You played the Mavis card really well- I was convinced you really believed there was such a person and, while I had literally no memory of her myself, I did try some various searches to find her, but only after answering your 3 questions last night. After about 5 minutes, I began to realize what your purpose might have been since I couldn't find any results at all, not even as a Mandela Effect, which strongly suggested you had fabricated the story itself.
This morning, I went through some lists of things people have called Mandela Effect stories- there were really none that tweaked my own memories. I had either never heard of the things mentioned, or I remembered them correctly.
I then thought for a while about memories I have had that were proveably wrong on further evidence, and I could only come up with a single instance. The Pet Shop Boys first US hit was "West End Girls", a song I was utterly convinced was a hit in the Spring of 1985 in the US- the song was intimately connected in my memory with my freshman year in college and a very specific event, and yet about 25 years later, I was scanning the Billboard Hot 100 for the Spring of 1985, and the song wasn't listed anywhere I looked in the months around that time. I eventually found it in the Spring of 1986, and the song hit #1 several weeks after that. This disturbed me a great deal- my memory for music and timelines involving them is almost at an idiot savant level- if it was a hit in the US between 1978 and 1987-88, I can tell you when it was on the charts to the year and season/s, and having this memory literally seared into my brain about hearing this song in the Spring of 1985 connected to an event I literally recorded in a diary freaked me out- I thought I had either slipped into a parallel universe, or I had a brain tumor screwing up my perceptions. However, I eventually figured out why my memory was screwed up- the song was released in an earlier version in 1984, and it was the recording I was remembering, not the one that became the hit a year later. I cancelled the CAT scan.
Ah, I thought it was very strange that after completing the poll I could find no mention of Mavis on any internet or video platforms. I thought damn, she must have done something really wrong, or be really important, to be so thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. My naive trust of the poll's honesty remained pure. 😄
That may explain why current AI (fancy curve fitting to duplicate human expression) efforts have been funded so strongly lately. They don't have much commercial use, but they have LOTS of uses in creating a reality that is entirely false.
You hit one of the important nails on the head, here. This is why the A.I. Superbeing psyop is something like the ultimate conclusion of technocratic Marxism.
And you'd have to have it. Marxism requires a servant class (no surprise considering Marx' laziness), and the only way to take free people and make them effective slaves is to present them with a false reality.
Most of media will simply believe what they're told, giving the controllers of the best deepfakes effective media narrative control. This will happen as they (news media people) are people who are so unimpressive they can't conceive of the potential evils of the unrivaled power of the ability to supplant truth with their first draft of history.
There is an icing on the cake, however. Real life living, speaking in person to real people, is still effective. AI will almost certainly destroy online interaction believability for decades if not more than a century.
Talking to so-called real people will be like talking to the media, just like now. The average person, for example, believes that Ukraine has been winning for a year, even though they've lost 27% of their territory.
If no one can trust what is said online, then online video, audio, and even text becomes entirely suspect. This forces people to meet in-person again, and to only believe what they see coming out of someone's mouth as not being a deepfake.
Sure, there will be a percentage of the population (not 100%) who just gets trapped in fantasyland. But those people will quickly become slaves to events and never understand what is going on. We've already seen the first big episode of this with the covid vaccines. People are now realizing that they were lied to, that their friends who openly expressed concern were right, and that they have now permanently altered their health in some unknown way.
Slaves don't thrive, not because they're abused, but because their energy is directed by a master. Only when slaves see and interact with free people do they realize they are slaves.
An interesting point on the Berenstein vs Berenstain argument - I found about as many newspaper articles citing Berenstein as I did Berenstain back in the 80s. There just seemed to be legimate confusion about the proper title from the beginning which led to one or the other getting cemented into people's heads. The funny thing is the whole argument probably boils down to ONE lazy ass journalist who didn't have a Berenstain Bears book handy and just guessed at the spelling.
I doubt it was just one. As the Oscar Mayer example shows, a lot of people autocorrect by assumed phonics. So, there are mass phenomena base on such simple mistakes as edge cases.
