imperialscum said:

Well if we are honest, Lucas was not the only person from the production crew who made stuff up.

For stuff that old, I'm sure a lot of half-forgotten details get fudged or moved around. Everyone's the big hero of their own personal life story, and details that run counter to that narrative sometimes just get automatically thrown out or altered if for nothing else but to make remembering the big picture easier. Not necessarily in some self-aggrandizing way, either. Just a matter of "I made a hell of a lot of dialogue updates. Here is one dialogue update in Empire. There's a memory gap of who made the update, but what the hell chances are I did it." And the rest is (revisionist) history.

I think the misstatements by Lucas fit this mold, but they seem a little more jarring than some others because it's often not merely a matter of switching around a few dates, actions, or cause and effect, so much as creating a whole parallel universe of pseudo-facts to support the narrative of the genius director working outside the Hollywood system, producing a few promising proto-films in the seventies and eighties, and then really coming into his form and making several wildly-critically-acclaimed indie films in the nineties and beyond.