Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [17]
Illustration of Elsie’s hands just as they were positioned in "photo number two."
In this photograph no shadow can be seen where it would seem a shadow of the gnome should appear, but details in the enlargements of the original three-by-four-inch negatives are rather obscure, so not much can be determined. But a shutter speed of second is not going to stop a gnome's pipes so sharply as this while they are "swinging in his grotesque little left hand," as claimed by Gardner.
So ends the 1917 effort. Matters that were not made clear still remain to be explained, however. Gardner admits that other pictures were taken in 1917 but expresses no curiosity at all about what happened to them. Doyle records that "other photographs were attempted, but proved partial failures, and plates were not kept." I'll just bet they were hurriedly discarded like so much radioactive waste. There's nothing like a set of failures around the house, waiting to be discovered!
And why were the photos ignored until three years after they were taken? Because the Wrights simply did not take them seriously, and until Mrs. Wright came under the influence of theosophy after attending a lecture by Gardner, she had no notion that anyone would take them seriously. In fact, in a recent letter Elsie writes, "My poor Dad was very much disappointed in his favorite detective writer, Conan Doyle. I heard him say to my mother, 'May, how could a brilliant man like him believe in such a thing?' " Ten points for Mr. Wright. The answer to his question is that, as chance would have it, the photos had fallen into the hands of a man who needed such evidence desperately to bolster his own delusions. It was bad seed on fertile ground, and six decades later the weeds still flourish.
Detail of photo "number three"
Gardner, Doyle, and the experts were turning a childish prank into a cause célèbre. Word of the matter had gotten out, and the intelligentsia of England were atwitter. Gardner, titillated by his newfound fame, was ripe for further plucking. Instructed by Doyle to ask the girls for more photos, Gardner equipped Frances and Elsie with two Cameo cameras and twenty-four specially marked plates. It was the heyday of spirit photography, the process used by mediums to produce on photographic plates images of persons who (they told their victims) were safely in heaven and yet able to communicate by impressing their photographic images on demand. Surprisingly enough, even believers like Gardner and Doyle were dimly aware that these mediums could cheat by double-exposing the plates, and they imposed safeguards by supplying secretly marked plates to prevent the test plates from being switched with previously exposed ones. When the operators managed to produce photographic shades of the deceased in spite of these precautions, the results were declared genuine, even though the darkness of the séance room far surpassed that of the photographic darkroom. It was another case of a little expertise being useless.
Marked plates made no difference to the girls. Since their method was simply to set up cutouts of the fairy figures and snap them, they had no need to switch plates at all. But Gardner went into great detail to assure Doyle he had checked everything out to be sure that the photos the girls eventually produced were done with the supplied plates. ("Yes, Captain, we have excellent fire extinguishers on the Hindenburg.")
Three photos were produced, though Elsie admits that other photos were "attempted." No one seems to have asked the question, Whatever happened to the other photos they took? After all, the girls were given twenty-four plates, all carefully but uselessly marked, by Mr. Gardner. This worthy himself remarked that "a number of photographs were taken" Did he have any interest in the others? Apparently he was not interested in the other photos, including those "only partially successful" ones that Elsie "threw... in the brook"! For in those other pictures, I'm sure, lies the evidence that even Snelling could not have missed.
Gardner reported