Television anchor Bryan Williams isn’t the first person to be embarrassed by claiming a remembrance that, well, never really happened.
Recent history shows how several famous figures suffered what one expert labels a false “flashbulb” memory.
A scientist
Astrophysicist and television host Neil deGrasse Tyson, a protege of the late Carl Sagan, claimed he heard President George W. Bush make a remark intended to highlight divisions between Judeo-Christian Americans and fundamentalist Muslims.
Tyson’s assertion is still published on the webpage of the Hayden Planetarium, which he runs.
“After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S. from the Muslim fundamentalists, said, ‘Our God is the God who named the stars.’ The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don’t think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making,” Tyson said in a 2008 speech.
Fact checkers found Tyson’s recollection to be wrong, and The New York Times even published an opinion piece in December 2014 by two psychology professors about the Tyson incident and “Why Our Memory Fails Us.”
“In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, ‘The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,’ and he said nothing about the stars,” wrote professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.
“Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that ‘the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.’ ”
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“I made a mistake,” he later confessed to Oprah Winfrey in 2006. “I made a lot of mistakes in writing the book and promoting the book.”
Pressed if he lied or made a mistake, Frey elaborated on what happened.
“I think probably both,” he said.
He admitted to embellishing several facts: he was jailed for only a few hours, not 87 days; and each character in the book wasn’t wholly represented.
But he asserted his book remained a memoir.
He told CNN’s Larry King that no one objected to about 200 pages of re-created conversations in the book, because it’s understood that those are subjective memories.
“In every case, I did the best I could to recreate my life according to my memory of it,” Frey told King. “When I had supporting documents, I used them.”
Winfrey retracted her support of the author, saying she felt “conned” by him.
