For years, I thought I was psychic until I read about deja vu.
What happens is that your memories will re-arrange themselves to reflect the reality. For example, I dreamed about a high ceilinged room combined with a sunny day. The next day, I visit a church with large windows (a sunny room with high ceilings,) and my memory confuses the memory with the reality, giving me the sense that I had been there before even though I had never been there before.
In all the examples cited, it’s pretty easy to see that someone saw something similar, and then later attributed it to a famous event.
I am sure many people remember the famous video footage of a few years ago showing Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees diving into the stands to catch a foul ball and emerging triumphantly with a bloody face and the ball in his glove. It was shown countless times on tv. And yet people who watched it over and over again still won’t believe it didn’t happen! He did not dive into the stands to catch the ball. He lunged for it, caught it, and then his momentum carried him into the stands. Still a great catch, but not what almost everyone says they saw.
I think this is a different effect. There’s a famous experiment where two groups were shown footage of a car accident. Then, they were asked a question. The question was different between the two groups:
Group A: Did you see any broken glass?
Group B: Did you see any shattered glass?
Group B reported more broken glass (there was none in the film.)
By hearing “dive” over and over, they assumed they saw a dive.
I just read a book or an article on memory formation. Basically your memory is chemicals stored in your brain. When you remember something your brain manipulates those chemicals. The chemicals can be changed by remembering something. Thus your memories can be changed by remembering.
A retrospective fiction, Walloon, or else a surprising number of Americans were hallucinating simultaneously to identical effect.
For the benefit of those who a) haven’t followed the suggested link, and b) prefer contemporaneous evidence to mere assertion, here’s Mark Lane on the subject:
And here’s UPI’s own press release describing the film shown on New York’s WNEW-TV, among other places, in the first hour after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, 26 November 1963. Note that no known version of the Muchmore film contains footage of the presidential limo turning from Houston on to Elm:
By contrast, the earliest descriptions of the Zapruder film reveal that the presidential limousine’s left turn from Houston onto Elm was present:
Hm, there was more than one version of The Maltese Falcon, could it have been one of those?
Another option is an odd one, the same author also wrote a book called The Dain Curse, that involved diamonds, could it have been that?
The funky thing is now I am thinking that your diamonds in a statue scene is ringing a bell… but I don’t think it is a false memory suggested by your mention…
Read the linked article. There is no picture. The photo is supposed to be a pterodactyl shot by people and photographed with them. It was named the Thunderbird photo because some tribes had legends of a large bird called the Thunderbird that flew away with people. There are Thunderbird glyphs in the Americas.
There are pictures that have been faked up now, but they all showed up after this false memory was already known about. The picture was supposed to be in a published book.