The Mandela Effect

About

The Mandela Effect is a theory of parallel universes, based in the idea that because large groups of people have similar alternative memories about past events. Advocates of the theory claim that for these collective experiences to be true, the fabric of reality must have shifted at some point in the past, and that therefore not only do parallel, inhabitable universes exist, but that we are constantly switching between them.

Origin

The Mandela Effect was first described online in 2010, by a blogger named Fiona Broome. Broome described an experience at a convention called Dragon Con, where she discovered that others had a false memory similar to hers, which was that Nelson Mandela had died during his imprisonment in the 1980s.^[1]

See, I thought Nelson Mandela died in prison. I thought I remembered it clearly, complete with news clips of his funeral, the mourning in South Africa, some rioting in cities, and the heartfelt speech by his widow.

Then, I found out he was still alive.

Fiona recounted discovering many widely held alternative memories, including those of Star Trek episodes that had never actually existed, and the death of the Reverend Billy Graham.

In 2012, another blogger named Reece, who wrote on the Blogger site Woodbetweenworlds, expressed a similar idea, but this time about the spelling of a popular children’s book series, The Berenstain Bears. ^[2]

And then I saw the book covers. The ones in the squiggly bubble letters from the childhood. The ones I saw a hundred times a month from the formative ages of 5 to 9. The ones that every 20-something in the world will tell you read “Berenstein Bears”.

Except they don’t read “Berenstein”. They read “Berenstain”.

Reece is a physicist, and he went on to describe a theory of the universe that would account for the Mandela Effect, based on a 4-dimensional universe.

I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold. If you don’t se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part “real” and part “imaginary”. Within this 4D manifold, there are sixteen hexadectants (like quadrants, but 16 of them), corresponding to whether we consider only the real or imaginary part of each of the four dimensions. In our particular hexadectant, the three space dimensions are real, and the time dimension is imaginary.

Spread

Both the original post by Fiona Broome and by Reece have received hundreds of comments, and the Mandela Effect has received a significant amount of media attention, first by Buzzfeed in 2014 and then by many other media outlets in 2015, including Vice, The Onion A.V. Club, Seventeen Magazine, and WGN-TV. The reddit community /r/mandelaeffect was created in December of 2013, and has since grown to 5,163 readers; this area and the comments section of the Mandela Effect blog are where many users go to share their alternate group memories and seek out new ones.

Some of the most popular false group memories include:

• The death of Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment in the 1980s
• The spelling of the children’s book series “Berenstain Bears” as “Berenstein Bears.”
• The countries of Sri Lanka and New Zealand being located in different places on the planet.
• The number of American states being 51 or 52.

In addition, many users have tried to find proof of past information that would have given them the false memories. They claim that the proof either vindicates their memory as the “correct” version, or that it proves the above theory of the universe.