That was one of the best STNG episodes, I had that in my head all year last year, or the past two years (losing track of time with all this madness that has been inflicted upon us). When you watch the episode you assume Picard is simply so strong-willed he withstands the torture, and he does at first. But the kicker is the very end of the episode, after he's rescued, he tells Riker (I think it was Riker he confides in), that right before he was rescued, he was about to say There are five lights, that he actually saw five lights. So eventually he would have succumbed to it, his own perception had been changed.
oh it's Troi not Riker... ok I thought it might her and I was getting it wrong. Re-watched the episode about a year ago, during the height of the madness here in Quebec, been a loooong year. Thx :)
Back in the 70s after the Watergate story broke, a poll was conducted asking people to list these five "public figures" in the order of their trustworthiness. One of the names was fictitious, and didn't even resemble the name of anyone who was a public figure at the time, but was ranked higher than Nixon by the poll takers.
Josh Slocum recently wrote about such an issue like this. He called the clinic where he had an appointment asking if there was a mask requirement. The woman he talked to said yes, and agreed with him that is not scientific, that it is theater. Except she still goes to work masked.
Narwhals are all the rage now. Stuffed animal creatures for kids. Characters in Minecraft. Probably in tv animation. Etc. Yet no one had ever ever heard of a narwhal until less than 8 years ago.
A dolphin unicorn? You're telling me that in the 1980s and 1990s when girls were in love with unicorns that don't exist and dolphins that do, that dolphin unicorns existed and WE NEVER KNEW IT??? They made a freaking Star Trek movie about saving the whales. Seems they'd have saved unicorn whales if they'd existed right???
I believe the narwhal proves either parallel universes are real and we've skipped between world lines or a time Traveller has gone back and retconned us--or we are all subject to mass hoaxes often.
Because no way we went from a thing that never existed and no one had ever heard of existing to everyone knows it exists as if it has always existed "naturally."
To be fair, people have written for years about how narwhals might have been the source of tales about unicorns. One of David Attenborough's documentaries from 15+ years ago featured narwhals. I didn't realize they'd been marketed to kids recently.
You only say that now. You only think Attenborough wrote about narwhals because surely he would have...oh. I see, you're from the other timeline.
No, for years people wrote about how certain kinds of two horned yaks-- whose horns from profile look like one-- were the source of unicorn stories. Again, this is all retconning. ;)
Matthew, this was a fascinating experiment I have a personal experience with what appears to be a wrong time memory, but for the life of me I can't make any sense of what appears to be "reality" in this case.
This is how this memory goes: I've been a "Star Trek" fan since I discovered it in re-runs in the late 1970s. I enjoyed it so much that many times, into the '80s, I wished they would bring the series back. The occasional ST movies were enjoyable, but not nearly enough. There being a paucity of science fiction series on TV at the time to catch my interest, I would regularly scan the TV listings for promising-sounding titles.
One day I found a series I hadn't heard of, "War of the Worlds." I checked it out and it was absorbing, each episode carrying forward the intense struggle between humans and the alien invaders who made themselves look human but, in the privacy of their own lairs, would revert to looking like the lizard people that they actually were.
I enjoyed this series for a year or two in the mid-1980s, as it filled my hunger for good sci-fi. Then Paramount came back with "Star Trek: The New Generation" and of course I was hooked.
So far, so good. But a couple of years ago I remembered having enjoyed that "War of the Worlds" series and wondering what ever had become of it. But -- and here's the problem -- every place I looked claimed that this series came out AFTER the new Star Trek, even giving the impression that it was an attempt to coattail on the renewed popular interest in televised science fiction.
To my mind, these sources could not be correct because I distinctly remember wishing Star Trek would come back sometime and THEN discovering this series as a serviceable substitute *in lieu of* ST. And yet, the sources I've checked all contradict my clear memory of the sequence of events. Very strange.
