Bunkum & Bullsh*t - The Mandela Effect
Anyone reading this is likely aware that, while Bunkum & Bullshit is a project near and dear to my heart and often requires a not insubstantial workload, the bulk of my research and written work is on the subject of professional wrestling, a field that I’ve worked within for more than a decade, and been a fan of for a little over twice as long.
My first brief foray into wrestling fandom actually came a little earlier than that, in the early-to-mid 1990s, when my parents saved up and splashed out to get Sky TV. I became very quickly obsessed with the seemingly endless array of channels - having an entire channel dedicated to cartoons was mind-blowing, but I needed to know what else was out there; before the nice clean on-screen TV guide list of channels we’ve grown accustomed to today, and being able to pick up channels in other languages, it felt like we could accidentally tune in to just about anything; I would sit awestruck at an episode of The Flintstones in German. I would sit in the early hours of the morning watching re-runs of American television staples - American Gladiators was a fascinating discovery for a kid already hooked on its British equivalent, while it’s impossible to explain how exciting even shows like Jeopardy felt in a time when all things American still carried a frisson of exoticism, simultaneously fascinating and something to be sneered at as uncouth, an unwelcome cultural import. This was at a time when I wasn’t allowed to go Trick or Treating at Halloween, because it was looked down upon as an unwelcome Americanism.
Somewhere in the mix of that channel-hopping obsession, I stumbled upon the WWF of the “New Generation” era. Far from the promotion’s glory days, but I knew no better. I was hooked. I knew nothing of professional wrestling - when Roger The Dodger, in one of my old Beano annuals, planned to make his dad fight Giant Haystacks, I puzzled over what was so scary about a haystack - and it was a revelatory experience. I was a comic book and video game nerd, so this world of colourful musclebound characters, each with a one-note gimmick and signature special moves just felt entirely natural to me, and seemed to confirm a suspicion I had held ever since the motion-capture actors from the first Mortal Kombat game appeared in full costume on an episode of Gamesmaster a year or two earlier - somewhere, there are people who do this for real. That excitement didn’t last - my Dad and older brother’s needling criticisms that “it’s all fake” eventually sunk in. I don’t remember the breaking point that eventually did it in for me, but if it wasn’t real, then what was the point? I stopped watching, gradually at first, and entirely by some time in 1997 - I had vague memories of a Bret Hart/Shawn Michaels angle from that year - and wasn’t tempted back to wrestling until mid-2000.
It’s strange how our obsessions and fandoms as children rarely seem to have any direct correlation to how much of the respective media we actually consume - I can’t have watched much WWF programming, because there were too many other family members in the house who wouldn’t have wanted it on the TV. My childhood flirtation with the WWF was fed through snatched glimpses of highlight shows taken out of context, not by a regular viewing habit, and certainly I never would have sat down to watch an entire episode of Monday Night RAW, let alone a pay-per-view event. As a result, my memories at the time were staggered and confused - a snippet of a promo here, a midcard B-show match there, and just a handful of powerful images.
One of those images was of a Battle Royal or Royal Rumble match, during which two identical twin Sumo wrestlers entered the fray - one was eliminated, but re-entered, and the referees were powerless to intervene, as they couldn’t tell which twin was still legal. I remembered it vividly. When my own twin brother and I played at being wrestlers, we invented characters, drawing pictures of them and choosing which we would portray - they were all rip-offs of WWF or video game characters; a hybrid Bret Hart/Shawn Michaels cool babyface, a snooty King, even an ersatz Duke “The Dumpster” Droese, Mortal Kombat ninjas and, in the mix, our own version of those Sumo twins.
Years later, as I became a wrestling fanatic once again, and it became easier to track down older WWF footage on video or DVD, I remembered that match and decided to track it down, but no results were forthcoming. Eventually, it became obvious why I couldn’t find it - the match never happened. My best explanation is that I must have seen highlights of the 1996 Royal Rumble, which featured the sumo-gimmicked Yokozuna, but also the massive 300lb+ twin tag team The Headhunters (billed as the Samoan Squat Team), and I had conflated the two. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to me, even though the Headhunters collectively spent less than two minutes in the match, and performed none of the shenanigans my memory ascribed to them.
It felt odd, having to accept that something that existed so clearly in my mind was a near complete fiction. My memory was wrong. That was the only explanation.
Or was it?
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In 2009, Fiona Broome coined the phrase “Mandela Effect”. Broome claimed that she had distinct memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he went on to become President of South Africa from 1994 until 1999 and, at the time of her first reporting these false memories, he was very much still alive. According to Broome, “perhaps thousands” of other people reported having those same memories, some even claiming to have remembered watching coverage of Mandela’s funeral on television.
