The Sunday New York Times Magazine explores false memories and the controversy over the work of Susan Clancy, formerly with the Harvard Psychology Department. We agree with Clancy:

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in. ''You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie,'' Clancy said. ''Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in.''

The current controversy over Clancy involves her use of people who claimed to be abducted by space aliens as subjects for her tests. We'd refer you to the work of memory guru and Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus on the topic and her excellent book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, which is available in paperback.

Popular Science also explored the phenonemon yesterday:

Our memories are, to some degree, like a final-cut videotape: Research confirms that each of us continually edits and splices recollections, replacing one "picture" with another, sometimes with a little outside assistance. "Memory is a creative event, born anew every day," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who is a leading expert on the malleability of eyewitness testimony. "You fill in the holes every time you reconstruct an event in your own mind."

A decade of intensive research has taught Loftus and her colleagues how easy it is to plant false memories. In experiments, they've demonstrated that few people, if any, can reliably distinguish between memories of something they've been shown and something they've been asked to imagine.