That is interesting. I feel like I recall WotW as being when I was around 8 years old, which would have been 1985-ish. I remember watching it, and somewhat enjoying it. I vividly recall one of the aliens eating something like a guinea pig? TNG came out in 1987. But I just looked it up, and WotW is on IMDB as coming out in 1988, so the year I turned 11. My memories of these periods of my life as significantly less and more crisp. I still recall tuning in to most TNG episodes, and recall the contents of those episodes pretty well, and the feeling of my time of life seems very different.
Maybe it's an altered fact. I plan to discuss evidence of altered facts in a future article, which is part of the point of this series---yes, the Shazaam story was a hoax (Sinbad admitted to it, eventually). It also appears that Jaws was edited.
Can you find the article that explains WotW riding the coat tails of TNG? I'd like to date the article. I think that such articles may be more recent as in the past ten years.
Mathew you may be misremembering V with War of the Worlds. There was a famous scene in V where one of the lizard people, in an early reveal that they were not good guys, eats a mouse I think.
I still remember running into my parent's bedroom and jumping on the bed to watch V as a kid in South Carolina before we moved back to Birmingham. God I loved that show!
Thanks, Matthew. What you're saying matches my own recollection down to a T, although I don't remember a scene showing an alien eating an animal. (I didn't see every episode.) Like you said, TNG came out in 1987 and I clearly remember watching WotW in 1985-86. Strengthening my impression is the knowledge that I would not have continued (and in fact did not continue) to watch WotW once TNG came out.
I've looked around, but can't find whatever the source was that gave me the idea that WotW was riding the coattails of TNG. For what it's worth, here's the Wikipedia article on that series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(1988_TV_series). It currently states that, "The show was a part of the boom of first-run syndicated television series being produced at the time."
This whole episode brings to mind one of the scarier 1984-like prospects from our growing reliance on the Internet: that real events that actually happened could be memory-holed by the easy and constant revision of Web pages, such that those who weren't there would have no way to question what they're being told. The permanence of ink printed on paper would act to counter this, but as printed matter (books, newspapers, magazines) go the way of the dodo, it'll become increasingly difficult to refute false historical claims.
Which leads me back to the original issue: the WotW question could be resolved by consulting issues of TV Guide from 1985-89. There are no guarantees of course, but as a practical matter it's much harder to hoax a print magazine than a Web page.
I watched War of the Worlds as well and I remember a friend of mine in middle school was a huge fan of it too and we would discuss the episodes. In the early days of youtube I found someone had put a few episodes up. I watched them, but the special effects were badly dated. My friend and I would later obsess over ST:TNG. In my mind WotW came first.
I have a particular analysis of the Mandela Effect that doesn't rely so much on human cognitive frailty, but does rely on (never unreliable) human malice for its efficacy. Perhaps it could be helpful to your consideration on the topic...
Considering that Mandela was a political prisoner set up for jail in the first place by CIA to stymie his leadership in the anti-apartheid movement, there is a likely scenario that the same organization instrumentalized Mandela's public image again, years later, thus creating this media 'enigma' we today call the Mandela Effect. For what it's worth, I am one of the people who remembered seeing his funeral procession take place on TV, occurring inside a soccer stadium. So when he later emerged from prison to become president, I was perplexed, which is the reason I've given the subject some concerted thought.
The silly sci-fi notion of divergent time-lines, I surmise, was derived as a creative cover-up for an otherwise banal (and very illegal) domestic psy-op, in which US media carried water for intelligence to tell a politically meaningful and nefarious fib. Most speculation on forums and comment boards, which I've tracked in order to pin down the calendar dates better, suggests that the news reports were telecast in the spring time, as early as March, but maybe farther into summer of 1983. The hypothetical reason that makes the most sense is that the NAACP and African-American Rights groups were planning a "March on Washington 2" scheduled for that August 27th to reignite the social justice dialog under Reagan's clearly unfriendly watch and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first "March on Washington" in which MLKjr. gave his indelible and inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech. (Interestingly 8.27.83 was also the day that Haiti adopted its new constitution. And on August 20th, 1983 the South African anti-apartheid umbrella organization, United Democratic Front was launched in Cape Town, for which political prisoner Mandela was named one of 6 Patrons. Another possible reason to mislead black American audiences.)
