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The "rashoman" effect: What we see and remember is influenced by other things, including what is in our society, ideas going around, our worries, our guilts etc.

In the movie Rashomon, the four people all remember a crime differently (a neutral observer saw it a fifth way, and at the end of the movie, one can understand why all the others remembered it differently because they NEEDED to remember it differently.)

It's due to the power of suggestion: a way of the mind to cope with the unthinkable.

I remember a crash in Pittsburg, where two people saw an explosion, but others did not in the "raw" local footage...yet the pilots in the nearby planes did not see anything like this.

In the past, people seeing a plane crash thought of bombs, so when they saw a plane crash, they saw an explosion. After TWA 800, most people are seeing missles, because they think of missles not bombs when a plane crashes.

This is the reason people see UFO's when it is venus, or when we cure with placebos in medicine,, or some holy lady sees the virgin Mary. Ninety nine percent of these things are imagination.

However, when a pilot sees a UFO and the local radar sees it too, when a scientific study shows a medicine works, and when the lady seeing the virgin mary predicts the dangers of communism a couple weeks before the Russian revolution, then maybe a tiny percentage of these things could be true.

You have to separate the wheat from the chaff...