Would Sherlock Holmes Believe in Fairies?

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Sherlock Holmes is one of the most fascinating and well-known fictional characters ever created. The stories of this “consulting detective” were written by Arthur Conan Doyle more than a century ago, and have been the inspiration for many movies and television series through the years - including two recent series that bring Holmes into the 21st century. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is famous for his analytical and logical approach to mysteries. He deduces entire theories from minute details. He boasts of the science of his deductive reasoning. So, it’s strange to me that Doyle was completely convinced by the Cottingley Fairies. The Cottingley Fairies were the invention of two girls - cousins who supposedly took photos of the fairies that played by the beck. There were five photographs in all, and they were so convincing that Arthur Conan Doyle actually presented them in one of his speeches on the supernatural and wrote a book proclaiming them as genuine The photos then became quite famous. Much later, when one of the cousins was an old woman, she admitted that they had simply made cardboard cutouts of fairies that one of talented girls had drawn and that the photos were faked. It is not surprising perhaps, that many people were fooled by them. But I find it quite amazing that a man whose most famous fictional creation is the Vulcan version of a detective, spent much of his time researching things like fairies and wholeheartedly believed in them. Did you know about the Cottingley Fairies?