A case in point is an eyewitness account of a small plane crash which stated that the plane headed "straight down" into the ground, while photographs showed that the plane had a low trajectory and skidded for almost 1,000 feet. Other cases involve false criminal indictment; in a rape case, a concurrent TV image of a man's face merged with the rape experience as the victim recollected it. Most theoretical analyses divide the memory process into three stages: the acquisition stage, the retention stage, and the retrieval stage. This article studies the important factors of each of the three stages, including conditions of the event and the eyewitness (gender, age, psychological health, etc.), what distortions they are likely to produce, and the questioning methods and wordings. 95 references.