The Mandela Effect became the hot new thing in paranormal and conspiracy circles. For those who choose to believe that the world we live in is merely a simulation, controlled from some higher plane of reality, then the apparent “change” in the date of Nelson Mandela’s death, or mundanities like the colour of Pikachu’s tail, was evidence of a glitch in the matrix. To others with a comic book interpretation of quantum psychics, it’s a sign that they, or the entire world, has shifted into an alternate dimension, another fixed point on the “Multiverse” where apparently the only difference is a slight change in the spelling of some consumer item or other.
All pretty far-fetched, so it’s a damning indictment of the social media content-scraping state of mainstream news that the concept was repeated more or less uncritically in all manner of once respectable outlets. If she gets a mention at all in these accounts, Fiona Broome herself is generally credited as a “paranormal researcher”, so it’s little surprise that she (and others in her wake) have approached the “Mandela Effect” as a strictly paranormal issue, rather than as course to question the vagaries of memory. Though on her own website Broome describes herself as a “skeptic”, and a researcher, her methods and output suggest that she’s not nearly sceptical enough. A self-professed “ghosthunter”, “historian” and “remote talent scout” for ghost-related TV shows, she claims to "publicly identify” sites and “predict anomalies” using ley-lines and non-specific “energy”. So far, so much new age and pseudoscientific woo. Or bullshit, in other words. And more than enough to give you cause to question the veracity of any suggestion of paranormal explanations for what are generally easily explained tricks of the mind.
Out of curiosity, and to get some background on who this person who coined such a popular term really was, I chose to read some of Fiona Broome’s writing on her pet topic; ghosts and hauntings. On one of her websites, HollowHill.com, she wrote about Eden Camp as perhaps the most haunted place in the UK. Eden Camp is a museum in Malton, North Yorkshire, built on what was once a WW2 Prisoner of War camp, that aims to tell a social history of Yorkshire during the war. It’s a little over three quarters of an hour’s drive from the village where I grew up, as it happens, and I know it well.
Self-professed sceptic, and professional ghost-hunter, Fiona Broome is very concerned about Eden Camp, in a series she calls “Ghost Hunting in the UK”. Writing in 2019, she was troubled by apparently clear evidence of “active, sentient ghosts”, “noises” and “poltergeist-like activity”. What was her evidence? She was watching an episode of Most Haunted, and basing her findings on how she interpreted the reactions of the “ghost-hunters” of that show. It should go without saying that, even if you believe in ghosts, Most Haunted isn’t exactly watertight on the evidence front - the show has been subject to numerous Ofcom complaints as a result of the late “psychic” Derek Acorah and his co-hosts faking paranormal activity and Acorah’s infamous possessions and channeling - most notably when a member of the show’s crew fed Acorah false information about an apparently haunted site, which the “spirits” possessing Derek predictably relayed, failing to notice that the names of the fictional ghosts were anagrams of “Derek Faker” and “Derek Lies”. Ghost-hunting is hardly an honourable and noble profession as it is, but I would expect that someone claiming to be a leader in the field would be a little bit more proactive than watching trash TV of someone else pretending to look for ghosts and commenting on it like a spooky YouTuber’s reaction videos.
Aside from watching TV, Fiona Broome admits to not knowing anything at all about the history of Eden Camp - as a government institution during perhaps the most studied conflict in history, and now a popular tourist attraction, it is an extremely well-documented site. Broome claimed that she would be unable to learn sufficient history of the location without access to local records - however, even Wikipedia provides a rudimentary timeline, and books about the history of the camp, or of the wider Malton area, are readily available on Amazon for less than £10. In subsequent write-ups, she expands her evidence for why the site must be haunted to the argument that it sits on leylines with other supposedly haunted locations - seemingly amazed at the fact that you can draw a straight line between two points - and on vague discussions of “energy”. Her grasp of history is near non-existent, of local geography even worse, and her self-description as a “skeptic” is so broad as to allow for not only belief in ghosts, but quoting approvingly from the nonsensical writings of John Michell, the editor of a magazine about crop circles, who also believed that leylines were guiding paths for ancient alien UFOs, and who wrote books on the unfounded conspiracy theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by another hand, published a book of Hitler’s quotations, rejected the theory of Evolution, believed in the need for racial segregation, and advocated for authoritarian rule by Britain’s royal family. Some “skeptic”, then.
