You’ve probably seen movies where people travel to the past and change something and that results in their whole reality being changed and when they get back to their own time, they find an entirely new world.

This idea of being able to change reality itself, in a large or even small ways, has been a very common subject in sci-fi movies, books and tv shows. There is something about this whole idea that is really fascinating for us, maybe because it would mean multiple chances to undo our mistakes. But, alas, this just isn’t possible.

Or is it? For some years now, many people have been claiming that the reality we are living in or at least many things about it, are being altered without anybody noticing it.

They say that thousands of people remember several things from a few decades ago that are totally changed now and have no traces of what they used to be. It’s like someone went into the past, and changed those things for some reason and we are only noticing now.

The Mandela Effect

In simple terms, the Mandela effect is when a large group of people remember things that were different (and have now changed without any trace) or things that didn’t even happen and they still have memories of it (somehow). According to believers however, the Mandela effect is the tiny changes that are being made to our reality.

The term was coined in 2010 by a blogger who noticed that thousands of people in the world had memories of Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s in prison while in reality he died in 2013. Hence, the ‘Mandela’ effect.

In fact, this is a very popular example put forth by believers who all say that they had watched clips of his funeral on TV and had even learned of it in their schools! But when you fact check, it turns out, that he actually died in 2013, which led them to believe that reality had been somehow altered and they still had memories of the old reality.

If it was one person or a small group of related people, it could be said that they are simply lying but when completely unrelated people from all corners of the world have the same exact memory that didn’t even happen, it makes you ask some serious questions. In fact, there have been a ton of other examples which you can read about here.

Image Credits (This is a very popular example of the Mandela effect)

I am now going to tell you about some things that I remember which have now apparently changed. The first one is the famous phrase that Darth Vader says in the Star Wars movie which is, “Luke, I am you father.” Guess what? He actually says, “No, I am your father.” If it was just me, I would have thought that I misremembered it, but apparently millions of people have the same memory.

Next, is the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember watching many photos and videos of the assassination many years ago and I distinctly remember that there were only 4 people in the car. Today, I found out that there were actually 6!! And again, it’s not just me but thousands of other people have the same memory as well.

Similarly, the internet is filled with such examples, some of which, I could relate to. If you visit that link above, you might find some that you do too.

So, Is Someone Really Changing Our Reality?

Most probably not. Researchers have suggested a lot of explanations for the Mandela effect that have nothing to do with the domain of science fiction. They have suggested that it might just be false memories, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, misconceptions, misinformation that got accepted as actual information and then spread from there.

However, believers are really convinced that something is up and have explanations of their own which right now are all theories and speculations but cannot be discarded completely as it is quite difficult to disprove them as they have some connections with theoretical physics.

They say that it could be that we live in a Matrix type reality and that the programmers of this world are just changing a few things here and there. They also say that it could be because of alternate realities which collide from time to time causing these changes.

Some of them also say that it could have been the work of time travellers who changed something tiny in the past which had all these separated but visible differences in the world while our memories of them remain intact.