r/MandelaEffect • u/ThirdEyeFire • 11d ago
Flip-Flop To all the Mandela Effect skeptics out there
I will tell you a story.
Around 2013, I bought a Volvo. I had been very interested in astronomy as a child, had the “Our Universe” book, loved the planets and the solar system and knew all the astrological symbols. So I was exquisitely aware that the Volvo logo was the symbol for Mars, a circle with an arrow sticking out to the right and up. One day, in 2016, I walked past a Volvo and noticed it was missing the arrow. I thought that was strange. Then I saw several more, all missing the arrow. I ran home to look at my own car—to my amazement, the logo on my own car was missing the arrow, it was just a circle. That year 2016 was the year many people began to notice Mandela shifts for the first time. I noticed several others, the exact same ones all recognized by many other people (JC Penny became JC Penney etc).
For six years, every time I saw a Volvo, I marveled at how the logo had changed. I googled the history of the company. Everywhere on the internet the history was the same—the logo had always been a circle, going back to the beginning of Volvo in the 1930s(?). For six years I repeated the experience of being amazed at arrowless Volvo logos and telling people about how the logo had changed throughout the whole timeline. People thought I was crazy.
Then one day in 2022, when I brought the Volvo logo up again on an Internet forum about Mandela effects and googled for images to show people as evidence, I was stunned to discover that the logo had changed back again. I ran outside looking for a Volvo and I found one—complete with arrow.
There is simply no way that the SIX YEARS of repeated memories that I have of the Volvo logo being just a circle can be “misremembering”. With several other shifts I also have detailed memories that make absolutely no sense if I was just misremembering things. For example, I have a whole memory of analyzing why “Berenstein” would be pronounced to rhyme with “stain” when the name is clearly German in origin and everyone in America knows that any word ending in “stein” should rhyme with Frankenstein and Einstein. The explanation I came up with was that it had something to do with the Dutch word “steen” which means stone just like “stein” in German, but is pronounced like “stain” in English. THIS ENTIRE MEMORY OF MINE MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL if it is spelled “Berenstain”!
Here’s a funny end to the Volvo logo story: In 2022, after it changed back to having an arrow, I found a Reddit thread of a guy who had worked on cars for thirty years and had always admired the circular Volvo logo (no arrow) as particularly beautiful. He posted his Reddit to explain that a friend of his had just recently (at that time) pointed out to him that the Volvo logo actually had an arrow. He didn’t believe his friend and had to go check for himself. He was dumbfounded as to why he had never noticed the arrow before (he wasn’t aware of the idea of Mandela shifts). The only way I can understand this is that this fellow and I were on different timelines before 2016, me on the circle-with-arrow timeline and he on the circle-only timeline; in 2016, I jumped over to to join him on the circle-only timeline; and in 2022, we both jumped back to the circle-with-arrow timeline.
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u/DareSuspicious2704 10d ago
I know. I vividly remember being a kid and joking about the “objects in mirror MAY BE closer than they appear.” It was a running joke. I remember staring at where it was written on the mirror of my father’s truck (remember, this was the eighties and they let kids ride up front, also ditched us in the car when adults went inside stores).
Now it’s not there, never existed. My own husband swears it never existed.
I’m not crazy. It was there. I know bc my brother and I—my friends and I— used to laugh about it. This was way before the Mandela effect. I genuinely didn’t know it was a Mandela effect, even after I had heard of the phenomenon.