Maybe you believe in ghosts, and maybe you don’t, it’s not really any of my business, or particularly relevant to this blog. But this is the expertise, background, and methodology of a woman who firmly believes that one of the most influential men of the 20th Century died several decades earlier than he actually did; a memory she insists is shared by thousands and which, admittedly, many people have claimed to also have believed. At the risk of slipping into petty, stereotype-heavy jingoism, those with this false “memory” largely appear to be American - I would be amazed if anybody in South Africa was in the mistaken belief that Mandela had died in prison, and it would equally be surprising in the United Kingdom, where the anti-apartheid movement, and high-profile calls for Mandela’s release from prison, were a staple of the political and cultural zeitgeist of the 1980s. Much as another Mandela Effect claims that New Zealand’s position on the map has changed since some unconfirmed point in history, and I very much doubt there are many Kiwis making that mistake.
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When I was a kid, there was a boy in our primary school playground, who, when we acted out scenes from a show we’d all watched on TV - most likely Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, though perhaps sometimes Biker Mice From Mars - and he got a line of dialogue wrong, rather than admit that he had misheard or misremembered, he would answer, “that’s not what they say on my TV”. It was a way to save face when outnumbered, not to admit defeat or error on their part, only that, in some small way, we inhabited separate universes. When I think of the Mandela Effect, and the place it has carved out for itself in the broader conspiracy ecosystem, I remember that boy - okay, you might be right, but I’m not wrong, it just happens different on my TV. I can’t be mistaken, the universe has to be wrong.
It’s as profoundly self-centred as it is depressingly intellectually incurious despite coming, as it often does, from a group of people inclined to think of themselves as free thinkers, and to implore others to “do their research”. To find that you are wrong about the life of Nelson Mandela - that you had so little interest in the world outside your window that you missed the stories of his release from prison, the global campaigning that secured said release, the collapse of Apartheid, his rise to the presidency of South Africa, and subsequent years as an elder statesman on the global political scene, and rather than feel quietly a little ashamed of yourself, or at best a little flustered and thinking you should probably do some reading up on what you missed, to reject decades of history out of hand because, no, it couldn’t be that you were wrong. It just happened differently on your TV.
We are all ignorant of far more things than we are cognizant of - I don’t understand physics, couldn’t give you the names of the current Manchester United squad, and am an absolute liability in a pub quiz Geography round - and finding that you are wrong about something, or were ignorant of some fact or other, shouldn’t be seen as a personal attack, but that’s where the self-centred constructs of the Mandela Effect are born. To be wrong is to be stupid, or weak, or lesser than. But to be wrong is the human condition, we’re all wrong about something every day of our lives, and we’re all ignorant of innumerable more things. At its best, to be wrong or ignorant of something is liberatory - conspiracists and pseudo-historians believe that scientists and historians cling to a rigid set of beliefs like dogma, and reject everything that would disprove them, but being proved wrong is what science is all about. Historians love finding out that their colleagues or predecessors were wrong about something, because it opens up whole new avenues of understanding. When scientists first sequenced a Neanderthal genome, and found concrete proof that they had interbred with early homo sapiens, putting to bed the old theories that they were wiped out by conflict, in favour of an understanding that they were likely genetically assimilated, did rival archaeologists pout, stamp their feet, and say, “that’s not it happened on my TV?”.
Many of the most famous “examples” of the Mandela Effect are the minutiae of pop culture - adults aghast that they can’t remember exactly how to spell the name of a book they haven’t seen or thought about since they were infants, or that the Monopoly Man doesn’t wear a monocle. There are simple explanations, and I’m not going to waste by time “debunking” simple misunderstandings piece by piece. As a kid weaned on trivia books and pub quizzes, once upon a time, something like “did you know that Darth Vader doesn’t say the line, ‘Luke, I am your father’?”, or that Humphrey Bogart never said, “play it again Sam”, was the stuff of idle conversation, but today it’s cited as evidence of a universe-hopping conspiracy. I’m not wrong, your universe is. He definitely said it on my TV. So what happened?
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In Bunkum & Bullshit, I repeatedly come back to two central points - how do we know what we know to be true, and the increasing interconnectedness of fringe beliefs, wherein the clearest key signifier for one unfounded belief is an existing belief in another, no matter how seemingly unconnected the two may be.
That is to say, there is absolutely no reason why somebody believing that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald should also believe in the existence of a species of large bipedal ape, unknown to science, in the Pacific Northwest. There’s no reason that doubting the efficacy of vaccination should make you more susceptible to believe that our planet has been contacted by extraterrestrials from beyond our galaxy. And yet.
