An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural

by James Randi

  Eventually, following a séance given on May 21, 1874, Crookes seems to have abandoned his belief in Cook, though he never publicly retracted his support of her.

  See also Mary Showers.

  Cottingley Fairies

  In 1917, two little Yorkshire girls in Bradford, England, Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances, told everyone that they had seen fairies in a place called Cottingley Glen, and they said that they had even taken photographs of the entities as proof of their stories. They produced five rather amateurish “fairy” photos that were widely celebrated at the time.

  Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an otherwise often levelheaded man except when it came to the supernatural, chose to accept and endorse the story told by the girls, probably because it fit in well with his belief system. Conan Doyle, even before he saw the photographs — and he never did meet the girls — accepted the whole tale and set about promoting the existence of fairies, elves, and other wee creatures who he firmly believed were flitting about in the woods.

  The Cottingley fairy photographs were staged using cutouts prepared from illustrations in a children's book. Yet this photograph fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great detective hero, Sherlock Holmes.

  Sir Arthur even took lantern slides made from the Cottingley photos abroad to America with him, as part of his lecture tour. The rights to the photos themselves were given by Elsie's mother to the Theosophy movement, which embraced belief in wood sprites and such beings. Years later, when Elsie saw a photograph of a huge church the Theosophists had built with the proceeds of sales of the photos, she grumbled that she and Frances hadn't seen a penny for their labors, while millions of pounds had been raised from their work.

  Only a few years ago, the two who had perpetrated this rather delicious hoax on Conan Doyle — and, through him, on the whole world — died. They had not ever been willing to openly admit that their photos were fakes, but along the way they dropped tantalizing hints. Elsie, the elder, admitted in 1978 that their “little joke fell flat on its face right away” and explained that, had it not been for the hopelessly unrealistic Conan Doyle seizing upon the opportunity to discover and champion yet another supernatural discovery, their photographs would have just remained “out of sight in a drawer” where her father had thrown them.

  Elsie was amazed that people accepted their hoax. She wrote, “Surely you know that there can not be more than one grown up person in every five million who would take our fairies seriously.” Elsie's dad, she wrote, was dismayed by it all. He asked his wife, “How could a brilliant man like Conan Doyle believe such a thing?”

  The photos were prepared simply by photographing cutouts of fairies drawn by Elsie from a popular children's book, Princess Mary's Gift Book. Frances and Elsie thus created a hugely successful monster that lives on even today — despite the proof of trickery — in the pages of sensational journals and in books.

  The great puzzle is why the Cottingley Fairy photographs were ever accepted in the first place. They are very obviously fakes, and it can easily be proven that they are. The first, and the most famous, of the five photographs shows Frances with four tiny fairies in full flight. What is often ignored is the image of a small waterfall in the background behind Frances, which Mr. Brian Coe, curator of the Kodak Museum in Harrow, England, says was registered on the film of that era only by a lengthy time exposure. However, the fairies themselves, and their fluttering butterfly wings, are very sharp and clear. That rapid motion would have required a shutter speed that was far beyond the capabilities of the camera that was used to take the picture, particularly in view of the subdued light that was present, and sufficient film speed was similarly not available. The four other photos are subject to the same kind of detection.

  The British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) — already well organized when these photos began being publicized — took a quarter century before they examined the evidence, and in 1945 — to their credit — they decided that they were now “skeptical of the reality of fairies in general and of the Cottingley Fairies in particular.” Science marches on.

  The British Journal of Photography understandably took until 1975 to even mention these photos, then in 1982 ran a series of quite devastating articles that should have effectively ended the controversy. Despite such in-depth investigative research and the very strong negative evidence it has produced, the fact is that articles still appear which support the fairy photographs as genuine.

  See also Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and fairies.

  Coven

  A word (said to be derived from covent or convent) meaning a group of witches, usually thirteen. Or there are twelve witches, the invisible thirteenth member of the coven being Satan. The choice of number may be a matter of budget, since Satan probably gets big fees for such personal appearances. Covens are independent from one another, but associated with one another through a Grand Master.

  Crandon, Margery

  (née Stinson, 1888-1941) A Boston medium who was examined by magician Harry Houdini and put through several rather inconclusive tests by him. At one point, during a séance, she produced a thumbprint in dental wax that she swore was made by her spirit guide, Walter. This was heralded by the press as definitive proof of her validity and of the genuine nature of spiritualism. Unfortunately for this breakthrough in human knowledge, the print turned out to be that of her dentist, who was very much alive. This pretty well discredited her with all but the most ardent believers, and Margery slowly went out of business. She died an alcoholic.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other prominent supporters of spiritualism never gave up their trust or belief in her.

  See also ectoplasm.

