Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [20]
In this interview, aside from recent interviews conducted with Frances and Elsie, we have the crux of the whole matter: The girls created a monster and just wished it would go away. Since it apparently has become increasingly difficult over the years to tell outright fabrications about the matter, they have found it easier for all concerned if the reporters are given a few small half-facts that can be expanded into elaborate tales in print. At this date they simply will not say that the fairies were real or that the photos were genuine. Then what do they say?
Interviewed in 1971 by BBC-TV in England, Elsie said that she "would not swear on the Bible that the fairies were really there." In a subsequent letter to Brian Coe, she said that she would not so swear, and that if she ever had, "my friends and relatives would have stopped enjoying our family story as a big laugh." She said, further, "I admit that I may not believe in fairies. As for the photos, let's say they are figments of our imaginations, Frances's and mine."
Frances herself insisted upon being interviewed with her back to the camera. She repeatedly asked what Elsie had said in response to the same questions and merely agreed with whatever Elsie had said. Elsie's dominance over Frances, it seems, has not faded in six decades!
Elsie, fearful that her father's reputation might be impugned by certain remarks of Mr. Coe, wrote him that when she discussed the matter with her father, he said "it was nothing to lie about, and that all he wanted was that we should tell the truth of how we did it." She absolved him of any involvement, comparing his honesty with that of Abraham Lincoln (a rather strange choice for an English girl). My question to Elsie is this: Is it not time for the truth to be told? These half-admissions and evasions are not the truth, Elsie. They are all that stands between a final decision about the Cottingley Fairies and a stand-off.
Or are they? There is one technical advance that Elsie and Frances could hardly have been expected to foresee, and that the experts of their day could not have known. It involves a highly sophisticated system originally developed to examine satellite photos, and with this advantage we are able to put a very large nail of doubt in the already well-sealed coffin of the Cottingley Fairies.
It was the inspiration of Robert Sheaffer to apply this "computer enhancement" technology to the fairy photos. He enlisted the assistance of William Spaulding, Western Division Director of Ground Saucer Watch in Phoenix, Arizona, who had analyzed numerous UFO photographs—with very interesting results—and who agreed to put the questioned photos under the scanner. Briefly, the process consists of scanning the photo minutely by electronic means and reducing tiny picture elements to "pixels" (no relationship to pixies), each of which has a specific value. When these readings are fed into a computer with the proper instructions, it is possible for some interesting data to emerge.
Spaulding demanded two things of his enhancement process. First, he asked the computer about the fairy figures as opposed to the human figures. Were they three-dimensional? No, answered the computer. None of the fairies were "round"; they were exactly what one would expect of simple paper cutouts—with the exception of the gnome figure in photo number two, which may have been an in-depth model. Second, the machine was asked to search for the presence of any invisible-to-the-eye threads or supports, and evidence of such a support shows up in photo number four in just the position that might be needed to hold the cutout in place.
Spaulding, on behalf of the staff who performed and analyzed the tests, is quite decided about the matter on the basis of the computer enhancement. "There is absolutely no photographic evidence to substantiate these 'fairy'