“Four out of 10 people have false memories of the 7/7 London bombings, according to researchers who questioned students about what they remembered seeing on news reports of the events.
Some people claimed to have seen non-existent CCTV footage of the bus exploding in Tavistock Square in July 2005, while others gave detailed descriptions of footage which did not exist…
Some of the students embellished their accounts with details they could not have witnessed. One wrote: “The bus has stopped at a traffic light. There was a bright light and a loud bang and the top of the bus flew off.”
The study backs up previous research by [Dr James Ost, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth] in which people claimed to have seen non-existent footage of the crash in Paris that killed Princess Diana.”
And also this experiment, in which people remembered meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. What are your favourite false memories?
Full story at the Guardian
The existence of at least two photographs of the immediate aftermath of the explosion:
http://www.officialconfusion.com/77/images/bus/bus_large.jpg
http://jforjustice.co.uk/77/images/bus5full.jpg
taken from different angles is surely a complicating factor here. It’d be interesting to know if the people who had the false memories had seen these photographs. Their memories would still be false of course but, for me, it would be less clear cut than the Guardian article suggests. I can certainly imagine a scenario where the visually-literate memory of a modern European might store two images, taken from different angles, as part of a continuous film segment, especially given that such photos were shown in the context of TV news reports at the time.
I’m a big fan of Strange Attractor; keep up the excellent work!