A widely believed one, mostly outside the road community, is the belief that one mile out of every five miles of Interstate must be perfectly straight to allow planes to land. (Nobody who espouses this belief stops to consider that this would make constructing an Interstate in places like West Virginia borderline impossible.)
Are these the Mandela Effect or an Urban Legend gone way out of control? Legitimately asking. Are they the same thing?
I mean the Mandela Effect is basically everyone having a memory that is off what actually happened because the retelling of the story, albeit wrong, becomes more popular than the actual event. The same can be said about an Urban Legend.
Makes me think.....
According to the creator of the concept "Mandela Efffect", it's
how an individual latches onto a distorted version of reality. It seems to now be caught up with misspellings of product names, a bunch of
who-gives-a-crap for everyone other than marketers.
True to form, the concept has been a little distorted; sometimes we just logically fill in the potholes of our knowledge, other times, we accept information that's slightly incorrect (spelling of things), outdated (technological/archaeological advancement), distorted by your circles (if your friends and family believe something you tend to accept it), artistic license (Hollywood and TV distort perception and facts), or sometimes even patent nonsense (info you probably picked up when you were a child or very new to a subject).
That a handful of people believe something that isn't correct isn't really the Mandela Effect; it's just wrong information because of the small sample size. I think most of these are not really Mandela Effect (I'm not big on the idea, frankly).
The
Interstate Highway must be straight every five miles...blah-blah-blah is more of an urban legend, probably the best known and most specific to this hobby. But many others listed here are just specific bits or trivial bits of information outside of this hobby.
Interstate Highway funding is misunderstood because...well, who was explaining that to the masses in the first place? Anyone outside of DOT circles? So there's going to be a major disconnect between the public at large and the typical motorist. After all, the typical assumption is that any public good or service comes from The Government, and that's all need to worry about until you need to complain about a pothole. Few are going to dig deep and figure that one out on their own.
Whether the Golden Gate Bridge isn't part of US 101 isn't really a mysterious Mandela Effect; example because there's dozens of signs and thousands of printed maps saying so. But nothing stating otherwise, at least not in a straightforward and easily-digestible way. So it's not a conspiracy, just a matter of convenience. (Still an interesting fact; one of those I'd forgotten about.)