Once upon a time, outside of the most stereotypical of raving loons, it wasn’t necessarily the case that belief in Conspiracy A would lead to belief in Conspiracy B. They were ideas isolated from one another, save for probably being filed close together in the same slightly hidden corner of your local bookstore - there were books on UFO, and books on Bigfoot, but the books on UFOs and Bigfoot were still to come.
A conspiracy can be intoxicating. It has all the thrill that comes of falling down a particularly satisfying research rabbit hole, with no facts laid out in front of you at every turn, but with an added frisson of forbidden knowledge. I sometimes reflect on how, growing up in the age of the X-Files and reading Fortean and paranormal books and magazines, watching Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, and in later adolescence being let loose on the internet, things could have gone very differently, and I could so easily have wound up a true believer myself.
But a conspiracy spreads through your mind like a virus, the moment you start believing it to be true. Because every facet takes you one step further away from consensus reality. Let’s go back to Bigfoot.
Bigfoot was named for the large human-like footprints discovered in Humboldt County, California in 1958 - which, it transpired, had been the work of serial hoaxer Ray Wallace with some wooden carved feet, to prank his co-workers. It became a cottage industry, of faked sightings, misidentified animals, easily staged videos that persistently still get trotted out as “evidence”, and of conflating centuries of native folklore about giants and wild men so that they all retroactively supported the argument for the existence of an unknown great ape stalking North America, a continent that is apparently lousy with ape-like or humanoid cryptids, despite having no fossil record of great apes.
For those who believe in Bigfoot, like those who believe in conspiracies, the evidence is overwhelming, and it must be a source of endless frustration that the rest of the world refuse to accept it. Like the conspiracist, there is a tendency to move in one of three directions to deal with that pesky lack of recognition, or of meaningful evidence. First, to cite previous examples of known species once thought to be fictitious, two, to invent spurious and fantastical claims to explain away the lack of evidence - nobody has ever found a Bigfoot body, because they are capable of travelling between dimensions, or becoming incorporeal; explaining one mystery with another, bigger one that requires even more evidence is not evidence, and third and finally, to invoke the cine qua non of conspiracy and fringe beliefs - the cover-up.
You see, when you start to believe that the evidence for Bigfoot, or UFOs, or that the world is run by shapeshifting cannibal lizard-aliens, is so overwhelming as to be almost everywhere around you, you would have to wonder why nobody in the “mainstream” accepts it, why the government refuse to act. The only explanation is that they know all too well, but they don’t want you to know. And now you’re back to the little dopamine hits of being granted access to forbidden knowledge, and isn’t that lovely?
As the internet, and particularly the algorithm-driven hellscapes of social media, have become the biggest vectors of fringe beliefs, that sense of access to forbidden knowledge, and of cover-ups, has gone nuclear. Facebook groups once used to organise anti-vaxxers now pivot to “15 Minute Cities” and transphobia, while TikTokers desperate for engagement trot out moral panics and urban legends that were getting long in the tooth when we first read them in thrice-forwarded chain emails twenty-five years ago. Once upon a time, genuine Flat Earthers were so thin on the ground that any given two were unlikely to ever meet, but now they can be brought together in Facebook groups and mutually reinforcing Twitter feeds, until every one of their news feeds, every corner of their information ecosystem, tells me that they are right, that scientific evidence, the media, and the world’s governments are all not only wrong but actively conspired and arrayed against them and their world-view. You’re not wrong, everybody else is. That’s not how it happened on my news feed.
It’s not unique to the extremes of fringe theories and conspiracies - the Brexit vote in EU saw liberals across the UK shocked to their core, because nobody they knew, nobody on their news feed was voting Brexit. Their observed reality did not reflect the facts. It’s now it happened on my TV, because none of us are even watching the same show any more.
In that environment of echo chambered (and don’t get me wrong here, this isn’t a mealy-mouthed liberal plea for you to follow more people on Twitter who hate you - nobody needs that), mutually reinforcing, algorithmically-driven information ecosystems, it’s easy to see how, when everything you read, watch and hear tells you that the universe is one thing, but when you step outside into the wider world, the organisations that present themselves as arbiters of truth and objectivity tell you that it’s something else entirely, one can fall back on the assumption that you are right, that they are wrong, and that it happens differently on your TV. That can manifest itself in the explanation of establishment cover-ups (and if they’re hiding Bigfoot and the truth of a Flat Earth, what else do they hide from us?), or, when our mistaken beliefs are a little more benign, centred around the spelling of a children’s book title, or the colour of C3PO’s leg, that something fundamentally shifted, that we inhabit separate universes. Because all too often, it can feel like we live in another world to those we disagree with.
