Loads of people ‘remembered’ seeing the infamous ‘In the butt, Bob’ episode of The Newlywed Game. (Yes, I know the quote is different.) For years Bob Eubanks and others said these people suffered from false memories. As it turned out, the episode did happen.
Can anyone please give me an example of a similar thing, where many people claim to have seen an event that didn’t actually happen? Not looking for UFO stuff, but well-known (non-)events.
I think Loftus has done research on inducing false memories. For example, people have claimed to remember seeing Bugs Bunny at Disney resorts.
If you have access to a decent newsstand, there’s a one-page article on exactly this topic in Fortean Times issue 243 (the current one).
ETA: Loftus link.
The* Challenger* explosion. The camera was actually on the commentators during the explosion, not the space shuttle. But you will find tons of people that “remember” seeing it happen live.
Well, ok, it did actually happen, so I guess it’s really not appropriate for the OP. But most people didn’t see it, as they claim.
I saw it live, not on tv. Then I saw it over and over and over again on tv. It’s not surprising someone doesn’t remember if they saw the live explosion or one of the replays first.
I think a lot of it becomes mixed up when people see things from different ways.
For instance on YouTube there was a tape of WCBS-TV coverage of The World Trade Center on Sept 11th.
The anchorman is talking to a girl via her cellphone and she says she saw the plane fly into the first tower and she’s telling about it. All of a sudden the girl stops and says “Oh my God another plane just flew into the other tower.” And the anchor says “No that was an explosion in the other tower, there wasn’t a plane.” (Now we the viewer are seeing the towers not the girl on her cell phone talking to the anchor). And the lady says “No, you’re wrong, I saw a plane fly into the other building.” And the anchor goes on to say he didn’t see a plane.
But the thing is if you look at the YouTube tape you can see the plane quickly fly in and move in back. So I could see why the anchor said he didn’t see the plane, and it looked like an explosion to him. In fact when I first saw the tape I had to start at the fireball and work backwards and found the little black thing, and then I could see it was a plane flying in from the corner around back.
So here’s a case of the anchorman not seeing the plane, 'cause he wasn’t expecting it and denying it to an eye witness right at the scene. Both would think they are telling the truth but the anchor was wrong.
No, there was no explosion. Just disintegration.
Many people falsely remember seeing the “Episode IV” on Star Wars’s opening crawl in the 1978 re-release, when it didn’t actually get put on until 1981.
They also falsely remember the cut scenes with Biggs, Camy, Fixer, and Luke in his Gilligan hat, but that was from reading the Star Wars Storybook which included photos and text from that scene.
The word you might be looking for is confabulation.
I saw an extreme case when I worked as a Mental Health Tech (or what most people call would call an “aide”) on a psych ward. A 30-something man had a brain tumor successfully removed, but unfortunately, most of his short term memory went with it. He literally could not remember anything more than about 5 minutes or so. Remember the movie Momento? Like that.
He created an elaborate scenario to explain his surroundings. Several times a day he’d dress, pack his suitcase, walk to the nurse’s station, and demand his bill. He “remembered” flying to Mexico for a business meeting. His meeting was now over and he wanted to check out of his hotel. He remembered his flight, the meeting, checking into the hotel, everything, just as strongly as you remember what you did today. You can imagine his reaction when we told him, no, he was a patient in a hospital in Oklahoma City, and eventually convinced him about the surgery. Again, this happened multiple times a day. It was probably like something out of the Twilight Zone to him. In retrospect, I wish we had thought to videotape him so we could show him that we weren’t lying.
The psychiatrist explained to me that, in this man’s case, his mind just could not accept all that blank space and filled it the best it could. It was one of the most pitiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. I remember how badly I felt for his wife (whom he could remember just fine, since his memories of her were created before the surgery, and were stored in long term memory).
Someone once died on the Dick Cavett Show. Many, many people swear they saw the episode on TV . . . except that it never actually aired.
My mother still swears she saw the Julia Child dropped turkey incident live on TV.
Snopes is full of similar incidents: Entertainment Archives | Snopes.com
The Mysterious Thunderbird Photo People thought they’d seen the picture in an old book, but there was no picture. Now there are some faked pictures, but that’s after the fact. Anybody that thinks they saw a picture may have seen one of the fakes at this point.
