[1]: >> If everyone believes in the Easter Bunny does it make the Easter Bunny true? [2]: But in this case we know that the persons making the observations are not stupid. They're intelligent, educated, and rational. [3]: Being intelligent, rational and educated is still not a gaurantee. Sir Artthur Conan Doyle was all three ... as evidenced by his stories on Sherlock Holmes .... BUT! ............... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Fairies" - By Donald E. Simanek ... In 1917, two teenage girls in Yorkshire produced photographs they had taken of fairies in their garden. Elsie Wright (age 16) and her cousin Frances Griffiths (age 10) used a simple camera and were said to be lacking any knowledge of photography or photographic trickery. .... Photographic experts who were consulted declared that none of the negatives had been tampered with, there was no evidence of double exposures, and that a slight blurring of one of the fairies in photo number one indicated that the fairy was moving during the exposure of 1/50 or 1/100 second. They seemed not to even entertain the simpler explanation that the fairies were simple paper cut-outs fastened on the bush, jiggling slightly in the breeze. Doyle and other believers were also not troubled by the fact that the fairy's wings never showed blurred movement, even in the picture of the fairy calmly posed suspended in mid-air. Apparently fairy wings don't work like hummingbird's wings. Hardly anyone can look at these photos today and accept them as anything but fakes. The lighting on the fairies does not match that of the girls. The fairy figures have a flat, cut-out appearance. But spiritualists, and others who prefer a world of magic and fantasy accepted the photos as genuine evidence for fairies. Three years later, the girls produced three more photos. .... The girls said they could not photograph the fairies when anyone else was watching. No one else could photograph the fairies. There was only one independent witness, Geoffrey L. Hodson, a Theosophist writer, who claimed to see the fairies, and confirmed the girls' observations "in all details". ... Arthur Conon Doyle not only accepted these photos as genuine, he even wrote two pamphlets and a book attesting the genuineness of these photos, and including much additional fairy lore. His book, The Coming of the Fairies, is still in print, and some people still believe the photos are authentic. ... he defended the reality of fairies with all the evidence he could find. He counters the arguments of the disbelievers eloquently and at great length. In fact, his arguments sound surprisingly similar in every respect to present-day books touting the idea that alien beings visit us in UFOs. ... In 1977 Fred Gettings stumbled on important evidence while working on a study of early nineteenth-century book illustrations. He found drawings by Claude A. Shepperson in a 1915 children's book which the girls could easily have posessed, and which were, without a doubt, the models for the fairies which appeared in the photos. ..... A curious fact is that in this book, a compilation of short stories and poems for children by various authors, there's a story, "Bimbashi Joyce" by Arthur Conan Doyle! Surely he received a copy from the publisher. If Doyle had noticed this picture, and if he had the sort of perceptiveness he attributed to Sherlock Holmes, he might have concluded that the Cottingley photographs were fakes. But, maybe not. Believers are good at seeing what they believe, and not seing things that challenge their beliefs. .... Then, in 1982 the girls admitted, in interviews with Joe Cooper, that they had faked the first four of the photos. .... As many had suspected all along, the girls had used paper cutouts of fairy drawings. No great photographic skills were required, though the photos do show good artistic composition. Elsie had artistic skill, and had even worked for a few months in a photographer's shop retouching photographs. But the girls probably did no retouching on these photos. The simplest of means, just cut-out drawings of fairies stuck on the shrubbery, was all that was required to dupe gullible and predisposed minds like those of Arthur Conan Doyle, Geoffrey Hodson, and Edward Gardner. Many of the copies of these photos which have been circulated have been suspected of having been "improved" by retouching. This certainly may be true of the photos being prepared for publication in books, the desire being for the clearest possible result on the printed page. However, those who say the pictures are "too good" to have been taken by teenage amateur photographers, are showing an unwarranted prejudice, not consistent with the facts revealed by analysis of the original photos. Some have claimed to see a slight "blurring" of the fairy images, when, in fact, the fairies are more sharply defined than the girl's images. On the matter of Conan Doyle's gullibility, Gilbert Chesterton said ...it has long seemed to me that Sir Arthur's mentality is much more that of Watson than it is of Holmes.
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