Do You Believe in Fairies?

Conan Doyle had a great interest in the spiritual world and his unshakable belief in  the genuity of the pictures convinced him to write The Coming of The Fairies in 1922 which told the story of the pictures and their implications, however it was an article in The Strand magazine that had really set off the controversy surrounding the pictures, the magazine sold out within days and the public imagination was captured.

Edward Gardener travelled to West Yorkshire and gave the girls new cameras and two dozen secretly marked photographic plates in the hope that they could capture more fairy pictures, the girls would not disappoint within days they had taken three more fairy pictures unmistakeably concrete proof of the existence of fairies, or was it?

 Picture courtesy of Cottingley Connect.

The authenticity of the photographs was discussed and written about many times after 1920, the two girls Elsie and Frances always maintaining the pictures were genuine, that was until 1981 when they finally confessed to The Unexplained magazine that the pictures were fakes, the fairies were cut outs from a book and by using hairpins and thread had been able to pull off their ruse. When asked by Arthur.C.Clarke in 1985 why they had never admitted the hoax, Elsie replied that after fooling the author of Sherlock Holmes they felt it best to keep quiet. Even after admitting the photographic, hoax Frances until her death in 1986, maintained that they really did see fairies in Cottingley Beck and that the fifth photograph was genuine.

It seems amazing now that two schoolgirls were able to fool the scientific community for so long, perhaps it was because some of them wanted to believe, their have been two films made about this story both released in 1997 Fairy Tale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies. Below is the fifth photograph that Frances always claimed was genuine, see what you think.