To capture the racial/political/intelligence context of the day, let's not forget Gary Webb's expose from the mid-90s that demonstrated clearly that the CIA was involved in supplying, if not creating, the 1980's crack epidemic (in a triangle trade that became known as the Iran/Contra Affair) to decimate, cobble or otherwise neutralize the black community during Reagan's tenure. Director John Deutch later quasi-admitted it in public town hall meeting in November 1996 in LA, claiming "if so, it wasn't intentional," a gaffe for which he was presumably removed from his post a month later. The US establishment's efforts were concentrated, to some degree, in this theater of civil rights suppression, sabotaging black leadership, and character-assassinating their role models.
So it's not a stretch to surmise that the Reagan/Bush team wished to suck as much wind from the sails of the immanent black pride event in D.C., such that they'd have no compunction about faking the South African Civil Rights Hero's death prematurely, and passing it off to news stations in African-American TV audience markets - in my case northern NJ, where I saw it as an 8 year old.
The fact that Mandela didn't actually die, and in fact later became President of S.A., necessitated the surrealistic Back-to-the-Future inspired excuse to explain why everyone remembered seeing something on TV that didn't actually happen anywhere but on TV. But that summer, assuming it did unfold roughly as I outline, it would have been considered an effective campaign to dampen the spirit of the march in DC. The media reports on the march described it as lackluster, lacking in black leadership, since the void left by King. (Of course, these reports may well have been just as premeditated and designed for social effect to achieve the same overall goal.)
The fact that the two primary other examples of Mandela Effect are the Berenstain Bears and Sinbad/Shazzam enigmas, each focused on minority perception or perception of minorities, suggests the sci-fi framing of split time had a broader operational context, perhaps. In any case, I tend to believe that the creation of the phenomenon was an ad-hoc response, a la Monday Morning Quarterbacking a viable cover-up. It may also have more simply been an organic folk-loric reckoning of irreconcilable media "facts," which has since been promoted due to its diverse and flexible utility. For one thing, it lends mystery and charming decoration to the Large Hadron Collider boondoggle by legitimating its cult of relativism and otherwise unsubstantiated cosmological claims masquerading as "science." 'Look kids! A worm hole! A divergent time/reality!' You can muddy the waters of any conjectural dialog with this one, so when everyone from astute cosmologists to oligarchs jump on the multi-verse/simulation bandwagon, you can pretty much ensure nobody will learn anything constructive or useful once it has been invoked.
Back to Mandela, if one considers the difficulty of 'narrative containment' between South African journalism and US/European counterparts posing a risk of exposure of such bold lies in the context of the 1980s, I recommend the documentary "Searching for Sugar Man," to get a sense of the information desert that characterized South Africa at the time. Nothing really got in or out back then. So the existence and security of such a bold mission is not an unreasonable conjecture. Surely more reasonable than the premise that Father Time broke Physical Law for sport and propaganda.
> There was never a Mavis Winehardt. I made that up.
Damn! I totally called it! I even left a winky face in my comment on that article ("Never heard of her... but ask me again in a month 😉"). But I only caught up after you'd posted this :(
I *did* notice that Liam Sturgess said he remembered Mavis, and thought "If I'm right he's going to be embarrassed.." but it never occurred to me that he might be part of the con -_-
You played the Mavis card really well- I was convinced you really believed there was such a person and, while I had literally no memory of her myself, I did try some various searches to find her, but only after answering your 3 questions last night. After about 5 minutes, I began to realize what your purpose might have been since I couldn't find any results at all, not even as a Mandela Effect, which strongly suggested you had fabricated the story itself.
This morning, I went through some lists of things people have called Mandela Effect stories- there were really none that tweaked my own memories. I had either never heard of the things mentioned, or I remembered them correctly.
