The Biggest Fairy Story fi 23
lady there and there's this fairy.... I was nowhere near as close as
that... .There weren't many seconds... I didn't make conversation... and I didn't see one, I saw three... .And I didn't sleep for three
nights after I'd seen what I'd seen."
The following year a young Barnsley playwright, Geoffrey Case, as
convinced as Cooper that fairies had been seen and photographed by
Elsie and Frances, was commissioned by the BBC to write a children's
play based on the Cottingley affair. The play, produced by Anne
Head-to whom Frances had passed on her description of fairies seen
in South Africa-was filmed at Cottingley in the summer of 1978, and
its first showing took place on BBC2 Wednesday, October 20, 1978.
This too-supportive program prompted a strong reaction from the
publicists of orthodoxy not only in England but also in the United
States. America was home to such official debunkers for the establish-
ment as Randi the Magician and defamer Martin Gardner, both mem-
bers of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of
the Paranormal. Considering themselves and those who commission
them the only ones authorized and qualified to determine what con-
stitutes real science, they pulled out their short knives as they gave Elsie
and Frances the horse laugh.
Gardner, famed or ill-famed for lampooning Atlantis, Orgonomy,
Dianetics, reincarnation, ESP, dowsing, the Great Pyramid, and any
subject indicated by his mentors as unacceptable, had attacked the
dowsing rod and the pendulum as "doodlebugs," labeling their practi-
tioners as scambags. He ridiculed Ignatius Donnelly's coherent and
scholarly defense of the Atlantis myth, then garbled the brilliant math-
ematical deductions about the Great Pyramid produced by pyramidol-
ogists John Taylor and Charles Piazzi Smith, efforts he arbitrarily and
incorrectly labeled "pathetic pseudo-science."
As late as 1970, when I published Secrets of the Great Pyramid, the
subject was still virtually taboo thanks to Professor EA.P. Barnard. As
president of Columbia College in New York and president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, Barnard had
labeled the Great Pyramid "a stupendous monument of folly," attaclung
its builders for the "stupidly idiotic task of heaping up a pile of massive
rock a million-and-a-half yards in volume." In Barnard's opinion the