Why Do So Many People Misremember Certain Things?

“Luke, I am your father.” “Beam me up, Scotty.” “Hello, Clarice.”

Those quotes from The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek/i>, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the most famous lines in cinematic and television history, right? Well, not exactly.

Despite many people thinking that they can recall those famous words, they’re actually misremembering them. In fact, the real line uttered by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back is “No, I am your father.” The closest Captain Kirk ever comes to saying “Beam me up, Scotty” in Star Trek: The Original Series is “Scotty, beam us up,” “Beam me up,” and “Mr. Scott, beam us up.” Perhaps most surprising, Hannibal Lecter never says “Hello, Clarice” in The Silence of the Lambs; he simply says “Good morning.” Yet these misquotes have entered the pop culture lexicon, and most of us think we remember them, even though they were never spoken in their original contexts.

These are just a few examples of what has become known as the “Mandela effect,” which is when many people misremember something in the same way or believe they remember an event that never happened. Other examples include thinking that the man in the Monopoly logo wears a monocle (he doesn’t, and you’re likely conflating Rich Uncle Pennybags with the monocle-wearing Mr. Peanut, the Planters mascot) or that the Fruit of the Loom logo features a cornucopia of fruit (it’s just a pile of fruit).

The name “Mandela effect” was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome in 2009, who discovered that she was not alone in misremembering Nelson Mandela’s death in prison in the 1980s – other people also had the same false memory. In fact, Mandela was released in 1990, became president of South Africa in 1994, and died in 2013.

So what’s going on here? It is widely understood that memory is malleable and highly suggestible, and our brains sometimes create false or distorted memories based on other people’s opinions and supposed recollections, even if we don’t have that memory ourselves. Researchers have even found that people can be induced to believe they have committed a crime or endured a traumatic childhood event, simply based on other people stating that these things happened.

The internet and social media have likely contributed to this, as we are exposed to a deluge of information, some of it false. Yet by encountering certain beliefs or "facts" so frequently or seeing them combined with familiar information, we begin to believe it or even believe we have a memory of it. Another possible explanation is “confabulation,” which refers to people compensating for gaps in their memory by spontaneously creating a false memory to fill that gap – something they think they remember. Similarly, people may merge two images or memories into a single one, creating a new false memory – like believing that the peanut butter brand Jif used to be Jiffy (it never was, but there is a Skippy brand).

Another theory (which certainly has its supporters) is that the Mandela effect is evidence of the existence of multiple parallel universes – and that the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator somehow opened a portal to them – though there is no scientific evidence to support this.

The Mandela effect in action: