"Unlike many other conspiracy theories, the doctrine of the Berensteins seems to be gaining
traction due to the fact that readers can take a side. There's Team Stein and Team Stain and
some of the people misremembering the fact, whatever they think that fact is, see that misremembrance
as proof of a different, and possibly darker, timeline.
Several theorists in particular think that the Berenst(E)ain Bear conspiracy is proof of the Mandela Effect.
The Mandela Effect is the brainchild of Fiona Broome, and it pulls its name from when a large group of people
all had vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison. A thing that in this timeline, as they say, never
happened. The theory reasons that if there is a large population of people who all share a similar false memory
then the phenomenon is "related to alternate history and parallel realities.""
-Lamoureux, M. (2015, August 10). The Berenst(E)ain Bears Conspiracy Theory That Has Convinced the Internet There Are Parallel Universes | VICE | United States. Retrieved from http://www.vice.com/read/the-berensteain-bears-conspiracy-theory-that-has-convinced-the-internet-there-are-parallel-universes
"They all say it. At first I thought they had changed their name. Maybe anti-semitic pressure lead them
to spell their name differently? And then maybe they doctored the images of the cover to turn the original
"e" in to an "a". Except as I read, I learned about people equally as shocked as I am, who ran to their parents
house and dug up their own copies of the books and saw, to their own great terror, that the physical book itself
no longer says "BerenstEin", but in fact says "BerenstAin", but more horrifying still is that it has always said
"BerenstAin".
Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of
whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow,
at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively
changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been
altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc."
-Reece. (2012, August 23). the Wood between Worlds: The Berenstein Bears:
We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe. Retrieved from http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.com/2012/08/
the-berenstein-bears-we-are-living-in.html