Cottingley Fairies
This story deserves some kind of award for being the world’s longest-running hoax. This one started way back in 1917, perpetrated by two young girls, Elsie and Frances, aged 16 and 9. They took five photographs of themselves in the woods, but something weird happened when these images were developed: the girls were surrounded by fairies.
Source: Cottingley Connect
Right off the bat, the girls received support from a peculiar source – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Sherlock Holmes creator was a keen spiritualist and complete believer in fairies, so he immediately accepted the pictures as genuine despite skeptics pointing out that they were faked.
And all this without Photoshop Source: Wikipedia
Interest in the pictures lasted for a few years, but eventually died down. By then, the two cousins grew up and went on with their lives. Every now an then, a newspaper would track one of the girls down and do a story on the once-famous Cottingley Fairies. The girls would again claim that the pictures are genuine and interest in the story is briefly rekindled.
By the 1970s new technology allowed careful analysis of the photographs, which had been completely dismissed as fakes. A closer look reveals a series of strings holding the fairies up. However, it wasn’t until 1983 that the girls confessed to the hoax, admitting that the fairies were nothing but cardboard cutouts from a children’s book.
