To me, it was nothing to be discussed, Mandela finally got out of prison, he got the Nobel Prize (shared) even. My friend who is very into politics and should have known this, says she (like so many else) believed he died in prison. I can understand if people watching the news with half an eye think this, but it got a little weird when she was sure that actually had happened.
I'm gonna let you in on a false memory of my own. It is nothing important really, still I know this happened, I'm yet to find the evidence. When I was in my early teens there was this TV show with a guy showing clips from really old music "videos". This was not its own program, it was a part of an entertainment chunk that aired every weekend. Later on, this show made it into its own show and it was slightly different. My brother loved that show. I know the name of the show. A year or so after, I asked my brother what the show was named, not the standalone show but the other one they showed in the entertainment chunk. He had no idea. How could he not know, being a fan? I even knew what type of word it was, which associations it gave me, but the word itself never came back to me.
As a young adult, one night I though, damn, I'm gonna find out what the show was called. Because at that point it was crystal clear the show had existed, I just couldn't recall its name, but I knew I would know, when I saw it. So I read my whole dictionary. Yes, I really did this. I didn't find the word so I gave up.
In today's world everything can be looked up online. So, I punched the show block name in and the name of the guy who had the mini show. He had not been on that show. I looked up his career. He had never made a sort of prequel to his standalone show. It did not exist. At all. The word the show was called, does not seem to exist.
He did however have a short show within another show, I can accept it gladly that I forgot which of the weekend shows he was in. Thing is, the name of it is not the right kind of word. Also I have not found any clips or images to see if this show even resembled the later stand alone show, the guy lost the rights of his own work so nothing is online. But from what I read, the shows had nothing in common, they were not similar.
I guess this IS a false memory after all. I really don't like the idea of it, I could accept it better if I had thought of it many years later, but it only took about a year or so after it was aired that it vanished from everyone's conscious but mine. After that short time it is almost impossible to distort a memory so grossly.
Oh yea, I also, many years ago thought NZ was north of Australia (a Mandela effect classic), but I simply chalked that down to poor learning.
Having false memories isn't that strange, but false memories shared by large groups of people? For me I do see a pattern though, it is often changed into what it "should" have been, something that would made more sense. So that the memory becomes more likely than reality. People remember Barbara Streisand because that is what they project on text when they read it. Then, if for some reason they are asked about the spelling, they can feel something is really off when they see she is named Barbra. Bar-bra.
I wish I could buy into this different dimension crap and weird effects of time travel, but I guess I am simply too boring.