I most admit, I am quite fascinated by the Mandela effect. It's like a crowd sourced Phillip K. Dick novel, or Fringe spin-off. And could possibly lead to new insights about the nature of the human mind.
But even ignoring all the quantum mysticism, there is need for skepticism. The claim is that "thousands" or even "millions" of people have the exact same wrong memory. But do they?
E.g the Berenstain Bears. I had never heard about them, but I googled and it's clear that people misspell their names in countless ways. It can be quite comical, people will swear they are excellent spellers and have very good memories and they vividly 120% remember it as Berenstein, then the next sentence they write Bernstein or Berenstien or even Bearstein.
Other ME's allow quite a lot of wiggle room. Nelson Mandela according to ME lore died "sometime in the 80's". But an ambiguous context-free quote from Google Books that mentions a date in 1991 somehow counts as a hit. New Zealand "moved" from somewhere else relative to Australia. Some say north, some west, northeast seems the most common, but they don't even give a ballpark figure for distance.
The inherent suggestibility of people also inflates the number of individuals who misremembers the same way.
And exaggeration by true believers, and bloggers who need clicks for their ads.
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