Cottingley Fairies
_V2.jpg)
The term Cottingley Fairies (German: Cottingley Fairies ) refers to five photos taken in 1917 by the two young cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright in Cottingley , a village in the Bradford area , in England . The photos later turned out to be fakes and are considered one of the biggest hoaxes of the 20th century.
Emergence
In July 1917, the then 9-year-old Frances Griffiths, who had spent much of her young life in South Africa, was visiting her 16-year-old cousin Elsie Wright in Cottingley. The two girls spent long hours playing at Cottingley Brook, a small stream. When asked about their fascination for the location, the two said they had repeatedly met fairies there. To the amazement of the family, they shortly after presented a picture they had taken with a camera borrowed from Elsie's skeptical father Arthur Wright; Frances was clearly visible on it, surrounded by five fairies in the shape of small people with butterfly-like wings and airy clothes. Two months later, the children showed a second photo of Elsie with a dwarf who was also winged in a pointed hat.
Copies of the recordings were circulating among friends, but the matter was on hold for three years.
distribution
In 1920, prints of the photos found their way to Edward Gardner , a leading theosophist of the time, who turned to photography expert Harold Snelling with fascination. He made professional prints (which should complicate later investigations) and declared the recordings to be real:
“This plate has only been exposed once ... These dancing figures are neither made of paper nor of any fabric; they are not painted on a photographed background - but what convinces me most is that all these figures moved during the exposure. "
As a result, slides were made of the recordings and shown during lectures. In this way, the pictures also came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , who had publicly professed spiritualism . Doyle contacted Gardner. The two decided to commission Kodak with a second appraisal; this was a draw; The reviewer doubted the authenticity of the recordings ("Since there are no fairies, the recordings must have been falsified somehow"), but was unable to prove a specific falsification, even if he could carry out a technically plausible possibility of its creation. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, was convinced that he had evidence of the existence of supernatural powers.
Gardner then paid the family several visits and loaned the children a camera with a tripod and 24 marked photo plates, which resulted in three more pictures. Arthur Wright was still convinced that these were fakes, but did not stand in the way of the famous gentlemen who wanted to make their discovery public.
Towards the end of 1920, Conan Doyle published an article entitled "Epochal Event - Fairies photographed" in the Christmas edition of his main journal The Strand Magazine . The article showed and described the first two images and marked the beginning of a tumultuous controversy. The issue was sold out after a few days. Until 1924 Doyle had further articles follow and also published the remaining pictures.
The public reaction was lively and divided. The mental health of the famous author has often been questioned; In particular, the fashionable hairstyles of the fairies were ridiculed. Others, in turn, pointed to the innocence and youth of the children (presented under a pseudonym), who are certainly not capable of forgery. In 1921 Gardner sent a certain Geoffrey Hodson , a medium and spiritualist, to Cottingley, who reported on sighted fairies, but was unable to capture any photographically.
Conan Doyle was not impressed by the ridicule and dissatisfaction of the critical majority and published The Coming of the Fairies in 1922 . Combining the history of the photographs and their discovery with a collection of fairy sightings and fairy tales from around the world, the book set out the implications of these phenomena as they presented themselves to the author. Until his death in 1930 he believed in the authenticity of the Cottingley fairies.
The story went through the media several times in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, with several books published (one by Gardner). In 1978 the stage magician and supporter of the so-called skeptic movement James Randi took on the matter. After an analysis, he and several colleagues declared the pictures fake, but the two authors stuck to their story. It was not until 1983 that Elsie Wright, now 83 years old, admitted the forgeries; 75-year-old Frances Griffiths at least insisted that the picture with the gnome was real. The other four photos were fake, but she actually saw fairies.
The fairies turned out to be from Princess Mary's Gift Book, an elaborately illustrated collection of poems and stories that had been distributed for charity in 1914. Elsie, who was gifted in drawing, had drawn them on cardboard, cut them out and posed them with hat pins.
In New Zealand, news of the forgery finally reached Edward Gardner; shortly afterwards he died at the age of 96.
filming
1997 came two films in theaters that are based on this story, Fairy Tale: A True Story (dt. Strangers beings - magic of the elves ), with Peter O'Toole and Harvey Keitel , and Fairies (Photographing Fairies) with Ben Kingsley .
Web links
- Cottingley Fairies for Anomalies; goes into more detail on the photos (with pictures)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alien beings. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .