139. I like Sherlock Holmes, but I do not like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That is because he wasn’t like Sherlock Holmes and he believed in the supernatural. And when he got old he joined the Spiritualist Society, which meant that he believed you could communicate with the dead. This was because his son died of influenza during the First World War and he still wanted to talk to him.
And in 1917 something famous happened called The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. Two cousins called Frances Griffiths, who was 9 years old, and Elsie Wright, who was 16 years old, said they used to play with fairies by a stream called Cottingley Beck and they used Frances’s father’s camera to take 5 photographs of the fairies.
But they weren’t real fairies. They were drawings on pieces of paper that they cut out and stood up with pins, because Elsie was a really good artist.
Harold Snelling, who was an expert in fake photography, said: “These dancing figures are not made of paper nor any fabric; they are not painted on a photographic background–but what gets me most is that all these figures have moved during the exposure.”
But he was being stupid because paper would move during an exposure, and the exposure was very long because in the photograph you can see a little waterfall in the background and it is blurred.
Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he believed they were real in an article in a magazine called The Strand. But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes, which is like aliens landing on earth and being like Daleks from Doctor Who or Imperial Stormtroopers from the Death Star in Star Wars or little green men like in cartoons of aliens.
And in 1981 a man called Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths for an article in a magazine called The Unexplained and Elsie Wright said all 5 photographs had been faked and Frances Griffiths said 4 had been faked but one was real. And they said Elsie had drawn the fairies from a book called Princess Mary’s Gift Book by Arthur Shepperson.
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
And it shows that something called Occam’s razor is true. And Occam’s razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Which is Latin and it means:
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.
Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can’t talk to someone who is dead.
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