The Amazing Rise of the Mandela Effect!

By Cynthia Sue Larson | Guest writer for Wake Up World

The Mandela Effect: When History Just Won’t Stay Put

The phrase “Mandela Effect” has been trending upward at an exponential rate since July 2015, according to Google Trends. Part of what is fueling the rapid increase in discussion about the Mandela Effect is that some of the reporters writing articles about the increased interest in this phenomena are experiencing it, too. One reporter noticed that an oft-remembered cheesy love sequence between two characters in the James Bond movie, Moonraker, no longer exists – despite his recollection (and mine) that “Dolly has braces”!

While many are surprised by the recent surge of interest in the “Mandela Effect,” those of us who have been researching and writing about this phenomenon of reality shifts and alternate histories have long been anticipating just such a rise of interest.

What is the Mandela Effect?

The “Mandela Effect” is named after South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela, who became a topic of interest in the year 2010 by people noticing with surprise that he was alive at that time – since many people remembered him having died while incarcerated. I had published similar accounts of the dead being observed alive again in my 1999 book, Reality Shifts, and reported first-hand accounts on the RealityShifters website from people all around the world noticing many dead people alive again. Observations of dead people alive again are just one of many types of Mandela Effects, with other notable examples including changes to song lyrics, movie dialogue, movie scenes, physical geography, physiological anatomy, and product names.

The Mandela Effect is one of those things most people won’t believe in until it happens to them. Like falling in love or going through heartbreak, the Mandela Effect is something you have to experience in order to fully embrace. And even then, it often takes more than one or two experiences to break through the resistance most of us have to accepting the existence of something that fundamentally challenges our unspoken foundational assumption — that facts and historical events don’t change. This perceptual bias has been poetically expressed in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on:
nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

When we encounter evidence indicating that in fact, history has changed – it feels shocking to discover some of the lines have been canceled and washed out! We seem to be approaching ‘tipping point’ where it’s getting harder for scoffers to say there’s no such thing as the Mandela Effect / reality shifts / alternate histories. The term “Mandela Effect” originated with blogger Fiona Broome in 2010 after she attended a conference where many people talked with her about remembering how Nelson Mandela had died many years earlier – though official recorded history at that time indicated no such thing had actually occurred.

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