Ready to Ruin your childhood?

Aw, I love the Berenstein Bears… wait, what The BerenSTAIN Bears?

Conspirators! 

Is your childhood a lie?

Do you trust in the world at large?

Is it possible that the moment we left our childhood we entered a parallel reality that has left us small clues, like the fact that The Berenstein Bears have ALWAYS (apparently) been spelled The BerenstAin Bears?

Let’s open a rift in the time-space continuum and find out:

Yeah? What is the Truth, Mama Bear? What. Is. The. Truth??

How do you remember the name being spelled? If you answered “Berenstein,” you are very much not alone. The split seems pretty even almost everywhere one looks on the internet (which, as we know, is full of truth and honor.) 

The agreement that something was fishy first circulated around the more unknown edges of the internet until it finally found its way to Reddit, Vice, and even Forbes. (Boy, they’ve really gone downhill haven’t they?) The most elemental breakdown of these theories is that, at one point, between the years of 1986 and 2011, the timeline of human history was altered forever. This major shift caused almost imperceptible shifts in our realities such as logos looking different, songs ending differently than before or even certain celebrities lived when they should have died (*cough* Carrot Top *cough*) or vice versa. 

Advocates of the theory call these alterations “residue,” as if a certain timeline had been erased, leaving behind small hints of what should have been. And besides our Berenstain bears debacle (I’m GETTING TO IT,) the biggest hint of all involves, that’s right, Nelson Mandela…

Nelson Mandela, dead or alive? Or both?…Huh?

An absurd amount of human beings are convinced that Nelson Mandela died in prison in South Africa in 1985. Everyone mourned, his wife gave a moving eulogy, and the worst decade of all time finally ended. 

But none of that happened. Mandela died in 2013. So… what the heck, guys!?

This incident gave a proper name to these residues we’ve been discussing, dubbing the phenomenon: “The Mandela Effect.” 

The most popular theory is that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (but they’re French so CERN is the abbreviation we got) created a splinter in space and time during one of its routine Hadron Collider experiments. This rift blurred the realities between our original timeline and that of other parallel universes, causing not only the residue but the impending feelings of doom... the worst of these being the shift in the spelling of a childhood classic (absolutely horrifying, am I right?)

My God, their eyes.... DON’T LOOK INTO THEIR EYES!!

To help get a handle on all of the chaos, a Vice reporter went to an expert, Dr. Henry L. Roediger, who is an expert on false memories. His response:

"I'm not sure that misremembering one letter in a long name is a major league false memory," he wrote VICE in an email. "My guess is that in this case that "stein" is remembered because it is a common ending of many names—Einstein, Frankenstein, Goldstein, etc."

Almost too obvious that he’s CLEARLY in on the conspiracy to keep all of this hush hush from the common people. Because was it Einstein… or Einstain…???

(^photographic evidence of spelling change. Also, this called a videotape for all of our readers who don’t know what it was like to grow up without internet…)

A beacon of sound logic or another conspiracy shill?

Now, this last quote comes from an anonymous comment off of a bizarre little piece of the internet universe, but it’s rare when we come face to face with someone directly involved in the incident:

“I normally don't comment on blogs about our family name but yours was so unusual and imaginative that I thought it only appropriate to add my thoughts. "Berenstain" according to our family lore was an attempt by an unknown imigration officer sometime in the late 1800s to reproduce phonetically a highly accented version of the traditional Jewish name "Bernstein" as pronounced by my Father's grandparents when they came to America from the Ukraine.

In that linguistic region, the name tended to come out sounding something like, "Ber'nsheytn". Since that's how the name was originally documented, it has always been spelled that way by our family and it has always been misread and mispronounced by nearly everyone. It has always been "The BerenstAin Bears". Your parallel reality theory is very resourceful but, unfortunately, by applying Occam's razor, we arrive at the explanation that most people have just misread the name.”

— Mike Berenstain (Son of Stan and Jan)

Clearly ANOTHER steerer of this grand conspiracy...

Stop Looking At Each Other Like That You Lannister Wannabes

So what do you think? Is there some truth here? Is this complete garbage? Wish you could have these 10 minutes back? Why don’t you waste some more and dive into the details:

• VICE

• FORBES

As always, stay ‘spicious. 

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