I
Ingenious Hoax?
In 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that stereotype of fictional
detectives, Sherlock Holmes, got himself involved in a real-life detec-
tive story, perhaps the least stereotypic of the century and the most
puzzling to him: the world of fairy. Incidents surrounding this inquiry
represented to him "either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever
played upon the public, or else... an event in human history which
may in the future appear to have been epochmaking in its character."
A convinced spiritualist and writer on spiritualism, Doyle, then in his
sixties, at the height of his popularity as novelist and playwright, had be-
come involved in this particular quest as the result of a story he had
agreed to write for the Strand Magazine, an illustrated English monthly,
dealing with the subject of human beings in different parts of England,
Scotland,Wales, and Ireland who claimed to be able to see and describe
the "little people." These were insubstantial creatures of a fairy world
about whom Doyle had accumulated "a surprising number of cases."
The article was to be a straight piece of reporting. "The evidence,"
wrote Doyle, "was so complete and detailed, with such good names at-
tached to it, that it was difficult to believe that it was false."
As justification for wandering into so fey a world of fancy, Doyle
pointed out that in the rational world of physics we see objects only
within the very limited band of frequencies that make up our color
spectrum, whereas infinite vibrations, unseen by most humans, exist on
either side of them. "If we could conceive a race of beings constructed
in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations," wrote
Doyle, "they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up, or
tune them down."