Yes! That's it! Thank you!

I'm amazed that this is actually not an established theory, as I believed it to be. It explains why this doesn't have a wikipedia article, because it's really just the musing of some guy.

http://english.stackexchange.com/posts/244277/revisions

I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 Expanded Universe (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine Time, I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed.

Thing is, it's just not going to be acknowledged by large groups of people; for example Wikipedians won't like it because it totally undercuts what what they base verifiability on.