Fakery- the Cottingley Fairies

In July 1917, two young girls claimed to have taken photographs of real life fairies at the bottom of their garden. When the genius behind the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presented the pictures to the public as evidence of the existence of fairies, the tale of the two little girls in Cottingley was immortalised. Later on in life, the girls admitted to the images being faked. infact they were just cardboard cutouts of fairies placed in different locations around the girls and the garden.  While one of the girls dad knew that they were messing around with the camera and paper fairys drawn by one of the girls, he didnt know of what a phenominon they would become. The images came under much screteny and were sent to kodak for analysis.  there findings were: The negatives are single exposure The plates show no sign of being faked work, but that cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of genuineness Kodak's were not willing to give any certificate concerning them because photography lent itself to a multitude of processes, and some clever operator might have made them artificially The studio chief added that he thought the photographs might have been made by using the glen features and the girl as a background; then enlarging prints from these and painting in the figures; then taking half- plate and finally quarter-plate snaps, suitably lighted. All this, he agreed, would be clever work and take time A remark made by one, as we were thanking them and bidding good-bye, was that "after all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow the images were later admitted to be faked by card backed drawings and hat pins. but the legacy had lived on for 60 odd years. one of the clear real fakes of our time.