And in spite of all the thousands of baseball fans, obviously fewer and fewer every year, who swear they were there and saw Babe Ruth hit his famous “called shot” homerun, it is almost certain he never hit it. Although this may be less a case of people remembering something that didn’t happen than it is a case of people misinterpreting what they did see.
But Ruth did hit it, the debate is where he pointed before he hit it. In my mind, it doesn’t matter what or who he pointed at. When you make a pointing gesture in baseball when someone is riding you, that means “This one is going to make you shut up.”
He may not have called the spot of his shot, but Babe Ruth damn well called that home run.
Not “things that didn’t happen,” but related:
How many millions of people “remember” having been at Woodstock? (I actually was there, but there isn’t much I remember.)
Remembering things that didn’t happen? I don’t remember anything. That’s the beauty of it!
Well, for the longest time I clearly remembered having never watched “The Maltese Falcon”, but clearly watching the last scene on the telly.
And I clearly remembered Humprey dropping the statue on the floor, the statue shattering and it being filled with diamonds.
Imagine my surprise years later when I actually watched the whole movie and it ends with the maltese Falcon completely intact. Where did my ending came from, that’s what I want to know.
In most examples of this what you get is a situation where there is a lot of other people’s input being applied to a memory.
I believe that the latest studies into memory suggest that retrieving one isn’t really like looking for a video file on a hard drive. Memories, instead are a creative process in the brain which combines a set of experiences to actually re-create a particular memory almost form scratch. The brain “re paints” the scene in the “canvas” of your brain.
And that process is delicate. Often times it is possible to shape that memory by suggestion or by simply allowing the subconscious or the conscious mind to interfere in the process.
This leads to the conundrum: the more you revisit a memory, the less likely it is to be accurate.
As pointed out, he did hit a home run, the issue is whether he called it. Whatever happened, it sure rattled the pitcher (Charlie Root), whose very next pitch was also hit into the bleachers (by Lou Gehrig) thereby ending Root’s afternoon, and that pretty much did the Cubs in for that World Series.
However, this sort of thing is VERY common for sporting events; remembering things either that did not happen, or very commonly, conflating events together. Bill James, in one of his books, notes a propensity for memories to become combined, especially to combine unusual or memorable things with important things; for instance, an event where something weird happened, like a triple play or a ball rolling into someone’s sleeve, will be combined with an important game, like a pennant-clinching win. So the observer remembers how old Joe had a ball fall into his pants and it cost the Giants the pennant, but what really happened was that the ball-pants incident happened in a meaningless game the year before, and the observer’s memory moved it to a more important game.
Indeed, almost all sports anecdotes prior to the age of television should be closely examined for truth.
I actually came into the thread to mention the “Episode IV in Star Wars” thing, which a million people insist was there when the movie first came out even though it was not.
But even recent events… the day of 9/11, I was sitting in my office in Toronto watching the events unfold in horror. At about 9:30 EST I called my best friend, who lives in California, figuring I should be the one to inform him. I woke him up, told his what was going on, and he initially refused to believe me, then went to his TV.
A few years later his memory of the event had changed completely; he INSISTS he was already up and eating his breakfast and that he saw the second plane hit live on TV. But I know for a fact he did not, because I have it documented. We were exchanging E-mails after I called him and the words clearly say I’d woken him up after the attack. I’ve never bothered to point this out to him because it’s not in his nature to take that sort of thing well, but it’s a perfect example, and it happened in less than three years. I am sure my memory has me all screwed up on similar things as well.
It’s a common demonstration for a psychology professor (or a law professor) to have a few amateur actors perform a “crime” in front of the class and later ask students to “testify” from memory about what happened.
Usually the students’ accounts are quite contradictory, which shows that at least some of the students are remembering things which didn’t happen or forgetting things which did happen.
Right,
And what often happens in those cases is that someone makes an error, perhaps because they weren’t paying attention, perhaps because they were thinking of their girlfriends, or the girl a desk down from them, or the status of their grades, etc and they end up blurting out that say the perp had a beard. Other people around that person are re-creating their memory and suddenly, they too, can remember a beard on the perp, and some will even describe it in detail, even though the perp was clean shaven.
There have been a lot of experiments in this kind of suggestive memory editing. The one I recall had scientists conduct an interview with a number of subjects. They were asked about events in their youth which they had collected from the subject’s parents. Amongst the real events however, they inserted false events. Not surprisingly, the majority of subjects suddenly “remembered” the false events down to minute details that the scientists never mentioned and of course, were completely fabricated.