I then thought for a while about memories I have had that were proveably wrong on further evidence, and I could only come up with a single instance. The Pet Shop Boys first US hit was "West End Girls", a song I was utterly convinced was a hit in the Spring of 1985 in the US- the song was intimately connected in my memory with my freshman year in college and a very specific event, and yet about 25 years later, I was scanning the Billboard Hot 100 for the Spring of 1985, and the song wasn't listed anywhere I looked in the months around that time. I eventually found it in the Spring of 1986, and the song hit #1 several weeks after that. This disturbed me a great deal- my memory for music and timelines involving them is almost at an idiot savant level- if it was a hit in the US between 1978 and 1987-88, I can tell you when it was on the charts to the year and season/s, and having this memory literally seared into my brain about hearing this song in the Spring of 1985 connected to an event I literally recorded in a diary freaked me out- I thought I had either slipped into a parallel universe, or I had a brain tumor screwing up my perceptions. However, I eventually figured out why my memory was screwed up- the song was released in an earlier version in 1984, and it was the recording I was remembering, not the one that became the hit a year later. I cancelled the CAT scan.
My search turned up one Mavis Winehardt. It was on Mathew's last post. I found it via Ecosia.org.
Ah, I thought it was very strange that after completing the poll I could find no mention of Mavis on any internet or video platforms. I thought damn, she must have done something really wrong, or be really important, to be so thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. My naive trust of the poll's honesty remained pure. 😄
Several people have made similar comments. I appreciate the signal: that my work is often checked for verification without complaint. :)
First person to register an identity as Mavis Winehardt* wins.
Winehardt
Can you give me a one or two sentence summary? I'm unfamiliar.
Interesting. Can you link the Corbett piece?
That may explain why current AI (fancy curve fitting to duplicate human expression) efforts have been funded so strongly lately. They don't have much commercial use, but they have LOTS of uses in creating a reality that is entirely false.
You hit one of the important nails on the head, here. This is why the A.I. Superbeing psyop is something like the ultimate conclusion of technocratic Marxism.
And you'd have to have it. Marxism requires a servant class (no surprise considering Marx' laziness), and the only way to take free people and make them effective slaves is to present them with a false reality.
And for the Marxists to get in line to participate is the icing on the cake for the ruling Kunlangeta.
Most of media will simply believe what they're told, giving the controllers of the best deepfakes effective media narrative control. This will happen as they (news media people) are people who are so unimpressive they can't conceive of the potential evils of the unrivaled power of the ability to supplant truth with their first draft of history.
There is an icing on the cake, however. Real life living, speaking in person to real people, is still effective. AI will almost certainly destroy online interaction believability for decades if not more than a century.
Talking to so-called real people will be like talking to the media, just like now. The average person, for example, believes that Ukraine has been winning for a year, even though they've lost 27% of their territory.
I think you're missing what I'm saying.
If no one can trust what is said online, then online video, audio, and even text becomes entirely suspect. This forces people to meet in-person again, and to only believe what they see coming out of someone's mouth as not being a deepfake.
Sure, there will be a percentage of the population (not 100%) who just gets trapped in fantasyland. But those people will quickly become slaves to events and never understand what is going on. We've already seen the first big episode of this with the covid vaccines. People are now realizing that they were lied to, that their friends who openly expressed concern were right, and that they have now permanently altered their health in some unknown way.
Slaves don't thrive, not because they're abused, but because their energy is directed by a master. Only when slaves see and interact with free people do they realize they are slaves.
An interesting point on the Berenstein vs Berenstain argument - I found about as many newspaper articles citing Berenstein as I did Berenstain back in the 80s. There just seemed to be legimate confusion about the proper title from the beginning which led to one or the other getting cemented into people's heads. The funny thing is the whole argument probably boils down to ONE lazy ass journalist who didn't have a Berenstain Bears book handy and just guessed at the spelling.
I doubt it was just one. As the Oscar Mayer example shows, a lot of people autocorrect by assumed phonics. So, there are mass phenomena base on such simple mistakes as edge cases.
