How did two girls fool Conan Doyle and the experts with cardboard fairies?

Two girls, a borrowed camera and some cut-out paper fairies fooled one of the most famous writers in the world, and got past a photography expert's inspection. The Cottingley Fairies are five photographs taken by two cousins, Elsie Wright, 16, and Frances Griffiths, 9, near Bradford in England; the first two date from 1917. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a committed spiritualist, used them in The Strand in December 1920, hoping that if the public accepted fairies, it would more readily accept other psychic phenomena. The issue sold out within days.

The detail that troubled sceptics most is what the experts found. Harold Snelling, a photography expert, examined the original glass negatives and called them entirely genuine, unfaked photographs with no trace of studio work involving card or paper models. He did not say they showed fairies, only that they were straightforward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera. Kodak's technicians saw no signs of faking but declined to certify the pictures, and Ilford reported some evidence of faking.

The answer was simple, and the cousins admitted it in 1983, though both still said they really had seen fairies. They had copied fairies from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, cut them out in cardboard and held them up with hatpins. The photographs were real in the sense that light really fell on real plates. What was in front of the camera was the fake.

One newspaper had suggested it in 1921: to explain these photographs, what was wanted was not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children. Frances later said it had been just a bit of fun, and that she could not understand why people were taken in: they wanted to be taken in.