The 1920 Christmas issue of Strand Magazine announced on its front page a sensational new contribution from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, had made his first appearance in its pages.

Conan Doyle's latest offering, however, concerned a very different kind of mystery. Under the title 'An Epoch-Making Event – Fairies Photographed', it gave an enthusiastic account of how two young girls in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford in Yorkshire, had managed to photograph each other playing with fairies.

One Saturday afternoon three years previously, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin, 17-year-old Elsie Wright, had borrowed a camera from Elsie's father. They used it to prove that the stories Frances had been telling about playing with fairies on a nearby riverbank were true. Conan Doyle declared that the photographs they had subsequently taken were authentic. One showed Frances resting by a waterfall while a clutch of tiny winged fairies cavorted in front of her. Another showed Elsie smiling down at a prancing gnome-like creature.

The photographs attracted the attention of everyone, from the Theosophical Society to the national newspapers, provoking great public controversy. Was this photographic evidence that fairies existed? Or was it an elaborate hoax perpetrated either by the girls themselves or an unidentified adult adept at trick photography? People flocked to Cottingley in the hope of seeing for themselves, but no convincing evidence was offered to support either view.

In 1978, CSICOP ran the fairy photos through an image enhancer and announced that the results showed strings from which the 'fairies' were suspended. Elsie laughed at their findings, later revealing that she and Frances had used hatpins to fix their fairies to the branches of bushes and trees. Frances, however, continued to insist that the photographs were genuine.

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