  Credophilic

  An adjective originated by author L. Sprague de Camp to describe a mind

  that gets positive pleasure from belief and pain from doubt . . . The credophile collects beliefs the way a jackdaw does nest ornaments: not for utility but for glitter. And, once having embraced a belief, it takes something more than mere disproof to make him let go.

  Creery Sisters

  Alice, Emily, Kathleen, Mary, and Maud, daughters of the Reverend A.M. Creery, who performed effective mental phenomena such as telepathy for several panels of investigators from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The investigators declared them absolutely genuine. Then they were found cheating — using a verbal code — by another special committee of the SPR in 1888.

  It is not recorded how, or if, the Reverend Creery chastised his daughters.

  Croiset, Gerard

  (1909-1980) Known mostly as a police psychic, Croiset received more media coverage than most psychics of his day. One case for which he was famous took place in Japan. He claimed all sorts of success discovering a body in a murder case there, but confirmation of his services was not forthcoming from the Japanese police. This alerted journalist Piet Hein Hoebens, and he began investigating Wilhelm Tenhaeff, Croiset's mentor. The resulting scandal was a huge embarrassment for parapsychology.

  See also Wilhem Tenhaeff.

  Crookes, Sir William

  (1832-1919) This very prominent scientist was one of sixteen children of a wealthy tailor. His contributions to science were numerous, involving radioactive devices (the Crookes tube was named after him) and he is credited with discovering the element thallium. He was knighted in 1897 for his scientific work.

  His beloved brother Philip died at sea in 1867 at an untimely age, and Sir William did what many another intellectual has done: He embraced an unlikely but satisfying set of beliefs that removed from him the pain of the loss; he became dedicated to spiritualism. That also appears to have been the reason that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose son Kingsley and brother Innes also both died at early ages, avidly adopted spiritualism and in fact devoted the rest of his life to promoting it among the public. American Episcopalian Bishop James A. Pike, whose son Jim was a suicide at age twenty, went through a similar process in 1966.

  Sir William was a member of the Society for Psyc
hical Research from its founding in 1883 and served as president of the society from 1896 to 1899. During his investigations, Crookes discovered that a very successful spirit medium, Mary Rosina Showers, was a fraud, but said nothing and reported nothing about his discovery.

  He and spirit medium Daniel Dunglas Home were on a very close personal basis, and his endorsement of Home's powers has always been a strong point made by the spiritualists to support their claims about Home. However, Crookes has been shown to be a dupe of such other mediums as Florence Cook and others exposed or confessed as fakes, so his validation of Home is highly suspect.

  Crookes was a devoted follower of Éliphas Lévi, as well as a Theosophist.

  Crop Circles

  (In the U.K., often called “corn circles,” since in that area of the world, corn refers to any grain crop, while what Americans know as corn is known there as “maize.”)

  In 1979, mysterious diagrams began to be noticed in the U.K., patterns formed by flattening out grain crops. Immediately, UFO fans declared that space aliens were communicating with Earth by this means, and as years went by, the shapes evolved from simple circles into Mandelbrot figures and complicated networks, as if extraterrestrial kids were competing with one another in an intergalactic drawing contest. The concept is not far from the actuality.

  This is a schoolboy stunt that, coincidentally, begins to be noticed annually immediately after school lets out in the U.K., though few have made any connection between the two matters. Farmers eventually notice the patterns, sometimes prompted by the media. A new group of paranormalists known as “cereologists” (seriously!) are convinced that these are extraterrestrial messages of some sort and of great import to humankind. That space people would choose to sketch figures in farm crops seems not at all incongruous to the believers.

  When, in 1992, two retired gentlemen in England (“Doug and Dave”) admitted that they had started the prank and it had been picked up by the schoolchildren in the area and eventually all over the country, the believers were quick to point out that those circles were not identical to the “real” circles in every respect. However, a newspaper in the U.K. asked these two hoaxers secretly to create a typical pattern, then called in the “experts,” who confidently declared it to be the genuine article. So much for experts.

  In Hungary, too, there was great excitement in June 1992 when a helicopter pilot passing over a farming area near the town of Székesfehérvár, about forty miles west of Budapest, reported sighting below him a “crop circle” of rather substantial dimensions. The media went crazy about it, celebrating the fact that, at last, the extraterrestrials had recognized their country by conferring on them this singular honor.

  There was no lack of eyewitnesses who claimed they'd seen little green folks in that field and UFOs hovering overhead. They fought to get in front of the TV cameras that were focused on vast crowds from all over Europe, milling about on the grounds of the Aranybulla collective farm where this 120-foot-diameter wonder was to be viewed. A number of “experts” came in and measured levels of known and unknown radiations that they said were loose in the area, and warned of the deadly nature of the phenomenon.

