2016 Postmortem

The brain does odd things in stressful situations - recall the Brian Williams effect:

"Clearly, Brian Williams is not alone when it comes to infamous false memories. In 2008, Senator Hillary Clinton recalled her experience in which she vividly remembered landing in Bosnia in 1996, under intense sniper fire, yet actual video of news footage showed that her group did not arrive under attack and in fact were walking calmly from the plane and in no apparent rush. Clinton’s critics accused her of deception, but she claimed she simply and honestly misremembered her experience and apologized.

George W. Bush also displayed some famous memory distortions, when, on several occasions, he told audiences that on 9/11, he had watched the first plane fly into the north tower of the World Trade Center on TV, just before entering that classroom in Florida to read a book to school kids.

All of these cases involved highly emotional moments that happened to people who are in the spotlight and doing very stressful things—and all the more reason one might think they would be hard to forget, perhaps. But just the opposite might be true under the right conditions. For Brian Williams, his trailing helicopter made an emergency landing in the desert behind the aircraft that was in fact hit (so, in fact, he saw damage to another helicopter, just not his own). Prior to landing in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton was instructed that she might have to wear a flak jacket to protect her from antiaircraft fire, and she was told her airplane might not be able to land at the airport in Bosnia because of some sniper fire in the area (thus, she was thinking about this issue prior to landing and may have had a vivid picture in her mind). Bush was told by an aide about the first crash into the World Trade Center Tower just before entering the classroom (again, he envisioned in his mind what had happened but hadn’t actually witnessed it)."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/metacognition-and-the-mind/201502/why-famous-people-aren-t-immune-false-memories