I WANT TO BELIEVE

I WANT TO BELIEVE


I first saw that on the poster behind Mulder's desk the week after I first heard about the Cottingley Fairies.


For those not familiar with the case, in 1917, after the Great War, two girls (Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths) faked a series of fairy photos, and fooled the whole world, for a time.


Arther Conan Doyle was involved, he verified the pictures as real, and generally got a bit too excited without looking too carefully at the evidence.


The girls had copied and cut out a series of pictures from a book (one for which Doyle had in fact written the foreword) and then held them in place with hatpins while they took the photos.


It wasn't until the mid-eighties that Elsie admitted: "Where I was sitting you could see the hatpins."
From the first time I read it, at age 10, that sentence has always sent a chill down my spine.


Somehow, this marvellous story of the two little girls, who had proven the existence of faries became instead a story of how two devious children fooled the world, and (however unintentionally) helped to destroy Doyle's reputation.


And yet, I must point out that Francis, until the day she died, said that the fairies were real, they just wouldn't allow themselves to be photographed.

Her version of the story was made into "Fairytale: a true story" by disney


And part of me still believes in fairies; in those exquisite little figures, dancing off-balance across the sunflower, in their contemporary clothes, with their fashionable haircuts and motionless wings.



I WANT TO BELIEVE



Two years ago, I found a job as a photo-printer, I take a picture, clean it up, and put it onto canvas.

I now do a line of pictures that I call "Cottingley Style" where I edit fairies into pictures of little girls, playing in gardens -they've been quite successful.


I also do "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" they're nowhere near as popular.


I quite often get people in who've been on ghost walks.


Having overheard one of our local ghostwalks, telling everyone how "Elizabeth I's daughter Mary, haunts the streets" I can't say I'm convinced by their historical knowledge.


I'm even less happy about how they take people to an old abandoned farm and promise that they will get ghost photos.



what they're actually photographing are called "orbs"


they look like bubbles of light, drifting around the room, and they can be filmed, or photographed, but you never see them with the human eye.


That's because they're actually specks of dust, reflecting the light from the flash.


The swindling so-and-so's are charging people upwards of £20:00 a go, for the privage of walking behind them for three miles while they talk absolute rubbish, and take photos of dust.

The thing is, that ghosts are one of the few Fortean Phenomena that I have first hand experiance with, and I DO believe in them.


I just can't believe that anyone is allowed to get away with ripping people off like this, to play on their hopes and fears, and to eventually discredit the very thing that they claim to be showing to people.

I'm sure that there are ghost walk companies out there, who really do their research, who learn all the old folk tales and tid-bits of history that relate to spooky events, but I've seen less evidence of them than of Sasquatch!



I REALLY DO WANT TO BELIEVE


My Job has recently led to me helping a few people to "verify" pictures of various Fortean Phenomena.


So far I've seen simualcre and optical illusion, excellent photoshopping, and blatant tounge-in-cheek mockeries. I've yet to see anything i couldn't reproduce myself with absolutely no supernatural influences.


I WANT TO BELIEVE BUT I NEED CONVINCING