  UFOlogist Károly Hargitai and “time-scientist” György Kisfaludy solemnly declared the circle to have been made by extraterrestrials and impossible of fabrication by humans. Kisfaludy averred that by looking at the crop circle “in six dimensions,” he had been able to solve the coded message it conveyed, a message available only to a savant such as himself.

  In September, on one of the popular but low-level TV talk shows on Channel 1, Budapest, both Hargitai and Kisfaludy appeared before the nation to solemnly restate and verify their pseudoscientific opinions on the matter. Then, to their dismay, the host of the show, Sándor Friderikusz, introduced two seventeen-year-old students who produced photographic and video proof that they themselves had made the crop circle, using very simple methods. The effect of this disclosure was rather strong, and the expressions on the faces of the “experts,” who were not prepared for such a confrontation, left the studio audience as well as the TV audience amused.

  The two hoaxers were Róbert Dallos and Gábor Takács. They were high school students who had read about crop circles in the newspapers and decided to make their very own. As students of agriculture, they knew that wet grass can be bent without breaking it, and they had noted heavy rains just before the night of June 8, when they created the figure. That was two weeks before the helicopter pilot discovered it.

  The two youngsters had waited until a local drive-in movie closed down, then went about their business of hoaxing. They also were wise enough to take photographic records of the area, before and after, in the correct scientific tradition.

  Following the TV program, the inevitable alibis were produced by the die-hard believers. The one who had solved the coded message from the stars declared that he had surveyed the area around Székesfehérvár just previous to the discovery of the artifact and had found no trace of the circle at that time. That seems quite strange, since the gentleman offered no reason why he chose to look at that specific site in advance of the wonder that the UFOs were about to create there.

  The collective farm, Aranybulla, chose not to be amused by all this. A lawsuit was brought against the boys demanding compensation for the widespread damage done to the crops as a result of the crowds who moved in, camping overnight in some cases. The court's decision was that the boys were responsible only for the circle area itself and that the farm's lawyers should pursue the media who had promoted the hoax as a genuine phenomenon.

  The boys were defended free by their admirers in the skeptical community and were not required to pay the legal penalty for their very clever and appropriate hoax in the name of science. Early in 1993, they were awarded a prize given each year in Hungary for the best essay or project produced by a young person, dealing with the supernatural, paranormal, or occult. It was presented to them by Gyula Bencze, a physicist with the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest. Dr. Bencze is a leading figure in the Hungarian skeptics movement.

  In 1993, four skeptics — some of whom had already created several very convincing crop circles in the U.K. — in the company of investigator Ian Rowland, used planks and ropes to make two excellent figures near Winchester, where “authentic” figures had been found in the past. There was an almost-full moon while they worked, and several times during their early-morning task, they were illuminated by the headlights of oncoming automobiles, but no one stopped to investigate. They used similar methods to those used by “Doug and Dave” and had no problem at all getting away with the prank. They discovered that simply walking through the crop with a certain amount of care does not leave any traces, thus demolishing another claim of the cereologists. One of their figures was so convincing that an entrepreneur put up a sign and charged visitors a fee to view the phenomenon.

  Paul Vigay, a popular U.K. writer on the subject of crop circles, ran diagrams of these productions in his booklet Crop Circle Surveys of 1993 and featured one of them on the cover. He also discovered marvelous ways of folding one of the two figures into a three-dimensional shape, as if to imply that the UFO people had created it just for that purpose. This would appear to be another example of discovering meaning where there is none.

  The fact that these figures are so easily made and have deceived the experts reduces the matter of the crop circles to whether or not one chooses to believe in a capricious and rather juvenile action performed by a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization, or what amounts to little more than an involved schoolboy prank carried out by quite ordinary folks.

  Crowley, Aleister

  (1875-1947) Described in his time as “the most evil man alive” and “the wickedest man in the world,” Crowley was a British magician who was violently opposed to Christianity. He founded his own religion based on himself as a holy figure and loved every nasty thing the public said about him.

  He liked to be known as “The Beast
666,” from the biblical reference in Revelation to that magical number, and also liked to believe that he was a reincarnation of Edward Kelley, the rascally associate of Dr. John Dee.

  In common with other gurus, Crowley liked to create his own nomenclature, referring to magic as “magick” and defining it as

  the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

  The definition, though wishful, does not differ substantially from others.

  Crowley reportedly had a powerful effect on women and separated many widows, spinsters and bored dilettantes from their cash in order to support his chosen lifestyle. He fascinated his followers with lavish costumes, animal sacrifices, other weird rituals which were often sexually oriented, and the use of powerful hallucinogenic drugs. This supreme egotist, manipulator, ruthless swindler, and genius of showmanship died a pauper at the age of seventy-two.