That was one of the best STNG episodes, I had that in my head all year last year, or the past two years (losing track of time with all this madness that has been inflicted upon us). When you watch the episode you assume Picard is simply so strong-willed he withstands the torture, and he does at first. But the kicker is the very end of the episode, after he's rescued, he tells Riker (I think it was Riker he confides in), that right before he was rescued, he was about to say There are five lights, that he actually saw five lights. So eventually he would have succumbed to it, his own perception had been changed.
He tells ship's counselor, Deanna Troi.
oh it's Troi not Riker... ok I thought it might her and I was getting it wrong. Re-watched the episode about a year ago, during the height of the madness here in Quebec, been a loooong year. Thx :)
Back in the 70s after the Watergate story broke, a poll was conducted asking people to list these five "public figures" in the order of their trustworthiness. One of the names was fictitious, and didn't even resemble the name of anyone who was a public figure at the time, but was ranked higher than Nixon by the poll takers.
Josh Slocum recently wrote about such an issue like this. He called the clinic where he had an appointment asking if there was a mask requirement. The woman he talked to said yes, and agreed with him that is not scientific, that it is theater. Except she still goes to work masked.
https://disaffectedpod.substack.com/p/what-medicos-really-think-about-masks
This is interesting, about the false memory concept being exploited to cover pedophiles / criminals ~ https://tlavagabond.substack.com/p/the-false-memory-syndrome-foundation
(Either the concept being exploited, or made up altogether.)
You should have gone asked about narwhals.
Narwhals are all the rage now. Stuffed animal creatures for kids. Characters in Minecraft. Probably in tv animation. Etc. Yet no one had ever ever heard of a narwhal until less than 8 years ago.
A dolphin unicorn? You're telling me that in the 1980s and 1990s when girls were in love with unicorns that don't exist and dolphins that do, that dolphin unicorns existed and WE NEVER KNEW IT??? They made a freaking Star Trek movie about saving the whales. Seems they'd have saved unicorn whales if they'd existed right???
I believe the narwhal proves either parallel universes are real and we've skipped between world lines or a time Traveller has gone back and retconned us--or we are all subject to mass hoaxes often.
Because no way we went from a thing that never existed and no one had ever heard of existing to everyone knows it exists as if it has always existed "naturally."
Ha.
To be fair, people have written for years about how narwhals might have been the source of tales about unicorns. One of David Attenborough's documentaries from 15+ years ago featured narwhals. I didn't realize they'd been marketed to kids recently.
You only say that now. You only think Attenborough wrote about narwhals because surely he would have...oh. I see, you're from the other timeline.
No, for years people wrote about how certain kinds of two horned yaks-- whose horns from profile look like one-- were the source of unicorn stories. Again, this is all retconning. ;)
Matthew, this was a fascinating experiment I have a personal experience with what appears to be a wrong time memory, but for the life of me I can't make any sense of what appears to be "reality" in this case.
This is how this memory goes: I've been a "Star Trek" fan since I discovered it in re-runs in the late 1970s. I enjoyed it so much that many times, into the '80s, I wished they would bring the series back. The occasional ST movies were enjoyable, but not nearly enough. There being a paucity of science fiction series on TV at the time to catch my interest, I would regularly scan the TV listings for promising-sounding titles.
One day I found a series I hadn't heard of, "War of the Worlds." I checked it out and it was absorbing, each episode carrying forward the intense struggle between humans and the alien invaders who made themselves look human but, in the privacy of their own lairs, would revert to looking like the lizard people that they actually were.
I enjoyed this series for a year or two in the mid-1980s, as it filled my hunger for good sci-fi. Then Paramount came back with "Star Trek: The New Generation" and of course I was hooked.
So far, so good. But a couple of years ago I remembered having enjoyed that "War of the Worlds" series and wondering what ever had become of it. But -- and here's the problem -- every place I looked claimed that this series came out AFTER the new Star Trek, even giving the impression that it was an attempt to coattail on the renewed popular interest in televised science fiction.
To my mind, these sources could not be correct because I distinctly remember wishing Star Trek would come back sometime and THEN discovering this series as a serviceable substitute *in lieu of* ST. And yet, the sources I've checked all contradict my clear memory of the sequence of events. Very strange.
