It’s a basic fact of psychology that people can form different memories of the same events. But sometimes this happens in a way that defies all rational explanation. At a party I attended on New Year’s Eve, for example, I was both charming and witty, dazzling everyone I spoke to with wry anecdotes and exquisite bon mots. But the next morning, I awoke to a flood of messages which told a different story: apparently I had been boorish and obnoxious – starting fist-fights, bursting into tears, and at one point commandeering the speakers to sing a satirical ditty about Keir Starmer being a Slytherin. Something strange, maybe even supernatural, was going on: it seemed that everyone other than me was experiencing a false memory, mass delusion, or even a parallel reality. This mystery – and others like it, where groups of people misremember the same event – can be described as “the Mandela Effect.”

The term – which was coined in reference to a phenomenon where countless people around the world shared the same false memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s – has resurfaced on TikTok over the last few weeks. Some of the most popular examples include the idea that there used to be a cornucopia (a horn overflowing with fruit and vegetables) on the logo for t-shirt company Fruit of the Loom, that the Monopoly Man used to wear a monocle, and that Darth Vader says, “Luke, I am Your Father” (when really he says, “No, I am your father” – this one seems a little pedantic). There is a simple explanation for this phenomenon: our memories are malleable, subjective and liable to be influenced by the information we’re exposed to. The Mandela Effect is basically contagious: the more people there are who believe the same falsehood, the likelier we are to believe it, too. But others believe something more sinister is afoot.

According to one conspiracy theory, the CERN Large Hadron Collider has created endless parallel realities, and the false memories that people experience are actually echoes of a past that once existed. Others believe that shadowy forces are gaslighting the public to test how gullible we are: they start with small and seemingly irrelevant details and then before we know it, we’re struggling to remember a time when we weren’t confined to our pods, surviving on intravenous injections of puréed bugs and making a daily pledge of allegiance to God-Emperor Hillary Clinton.

As explained by TikTok user Nicole (@dimlifting), the Fruit of the Loom example is really an exercise in corporate malfeasance. She notes that, in 1973, the t-shirt company was ‘responsible for one of the largest chemical poisoning that's ever happened in the Western world” and “contaminated the food in the entire state of Michigan”, and suggests that the disappearing cornucopia could have been part of a post-scandal rebrand. The part about the chemical poisoning is true, but why would making such a minor adjustment help their image problem? Wouldn’t it make more sense to change their name? And why would they think that embarking on an elaborate – and surely easily disproven – conspiracy help them regain consumer trust? People have dug up several examples of garments that appear to show the cornucopia, but it’s difficult to verify when they were made or by whom.

If the above doesn’t seem to make sense, the explanation could be even more diabolical. “I have a theory that the Mandela Effect is used to see how much of history can be altered right in front of our eyes,” argued one of the hosts on The Mind’s Eye podcast on TikTok. “They’re using this to see ‘oh, if we can get people to forget certain primary things about their childhood, what can we do with history?’” The implications of this are truly chilling. If the powers that be can manipulate us into thinking that a t-shirt brand once had a slightly different logo, then there’s no end to what they can make us believe. Before long, we could be collectively brainwashed into insisting that Saltburn was a good film, or that Taylor Swift was once named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.