reliability of eye-witness accounts

Many people have vivid and substantially accurate memories of events which are erroneous in one key aspect: the source of the memory. For example:In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot's heroic response: "Never mind. We'll ride it down together." ...this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film "A Wing and a Prayer." Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source (Schacter 1996, 287).An even more dramatic case of source amnesia (also called memory misattribution) is that of the woman who accused memory expert Dr. Donald Thompson of having raped her. Thompson was doing a live interview for a television program just before the rape occurred. The woman had seen the program and "apparently confused her memory of him from the television screen with her memory of the rapist" (Schacter 1996, 114). Studies by Marcia Johnson et al. have shown that the ability to distinguish memory from imagination depends on the recall of source information.Tom Kessinger, a mechanic at Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, gave a detailed description of two men he said had rented a Ryder truck like the one used in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. One looked just like Timothy McVeigh. The other wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt, and had a tattoo above the elbow on his left arm. That was Todd Bunting, who had rented a truck the day before McVeigh. Kessinger mixed the two memories but was absolutely certain the two came in together.

We have only in the last decade or two had the information necessary to realize how easily a memory may be twisted or created.

schraf writes:Remember the hubub surrounding the "recovered memories of childhood abuse" a few years back where people were convicted solely on the basis of victim testimony? Remember the same kind of uproar there was over those Satanic cults which were killing children, complete with trials and convictions, except that those cults never existed?

But to your personal account, to your life experiences, your perception is the only thing that matters.