That is interesting. I feel like I recall WotW as being when I was around 8 years old, which would have been 1985-ish. I remember watching it, and somewhat enjoying it. I vividly recall one of the aliens eating something like a guinea pig? TNG came out in 1987. But I just looked it up, and WotW is on IMDB as coming out in 1988, so the year I turned 11. My memories of these periods of my life as significantly less and more crisp. I still recall tuning in to most TNG episodes, and recall the contents of those episodes pretty well, and the feeling of my time of life seems very different.
Maybe it's an altered fact. I plan to discuss evidence of altered facts in a future article, which is part of the point of this series---yes, the Shazaam story was a hoax (Sinbad admitted to it, eventually). It also appears that Jaws was edited.
Can you find the article that explains WotW riding the coat tails of TNG? I'd like to date the article. I think that such articles may be more recent as in the past ten years.
Mathew you may be misremembering V with War of the Worlds. There was a famous scene in V where one of the lizard people, in an early reveal that they were not good guys, eats a mouse I think.
I still remember running into my parent's bedroom and jumping on the bed to watch V as a kid in South Carolina before we moved back to Birmingham. God I loved that show!
The guinea pig does sound like the mouse scene from V.
Oops, you're right. Thanks.
Thanks, Matthew. What you're saying matches my own recollection down to a T, although I don't remember a scene showing an alien eating an animal. (I didn't see every episode.) Like you said, TNG came out in 1987 and I clearly remember watching WotW in 1985-86. Strengthening my impression is the knowledge that I would not have continued (and in fact did not continue) to watch WotW once TNG came out.
I've looked around, but can't find whatever the source was that gave me the idea that WotW was riding the coattails of TNG. For what it's worth, here's the Wikipedia article on that series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(1988_TV_series). It currently states that, "The show was a part of the boom of first-run syndicated television series being produced at the time."
This whole episode brings to mind one of the scarier 1984-like prospects from our growing reliance on the Internet: that real events that actually happened could be memory-holed by the easy and constant revision of Web pages, such that those who weren't there would have no way to question what they're being told. The permanence of ink printed on paper would act to counter this, but as printed matter (books, newspapers, magazines) go the way of the dodo, it'll become increasingly difficult to refute false historical claims.
Which leads me back to the original issue: the WotW question could be resolved by consulting issues of TV Guide from 1985-89. There are no guarantees of course, but as a practical matter it's much harder to hoax a print magazine than a Web page.
Now I shudder when I think about the police raiding Johnny Vedmore, taking his newspaper clippings while leaving the Marijuana plants.
I watched War of the Worlds as well and I remember a friend of mine in middle school was a huge fan of it too and we would discuss the episodes. In the early days of youtube I found someone had put a few episodes up. I watched them, but the special effects were badly dated. My friend and I would later obsess over ST:TNG. In my mind WotW came first.
GANGS! Love it!
That is hilarious! This is really fun! I can imagine where this it going to go and I'm excited to see your articles unfold.
On soulful side note - the staple singers.
Mavis singing backup on the weight for the band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRTqa6Y6eWY
I have a particular analysis of the Mandela Effect that doesn't rely so much on human cognitive frailty, but does rely on (never unreliable) human malice for its efficacy. Perhaps it could be helpful to your consideration on the topic...
Considering that Mandela was a political prisoner set up for jail in the first place by CIA to stymie his leadership in the anti-apartheid movement, there is a likely scenario that the same organization instrumentalized Mandela's public image again, years later, thus creating this media 'enigma' we today call the Mandela Effect. For what it's worth, I am one of the people who remembered seeing his funeral procession take place on TV, occurring inside a soccer stadium. So when he later emerged from prison to become president, I was perplexed, which is the reason I've given the subject some concerted thought.
