The Mandela Effect is a rather unassuming name for such an out there topic. It also goes by another name that might turn a few heads. The Berenstain/Berenstein Bears Conspiracy Theory. This topic is divided by two generations with two different major instances of inconsistencies in our world. Those who followed the Nelson Mandela story on the news and those who watched the Berenstain Bears on television. At the moment, those of you who do not frequent time travel message boards or humor the idea of a latent lizard person race living on Earth might be a tad confused. So I will break it down for you; beginning with the Mandela Effect.
The term was coined by Fiona Broome on a message board nearly a decade ago. Many people seem to vividly remember Nelson Mandela passing away in his prison cell during the 1980's and not in his home in Johannesburg during the year 2013. The main takeaway from this misconception is the concept of false memories. People were so positive and sure that he had passed away in prison, but that has now been proven false. There are a few theories as to why this is happening. All of them are pretty out there. I've fallen into the rabbit hole so you guys won’t have to.
The first theory is simply we have slipped into another dimension. What was once the world where Nelson Mandela passed away in prison is now one where he died silently in his home just a little less than five years ago. Nothing about this theory is solid. To be honest, every one of the theories are speculation, but even so, there is a large collection of people who vividly remember his passing in prison, leading me to believe that it had to happen sometime and somewhere. We weren’t privy to Fake News until recently.
Before I jump into any more theories, let me give more examples of The Mandela Effect, in hopes of striking some you are familiar with. Another common name for The Mandela Effect is the Berenstain/Berenstein conspiracy. Many millennials grew up with the beloved books and television show of the Berenstain Bears. Every story had a life lesson to be held within it. But the stories we all remember the same. What is new is the spelling of the Bears themselves. Many people remember it being the Bearinstein Bears; emphasis on the difference of the stain and stein. When this was first brought to my attention, I quickly ran to google, remembering it being Bearinstein. That E was burned into my minds eyes. But when I pulled it up on the internet my spelling had been corrected and to my disbelief there was a cover of the children's book with A proudly on the cover. From when I was five to my now eighteen years we must have shifted dimensions surely. And it isn't just me. It's an entire slew of people claiming the same thing all over the internet. The Berenstein/Bereinstain Bears conspiracy is what has blasted this thing wide open again, putting it into the light of normalized media.
Some other examples of the Mandela Effect people have discovered are a painting of King Henry VIII holding a turkey leg, dressed in royal garb of the time. Many claim to have seen this picture featured in textbooks from their youths. Sadly there is no such painting that exist. Another one is Curious George. Do you remember the lovable monkey from the books with a tail or no tail? The truth is, he never had a tail. Shocking right? Some even claim that the geographical location of Australia is in a different spot than they remember, in accordance with New Zealand. If any of these sounds familiar to you, you might possibly have just shifted into a parallel universe or wormhole and haven’t realized it yet.
Now that we have quite a few instances of the Mandela effect under our belts, let us put on our tinfoil hats and get down to the meat of what this shift in our realities might just mean. It is simple to claim we have moved from one universe to a vastly similar one, but what if something more complex were the cause of this? Something like time travel?
Time travel is not linear as we know time itself it to be. To us, a lifetime is just that, a lifetime. To the planet Earth, our lifetime is a drop in the vast ocean of time. And Earth is just a baby when we look at the universe. The stars we see at night are just beams of light that has taken a few hundred years to travel down to us for our viewing pleasure. So let us say that down the road someone builds a time machine. For convenience, this time machine can go backward and forward. Someone travels back to prehistoric time and steps on a butterfly. A million years later, Hillary Clinton has won the election instead of Donald Trump, but we would be none that wiser. This is called the Butterfly Effect.
To tweak this theory a bit to fit the Mandela Effect, let's say action A (the stepping on the butterfly) happens and that action is what leads us to be in timeline B (Hillary for a president) now. In the Butterfly Effect the general population is not able to see the effects of stepping on the butterfly. With time travel in the Mandela Effect, we lived in timeline A, but now get to see the effects while living in timeline B.
It isn't streamlined like in the movies when Marty Mcfly goes back in time and then everyone forgets him when he goes home. He would have been remembered if the writers of Back To The Future had been aware of the Mandela Effect. Time travel theory works more like a fruit salad than it does a straight line. So in accordance to this theory, someone has gone back in time and we are now just seeing the effects of it.
Paintings disappearing from history and Nelson Mandela living longer than he would in the previous timeline. Even something as simple as the spelling of a children’s book has been changed. I would hate to be the person responsible for the change of Berenstein to Berenstain, wouldn’t you?
The last theory is one that seems like it would make for better television. And actually has. This theory comes from the woman who erected the phrase Mandela Effect. It is the idea that we could all be experiencing our own realities inside a Holodeck.
A holodeck is essentially something that alters the way we see our world. A virtual reality prison of sorts. This type of technology has been seen in a few episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. Basically, the inconsistencies we find are what we remember from our lives outside the holodeck. It's an eerie thought.
It's simple to say we misremembered things. Sometimes simple is the answer people want you to come to. Having different theories of parallel universes and time travel is far more interesting than accepting you were wrong.
If you guys have any other examples of the Mandela Effect please be sure to leave a comment!
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