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| map source: mapshop.com |
(According to my sources, for example: Lima, Peru is directly south of Washington, D.C.)
Other people remember South America as more or less directly south of North America. According to their memories, Lima is more or less directly south of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast of North America, and Washington is more or less directly north of Rio de Janeiro, on the Atlantic coast of South America.
These people look at maps such as this one, and they wonder: How can this be? Of course, they don't think: How can Lima be so far east of San Francisco? How can Rio be so far east of Washington? They see it all at once; they think: Why is South America in the wrong place?
This is not a trivial matter. The difference amounts to the distance from San Francisco to Washington, more than 2400 miles as the crow flies. (Personally, if I were the crow, I would rather fly from Washington to San Francisco, but that's a story for another time.)
The point is: a huge land mass is out of place by more than 2400 miles. And the question I want to consider is this: What do we do when we come face to face with such a huge discrepancy?
In my experience, it depends on who we are. Some people brush it off: who cares?, just one of those things, one of life's sweet little mysteries, gotta get back to work, or whatever. Some people take it as their own error. They think: I must not have paid enough attention in school, or maybe I've just forgotten.
But other people get curious. They start looking at world maps online, all of which show the same thing. And they wonder: Who changed all these maps?
It's shocking enough that all the maps on the Internet appear to have been changed. The bigger shock comes when they look in libraries and find that all the old atlases also show South America in the new position. So they wonder: Who changed all the atlases? How could they have done this? And why?
In less advanced cultures, when people found that their memories differed from all available sources of confirmation, they sometimes wondered what was wrong with themselves: whether their educations may have been deficient, at least on this point, or whether their memories may have failed them, at least on this subject.
But we're advanced now, and we don't have to wonder. People have good educations and good memories. Something else must be going on. What is it?
The more we look into it, the more clearly we can see what's going on here. There's nothing wrong with these people. They're well-educated and they have good memories and they learned world geography in school and they haven't forgotten any of it.
They're simply experiencing the Mandela Effect.