The silly sci-fi notion of divergent time-lines, I surmise, was derived as a creative cover-up for an otherwise banal (and very illegal) domestic psy-op, in which US media carried water for intelligence to tell a politically meaningful and nefarious fib. Most speculation on forums and comment boards, which I've tracked in order to pin down the calendar dates better, suggests that the news reports were telecast in the spring time, as early as March, but maybe farther into summer of 1983. The hypothetical reason that makes the most sense is that the NAACP and African-American Rights groups were planning a "March on Washington 2" scheduled for that August 27th to reignite the social justice dialog under Reagan's clearly unfriendly watch and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first "March on Washington" in which MLKjr. gave his indelible and inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech. (Interestingly 8.27.83 was also the day that Haiti adopted its new constitution. And on August 20th, 1983 the South African anti-apartheid umbrella organization, United Democratic Front was launched in Cape Town, for which political prisoner Mandela was named one of 6 Patrons. Another possible reason to mislead black American audiences.)
To capture the racial/political/intelligence context of the day, let's not forget Gary Webb's expose from the mid-90s that demonstrated clearly that the CIA was involved in supplying, if not creating, the 1980's crack epidemic (in a triangle trade that became known as the Iran/Contra Affair) to decimate, cobble or otherwise neutralize the black community during Reagan's tenure. Director John Deutch later quasi-admitted it in public town hall meeting in November 1996 in LA, claiming "if so, it wasn't intentional," a gaffe for which he was presumably removed from his post a month later. The US establishment's efforts were concentrated, to some degree, in this theater of civil rights suppression, sabotaging black leadership, and character-assassinating their role models.
So it's not a stretch to surmise that the Reagan/Bush team wished to suck as much wind from the sails of the immanent black pride event in D.C., such that they'd have no compunction about faking the South African Civil Rights Hero's death prematurely, and passing it off to news stations in African-American TV audience markets - in my case northern NJ, where I saw it as an 8 year old.
The fact that Mandela didn't actually die, and in fact later became President of S.A., necessitated the surrealistic Back-to-the-Future inspired excuse to explain why everyone remembered seeing something on TV that didn't actually happen anywhere but on TV. But that summer, assuming it did unfold roughly as I outline, it would have been considered an effective campaign to dampen the spirit of the march in DC. The media reports on the march described it as lackluster, lacking in black leadership, since the void left by King. (Of course, these reports may well have been just as premeditated and designed for social effect to achieve the same overall goal.)
The fact that the two primary other examples of Mandela Effect are the Berenstain Bears and Sinbad/Shazzam enigmas, each focused on minority perception or perception of minorities, suggests the sci-fi framing of split time had a broader operational context, perhaps. In any case, I tend to believe that the creation of the phenomenon was an ad-hoc response, a la Monday Morning Quarterbacking a viable cover-up. It may also have more simply been an organic folk-loric reckoning of irreconcilable media "facts," which has since been promoted due to its diverse and flexible utility. For one thing, it lends mystery and charming decoration to the Large Hadron Collider boondoggle by legitimating its cult of relativism and otherwise unsubstantiated cosmological claims masquerading as "science." 'Look kids! A worm hole! A divergent time/reality!' You can muddy the waters of any conjectural dialog with this one, so when everyone from astute cosmologists to oligarchs jump on the multi-verse/simulation bandwagon, you can pretty much ensure nobody will learn anything constructive or useful once it has been invoked.
Back to Mandela, if one considers the difficulty of 'narrative containment' between South African journalism and US/European counterparts posing a risk of exposure of such bold lies in the context of the 1980s, I recommend the documentary "Searching for Sugar Man," to get a sense of the information desert that characterized South Africa at the time. Nothing really got in or out back then. So the existence and security of such a bold mission is not an unreasonable conjecture. Surely more reasonable than the premise that Father Time broke Physical Law for sport and propaganda.
> There was never a Mavis Winehardt. I made that up.
Damn! I totally called it! I even left a winky face in my comment on that article ("Never heard of her... but ask me again in a month 😉"). But I only caught up after you'd posted this :(
I *did* notice that Liam Sturgess said he remembered Mavis, and thought "If I'm right he's going to be embarrassed.." but it never occurred to me that he might be part of the con -_-