24 @ The Secret L@ fe Nature
pyramids "originated before anything like intellectual culture existed;
have been constructed without thought of scientific method, and have
owed their earliest forms to accident and caprice."
So virulent was orthodoxy in defense of its indefensible citadel,
mocking the theory that the ancient Egyptians could have had an ad-
vanced knowledge of geometry, geodesy, and.astronomy, that just a
few years before my book appeared an eminent engineer in Baltimore
stated in the booklet Designing and Building the Great Pyramid: "There
is no evidence in the Great Pyramid that they [the ancient Egyptians]
had any conception of true north or knew that a north-south line was
perpendicular to an east-west line."
Randi the Magician, known as "hit man" for the American com-
mittee, attacked Doyle's story about the Cottingley fairies as "one
of the most fatuous and enduring hoaxes ever perpetrated on the
species." He took issue with Doyle, denying his belief--shared by his
eminent scientific friends Sir Oliver Lodge and Wdliam Crookes-that
the evidence for survival after death is "overwhelming." And he at-
tacked Doyle's fairy investigation, saying, "The case features all the
classic faults of such investigations: gullibility, half-truths, hyperbole,
outright lies, selective reporting, the need to believe, and generous
amounts of plain stupidity are mixed with the most outrageous logic
and false expertise to be found anywhere in the field."
That the committee was grossly prejudiced was made clear by one
of its own disaffected members, Dr. Dennis Rawlins, editor of the
Zetetic Inquirer, who resigned and attacked the committee as "a group
of would-be debunkers who bungled their major investigations, falsi-
fied the results, covered up their errors, and gave the boot to a col-
league who threatened to tell the truth."
Cooper, in an attempt to present a more balanced view of the Cot-
tingley fairies, produced three more articles in early 1980 for the
magazine The Unexplained in which he said he was "inclined towards
belief that the Cottingley fairies had actually been photographed." He
concluded his argument by saying, "The critics-Lewis of Nationwide,
Austin Mitchell of YTV, Randi, and Stewart Sanderson and Katherine
Briggs of the Folklore Society-all these are fair-minded individuals
interested in balancing probability on the available evidence. The ex-