Cottingley and the Paper Fairies
In the summer of 1917 sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths came back from the beck behind the house with five photographs of themselves sitting beside tiny winged figures. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had just buried his son, published them in the Strand Magazine and defended them for the rest of his life. The fairies were cut from card, copied from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, and held up on hatpins — one pin is visible in a print. Both women confessed in 1983, a few years before they died; Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was real.
Operation Blackbird
In the summer of 1990 the BBC and Japan's Nippon TV, with the British Army, set up round-the-clock surveillance of the fields near Bratton in Wiltshire: image intensifiers, thermal cameras, radar and a camp on the hill. It was called Operation Blackbird and broadcast live. On the fifth morning, 25 July, a flawless pattern of circles was found in the field beneath the cameras, and the breakfast bulletin went out announcing a breakthrough. Within hours it emerged that a wooden Ouija board and a cross of sticks lay at the centre of each circle: a hoax carried out in the night directly under observation. None of the equipment had recorded anything at all.
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