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There are few social or cultural indicators as to who is more prone to belief in fringe theories, though there have been studies which indicate a high propensity for belief in conspiracies among those with high individual narcissism, and low self-esteem; that is to say, glibly, somebody who believes that they are something special, and that everything wrong in their life is somebody else’s fault. It’s easy enough to map that on to the Mandela Effect - misremember something, me? Not how it happened on my TV.
Memory is not infallible. Every time we reflect on a memory, or tell it to a friend, it’s reshaped. My own autobiographical memory is dismal, so when I have particularly clear memories from early childhood, I suspect that they are largely constructs, built from stories told to me by my parents and others, with my mind filling in the blanks, rather than a true reflection of the actual events. Memories and imagination cross-pollinate without us even realising it. When it comes to something like the Monopoly Man having a monocle, it’s junk data, useless information that your brain has little need for - when was the last time, unprompted, you gave any thought at all to what the Monopoly Man looks like? So when you’re presented with the question, “did the Monopoly Man have a monocle?”, there’s no strong image to anchor that on, and your brain is going to take the implications of the question, perhaps mix in an understanding of the cultural archetype the Monopoly Man represents and, yes, it will come up with a decent enough mental image in which that particular mascot is bemonocled. But that’s not a false memory, and it’s certainly not evidence that we’ve jumped dimensions. It’s only when invoking the logic of “not how it happened on my TV” that it becomes anything more than that.
The Mandela Effect is a bit of daft fun, a meme or a thought experiment, for most people, but for others it’s that one step further into a world where nothing is true, and everybody is lying to you. Like all fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, it’s a gateway drug to the next one, and that one might not be so harmless. The same cycle of reinforcement that happens in those Flat Earth and chemtrail Facebook groups, that same algorithm-driven sense that they are lying to you, has mutated in recent ways, to not only funnel more conspiracies and more extremist views directly into the eyelines of those most susceptible to believing in them; it’s also seen conspiracies go open source and interactive.
To those of us familiar with conspiracy literature, the overarching themes of QAnon were nothing new - right-wing extremism mingling with retro ‘80s Satanic Panic, evangelical homophobia and the Blood Libel given a 21st Century gritty reboot - but the way they proliferated was. This wasn’t a coherent message delivered from on high, but a treasure hunt - clues drip-fed to an audience hungry for acknowledgement and positive reinforcement, not just being given forbidden knowledge, but being trusted with finding it, solving puzzles and decoding riddles, as if the golden hare of Kit Williams’ Masquerade was a fascist coup of the United States government. Endorphin hits by conspiracy and, not only that, but it brought together all these desperate people, each keen to blame anyone but themselves for the problems in their lives, and each firm in their belief that their version of reality was the correct one, that the government covers up Bigfoot, that their candidate won the election, and that it was definitely spelled Berenstein Bears, into a horrible little community. As a result, conspiracies mutate faster than we have ever seen before, because it’s no longer a handful of fringe publishers and pseudo-academics churning out books, or lone nutters in the weirder and more racist corners of the internet, but a huge, interconnected network of people, each primed to believe anything that makes themselves more sure of their place in the world. And it’s not some unknowable monolith - it’s your Dad on Facebook, your niece on TikTok, the weird reply guys on Twitter, the toothless guy I met at Skunk Ape Headquarters in Florida, the loudest idiot in your local pub, but they’re all talking to each other, and they’re starting to wonder if maybe Nelson Mandela did die in prison in the 1980s, they’re gearing up to hunt Bigfoot, they’re keeping a close eye on the next election results, and it’s all because they could have sworn Sinbad had made a movie about a genie. At least, that’s how it happened on their TV.
Notes: Bunkum and Bullshit is an occasional series about liars, con artists, scammers, grifters and showmen, and I’ve been giving some thought to its future. The all-powerful algorithm doesn’t look too kindly on its name, so I’m toying with a pivot to “Bunkum and Ballyhoo”, as well as the possibility of either switching from a text format to a podcast, or recording a podcast to complement the text essays I post here. Sound off in the comments, or on social media, let me know what you think.
When not writing about con artists in general, I mostly write about a very specific breed of con artist - professional wrestlers. My book on the history of professional wrestling is available to purchase now, and getting rave reviews, so please, give it a read - you can buy it from Amazon now, or you can come and find me at the merch table at one of my upcoming appearances, which you can find on my homepage.
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