Fruit Loops?
The Mandela Effect is when something is misremembered by a whole bunch of people. The reason it is called the Mandela Effect is because the first notice of it was when a whole lot of people remember that Mandela died in prison. They recall vivid details about the event, when it happened, how world leaders reacted to the news. The only problem was that Mandela did not die in prison. He was released from prison and eventually became the president of South Africa. However, people will swear that they remember him dying in prison.
Since then a lot of other things have been misremembered. Like whether the candy bar Kit-Kat has a hyphen in it's name or not. Whether a character in the James Bond file Moonraker is wearing braces or if the continent of Australia is just too darn far North.
Now, there are people that firmly believe that when the changes occur it's because people are accidentally stumbling into a different dimension where things played out a little differently than the one they remember. Other people believe it's a mass hypnosis experiment conducted by the government (surly the government would conduct experiments on it's own people!!!) However, the simplest explanation is probably the best and that is that people's memory is just faulty.
Having said all that I did experience one minor Mandela Effect that still kind of trips me out if I think about it. When I first heard of the Mandela Effect there were people who claimed that the name of the Kellog's cereal "FRUIT LOOPS" was spelled "FROOT LOOPS". Then I thought "Hey, I remember fruit loops being spelled FROOT LOOPS too". So I looked it up on the internet but the internet said it was spelled "FRUIT LOOPS" and had always been "FRUIT LOOPS".
I checked the cereal ilse of my local grocery store and verified that "FRUIT LOOPS" was indeed spelled "FRUIT LOOPS" on the cereal box. I was perfectly willing to admit that my memory was faulty, although I was sure that it wasn't.
I forgot about it and about 8 months pass. I had completely forgotten about the Madela effect and one day it came back into my memory. So I thought I would check to see if "FRUIT LOOPS" was still spelled the same and it wasn't!!!!!! It went back to being spelled "FROOT LOOPS"!!! I checked the cereal isle and it indeed had changed back.
Now if you check the internet you will find that "froot loops" was indeed spelled "fruit loops" but the name was changed to "froot loops" in 1963. That was well before I was born. The name change of a cereal isn't a big deal but if I were conducting experiments on altering people perception of reality like that, I would do it on something that's not a big deal like the name of a cereal and see how many people freak out about it. Having said that the mind works in strange ways and sometimes a lot of people's minds work in the same strange way. That's probably what is going on.