[vidarh]

To me, your entire claim here comes across as "hallucination". That is, I simply do not believe that you have not experienced people accidentally inventing entire facts, and so I don't believe you are genuinely unaware of people doing it.

To be clear, I'm not arguing you've made this claim in bad faith at all.

However, going back and examining my own writing, I have more than once found claims that I'm sure I believed at the time of making them, but that I in retrospect realise I had no actual backing for, and which were for that reason effectively pure fabrication.

An enduring memory of my school days was convincing the teacher that she was wrong about a basic fact of geography. I was convinced. I had also totally made up what I told her, and provided elaborate arguments in favour of my position.

To me this is innate human behaviour that I see on a regular basis. People accidentally invent entire "facts" all the time.