What causes a false memory?

[D_Bone_Steak]

So I was living in Los Angeles... Hollywood to be exact, but I was taking some time off and hanging out in Palmdale. There was a huge aurora in the sky and the people on the street were saying it's on the news, they blasted a nuke in space to see what it would do. At the time, it felt like a normal event. But weeks later people would look at me crazy for mentioning it. Was it real? I'm at the point that I don't believe it was real anymore... but why such a false memory? It had nothing to do with some sort of trauma or anything at all. This all happened around 2001 if you're curious. Literally, nobody I've talked to remembers the nuke in space experiments where the shades in the sky was visable from daylight. It was all just in my head.

[Anonymous]

I have a friend like that. He brings up stuff that was likely to never have happened. I asked him how he comes up with this stuff because some of it was so odd. His reply was that maybe he dreamed it but remembered it as being real.

[D_Bone_Steak]

It felt real. Like it was so normal that everybody was talking about it as just a thing. Then some time went by and nobody (and I mean literally nobody) even remembers such a thing. Even the people that were explaining what it was to me, because I didn't watch the news, they were completely oblivious to any of it. I even remember it was on the internet with news articles and everything a few days after... a week after, there is nothing out there about it at all. So I know it's crazy or I someone passed through some other dimensions timeline for a week...

God damn it felt real though. Nuke tests in space that everybody knew about just turned into something my mind made up.