Twenty subjects. The researchers wrote to each family and collected real childhood photographs, then took the subject out of one of them and pasted them into a hot air balloon they had never been in.

Three interviews, spread over days. Look at the photograph. Think about it. Try to recall the afternoon, and if nothing comes, picture it — who took you, what the basket was like, how high you went.

Fifty percent of the subjects created complete or partial false memories.

Wade, Garry, Read and Lindsay, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2002 — abstract

The memories were not vague and did not stay the same size. Detail accumulated between sittings: the weather, who else was there, what was said on the way up, being frightened and being told not to be. Subjects who had reported nothing on the first visit arrived at the third with an afternoon.

The photograph did not testify to anything. It made no claim, it was not offered as proof, and it was not needed as proof. It was a place to put a memory, and twenty people were asked to look at it for a while, and half of them furnished it.

They were not deceived into remembering. They were given somewhere to build, and they built.