prison. This was eight years before Fiona Broome coined the term.
Do I have a favorite theory? Sure. I lean toward simulation theory as an explanation, but I have yet to find hard evidence of that, so I can’t be sure. As much as I would love to have someone to blame for all this, I cannot get on board with those that say that CERN is responsible. It’s been happening longer than the Large Hadron Collider has existed.
I also must admit that most of the reality shifts that I recognize seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I have no idea why anyone would want to change the wording on a mirror, remove Dolly’s braces and turkey leg, or what the purpose of altering the kind of van used by the terrorists in Back to the Future could possibly be. It seems random and pointless. Do I think it’s possible that there is some meaning behind it, and this is all some elaborate code that has been set up for someone to discover and change the world? Maybe. But if that’s the case, I know that I will not be the one to figure that out and I would be skeptical of anyone who claims that they have.
There have recently been a couple of scientific studies on the phenomenon. Look them up yourself. No one running these studies is yet ready to attribute all of this to something spooky, but they have determined that there seems to be something more to this than just poor memory because control groups that they have inserted using things that no one is claiming to have changed are rarely if ever misidentified, while the well known changes are commonly and consistently identified, even by people who have never heard of any of this.
https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/news/new-research-shows-consistency-in-what-we-misremember
The last thing I will say after writing this story about my experience with the Mandela Effect is that I really hate that this thing has been named that. I remember Mandela becoming president, not dying in prison. I wish it was called the Dolly Effect or the Mirror Effect or literally anything else.
So, do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I’m just making all of this up? Do you think this is all just bad memory? I understand if you do, especially since the craziest part of this story cannot be proven in any way. You will never find evidence of the wrong line in Apollo, the wrong van in BTTF, or the existence of Tidy Cat because those things have changed back to their original form. If the multiverse explanation is true, you may not have even been on the timeline where those things happened. If this was all new to you, then I’m sure it sounds nuts unless any of the very few examples of reality shifts that I covered in this have a meaning to you and you happen to have anchor memories around the same shifts. But I challenge you to investigate it yourself. Google The Mandela Effect and find a list of 50–100 of them. Go through that list and find out for yourself if you still think all of this can just be bad memory. But keep in mind that there is no reasonable explanation why so many people would remember a turkey leg in that painting. Never a candy cane, never a hunting bow, never a mug of beer. It’s always a turkey leg.
If you would like to contact the author for any reason, please email theproblemwithreality@gmail.com