3 more tall tales
1 FAIRIES AT COTTINGLEY Young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, were forever in trouble for getting muddy in Cottingley Beck as it burbled through a Yorkshire wood. Their excuse was they only went ‘to see the fairies’ and in 1917 they took photos to prove it. In one, Frances watches a fluttering group; another shows Elsie smiling at a winged gnome. Elsie’s dad called it a prank, but mum believed, and a photo expert declared them ‘entirely genuine, unfaked’. Three more pics were taken in 1920, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published them in an article called The Evidence for
Fairies. It wasn’t until 1983 that the cousins admitted to faking them with cardboard cutouts glued to hatpins. Elsie said they hadn’t known how to confess sooner: ‘Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet.’ Both girls maintained they really had seen fairies though; Frances even insisted the final photo was real – so who knows what you might see on a walk.
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2 AN AVIAN HOODWINK
You may well have spotted this bird on a walk. It tends to be ‘partially seen or indeterminately heard’ and is characterised by a ‘blurred appearance and extremely rapid flight away from the observer.’ The bare-fronted hoodwink – also known as
Dissimulatrix spuria – was first documented by ornithologist MF
Meiklejohn in the 1950 volume of Bird Notes. There have been international sightings too.
Benjamin Burtt wrote of it in
The Post-Standard (USA) in 1958, comparing its call to a ‘far away train whistle or an exploding firecracker or an unoiled hinge’ and explaining that one woman lucky enough to glimpse the bird had described it as about the size of a piece of wood. On April 1st 1975, the only one ever caught went on display at the Royal Scottish Museum, with a series of photos showing a blur flying out of shot.
3 SAUCERS FROM MARS
‘The morning of February 18 found me strolling along the coast between Lossiemouth and the distant Buckie,’ wrote Cedric
Allingham in 1954. He was on Scotland’s Moray firth for a birding holiday, but then a flying saucer landed on the beach and an alien got out. By sketching the solar system and pointing, Allingham established the visitor was from Mars, and had visited Venus and the Moon. He managed to get a few photos, and the event corroborated by a signed witness statement from fisherman James Duncan. Many attempted to contact Allingham and Duncan, but in 1986 both the story and its tellers were confirmed fake. Flying saucer from Mars was traced to a man called Peter Davies, who said he’d co-written the book and posed as Cedric in the only photo. He would never name his conspirator, but most think it was astronomer Patrick Moore. He denied it to the point of threatening legal action, but he was friends with Davies, and a noted UFO sceptic, perhaps keen to take the mick.
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