- Carter Tweed
Glitches in the Matrix
The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in 2008. In 2010, Fiona Broome started the website mandelaeffect.com after noticing many different Mass Memory Discrepancy Effect reports, and popularised the phrase "Mandela Effect". The concept of false memories has been around for centuries, but these focus on individuals. There hasn't really been much evidence for larger groups of people experiencing them before.
This gives rise to much speculation.
In particular, the quantum physicists notion of many worlds, each created when tiny particles in one have a "choice" of how to behave and in fact take different choices, each choice being a parallel universe to the others, has been linked to these collective memory differences. This came about partly due to the timing mentioned already, and partly because of the idea of humans being able to create these parallel universes at CERN and affect "reality" by somehow retaining a memory of a past event which didn't happen in their universe.