FTW!
While we haven’t had an elephant crash into a room yet, my family has what we call “The Death of Bo” story. It’s a long story (told it once here) but the short version- and the facts we all agree on- are
-Back in the 1970s we had a St. Bernard named Bo who weighed well over 200 pounds- massive dog
-Bo was given to us by his previous owners who had to get rid of him
-A couple of years after they gave us Bo they had to get rid of a female St. Bernard and offered her to us and we accepted
-The day they brought up the “bride” (B.B.) Bo was brought in, happily reunited with his previous owners, and got to sniff the bride
-While Bo’s previously family was in our living room Bo dropped dead of a heart attack
-We had to take some “extraordinary measures” to get the 200+ pound body of Bo out of the house without his former owners finding out
I was about 9 or 10 and my siblings were 6 and 7 years older. In the 35 years or so since we have told this story many times- still comes up at least every third time we’re together (i.e. once ever 5 years) and we all agree on the above points. Where we vary though is on who did what in getting the dog’s body out of the house. Each one of us tells a completely different and egocentric story about moving the dog out of the house, and any one of us I have no doubt could pass a lie detector test, I’ve no doubt.
There are other stories we vary on but this is the big one and unlike others I don’t think any of us has intentionally edited it. My brother and I each remember our sister playing a negigible role and being in the other room when this happened- our accounts are pretty much the same other than what he did and what I did- but our sister remembers pulling the dog’s corpse (which I’d swear she didn’t and so would my brother). My brother swears that he pulled the dog out the back door alone which I don’t even think would have been possible (he was a scrawny teenager and this was a HUGE dog). I’m guessing that if we could somehow zap a Flip Cam back in time to the 1970s and watch the video we’d see a 4th version altogether, but it’s an interesting family Rashomon moment.
They might not all involve dead dogs but I’m guessing any family or group of friends has these things where they differ and any one of them could pass a lie detector test and yet the versions are mutually exclusive and can’t all be true. I think after a while you have to develop an “I stand absolutely by my version… but I could be wrong” sort of flexible rigidity.
There have been numerous experiments about people’s memories and observations and how extremely suggestible even the most observant and intelligent people can be. One I saw on a documentary once- wish I could remember the name- involved a professor who was teaching a forensic pyschology class at a major research university- can’t remember which; he was teaching a class when in walked a somewhat disoriented young man and after saying “sorry, I think I’m in the wrong room” he suddenly lunged for the professor’s briefcase, grabbed it and ran out of the room before any student could stop him. Some of the students wanted to run for help or call 911 of course but this is when the professor let them in on the ruse: it was a set up.
The professor said something like (I’m paraphrasing) “Enrique really does have my brief case but I know him, he’s one of my student assistants, and he agreed to help me with this, but you won’t be seeing him again until after the experiment”. Then he asked all of his students to write a description of “Enrique” as if they’d witnesed a real robbery. What was interesting was that the descriptions were all over the map as far as the guy’s height, weight, age, what he was wearing, etc., but almost all agreed that he was dark haired, and was Hispanic.
Point of fact: the guy wasn’t Hispanic or black haired, nor was his name Enrique (or whatever Hispanic sounding name the professor used)- he was an Anglo kid wearing a baseball cap over brown hair and if you had stood him in front of the class and asked anybody to describe him nobody would have said ‘Hispanic’. That tiny seed though, with no other mention of his ethnicity, caused most of the class to remember that one detail which wasn’t true. The professor’s point was of course that eyewitness testimony, when the witness did not know the person beforehand and especially when they’re from a different race or ethnic group or whatever, can be some of the least reliable evidence there is even though it’s treated as some of the most reliable. Memories aren’t cameras.
A more appropriate example in this case isnt a hat, but that 3 of the people saw a gorilla vs 3 seeing an elephant. If the person really feels they’ve had a large enough experience, the argument that it could be fallible memory becomes a much tougher sell.
As in I cant reliably tell you what I did on June 10 1975, but if you told me I never went to school for a year in England as a child, Im going to take more than a fair bit of convincing.
Please note Im not saying that god exists, simply that this isnt a good argument for why someones experience might be mistaken.
Otara