In 1917, two young girls Elise Wright (16) and Frances Griffith (10) borrow Elise's fathered camera and took two pictures of what the girls claimed to be fairies they spotted in Cottingley Beck, England. Although Elise's father considered the photos a fake, her mother, convinced they were authentic, decided to publish them.
Initally the photos were authenticated by some of the worlds leading photography experts, although some such as those from Kodak argued that their were many ways the girls could have tampered in the taking of the photograph. Two years later, Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes saga) a strong believer in spiritualism published the photos in an edition of the Strand crazy creating a mass world-wide media frenzy, prompting the girls to take three more photographs of the fairies dancing/bathing in the sunlight.
It was not until some 58 years later that a researcher spotted the fairies featured in the photograph to be identical to the fairies illustrated in Princess Mary's Gift Book, a childrens book published in 1917. Three years later the two girls now in their late seventies admitted to staging 4 of the 5 photographs using paper-cut out and hat-pins. Francis however maintained that the first image shown above was genuine.
More images can be found here
I was given a book about this when I was a child. Still one of my favourite books to date.
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