Call it false memory, confabulation, or a sign of alternative universes. Regardless, we have to admit the Mandela Effect is a meme worth mentioning. For the uninitiated, the phrase was first coined in 2010 by blogger Fiona Broome to describe a false memory that Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, had died in prison in the 1980s. This misunderstanding might have been chalked up to a simple case of misinformation or an inaccurate memory, except that Broome found that many others actually remembered the same thing. Since then, more and more examples of the Mandela Effect have been discussed on the internet, ranging from whether or not the Monopoly man has a monocle to the correct spelling of a universally loved children’s book family’s last name. To make matters more...interesting...some internet users have posted images as “proof” that in this universe, you spell it “Berenstein” and that actor Sinbad really was in a movie called Shazam and that the Mandela Effect is really just a sign that we’re all living in a computer simulation.
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