“Loftus learned for herself how realistic false memories can seem when she had an upsetting experience several years ago. She was shocked when, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that thirty years earlier, when her mother drowned in a pool, she had been the one who discovered the body. Loftus, who was fourteen when the drowning occurred, always believed that she had never seen her mother's dead body. Indeed, she remembered little about the death itself. She recounts what happened the next in her book 'The Myth of Repressed Memory'. Almost immediately after her uncle's revelation, 'the memories began to drift back, like the crisp, piney smoke from evening camp fires. My mother, dressed in her nightgown, was floating face down. . . . I started screaming. I remembered the police cars, their lights flashing'.
A few days later, she writes, 'my brother called to tell me that my uncle had made a mistake. Now he remembered (and other relatives confirmed) that Aunt Pearl had found my mother's body.' This shocked Loftus even more than her uncle's false revelation. If someone so specially trained as she is to recognize fallible memories could suddenly believe her own false memory, just think how readily the average person can be fooled.”