This is an Occam's Razor situation, folks.
Which of these is a more likely scenario?
Scenario One:
At nine years old, rancher saw a very different and thus-far-undocumented cut of one of the biggest movies of all time, in which there was footage from a number of scenes which have long been considered to have been excised from the film for various reasons, yet not a single person of any significant credibility (i.e., someone involved in either the making of the film or the distribution of it in those early days) has ever mentioned this markedly different cut's existence in 35 years.
Moreover, practically no one at all has suggested they saw any such cut, save a few people online who, like rancher, insist that they remember doing so, but can't really back it up with anything beyond "but I remember it perfectly".
Decades of interviews with cast and crew have failed to document this rare early cut of the film, and the thousands of obsessive, hardcore fans out there have simply received bad information for all these years:
The scenes that we've always been told were never finished? They totally were.
The Wampa scenes that we thought were abandoned in mid-shoot because the effects simply looked terrible, for example? Nope! They actually figured out how to make it all look good enough to be included in the most anticipated special effects film of all time, without concern for it sticking out like a sore thumb against the rest of the cutting-edge effects in the film.
Oh, and that footage also didn't look anything like the few bits of deleted Wampa footage we have seen so far, obviously, since that footage is so totally unconvincing that it's clear why they must've started over with something else.
But despite all that, they cut it out anyway.
Basically there's *a lot* of fully-complete -- but deleted -- scenes from The Empire Strikes Back which no one ever talks about for some reason, and the entirety of the rabid, fanatical Star Wars fan base has somehow missed it all.
Scenario Two:
Rancher is mis-remembering.
I mean, come on.