Later investigations
Frances and Elsie
1917
Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually
subsided after 1921. Elsie and Frances eventually
married and lived abroad for many years. In 1966,
a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper
traced Elsie, who was by then back in England.
The media subsequently once again became
interested in Frances and Elsie's photographs and
in 1971, BBC television's Nationwide programme
investigated the case. Elsie stuck to her story:
"I've told you that they're photographs of figments
of our imagination, and that's what I'm sticking
to".
However, during an interview in 1976 by journalist Austin Mitchell,
Elsie and Frances agreed that "a rational person doesn't see
fairies", but they refused to accept that they had fabricated the
photographs. Many experts including internationally renowned
magician and sceptic James Randi, a team from the Committee for
the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and
Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography
labelled the photographs as fakes.
Confessions
In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the
magazine The Unexplained, that the photographs had been faked,
although both maintained that they had actually seen fairies.
Strangely, the cousins disagreed about the fifth and final
photograph. Elsie maintained it was a fake but Frances insisted that
it was genuine. In an interview given in the early 1980’s Frances
said: “It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching
about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw
these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera
and took a photograph.”
In a 1985 TV interview, Frances said: "I never even thought of it
as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I
can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted
to be taken in.”
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