I'm going to breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Over a century ago, long before people believed that sharks were swimming in the subways of New York during Hurricane Sandy,

or before Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois joined the immigration debate on the Senate floor,

using an AI-altered photo

that included an ice agent without a head, young Francis Griffiths and her cousin took pictures of

fairies dancing in the forest, began as the imagination of little girls, but it turned into an

international sensation known as the Cottingly Fairies incident of 1920. Dr. Merrick Burrow, the curator of an

exhibit that commemorated the strange incident, told the BBC article, and I quote,

I do not think anybody really believed it, but they couldn't explain how it had been done either.

And the fairy pictures look so real, in fact, they even convinced none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

the author of the famously logical Sherlock Holmes stories. Initially skeptical, Conan Doyle became a believer,

worked to promote the images as evidence of the supernatural. It wasn't until decades later that one of

the girls confessed that they had used paper cutouts from a 1915 children's book.

I never thought of it being a fraud, Francis Griffith told the BBC in 1983. It was just Elsie and I

having a bit of fun. Even so, the bit of fun was enough to convince some really smart people that

these girls had discovered a window between our world and the

world of spirits and fairies. Now, how do otherwise intelligent people fall for these things?

Conan Doyle certainly wasn't a fool, but he also wasn't a disinterested party either. He was

someone very curious about spiritualism. Perhaps most importantly, he'd lost a son during the First World War.

The prank gave him hope that perhaps there was something beyond this world, and if so, it could

mean he might see his boy again. This also helps explain the emergence of new spiritualism,

...