<P> By now Elsie and Frances were tired of the whole fairy business . Years later Elsie looked at a photograph of herself and Frances taken with Hodson and said: "Look at that, fed up with fairies ." Both Elsie and Frances later admitted that they "played along" with Hodson "out of mischief", and that they considered him "a fake". </P> <P> Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually subsided after 1921 . Elsie and Frances eventually married and lived abroad for many years . In 1966, a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who was by then back in England . She admitted in an interview given that year that the fairies might have been "figments of my imagination", but left open the possibility she believed that she had somehow managed to photograph her thoughts . The media subsequently became interested in Frances and Elsie's photographs once again . BBC television's Nationwide programme investigated the case in 1971, but Elsie stuck to her story: "I've told you that they're photographs of figments of our imagination, and that's what I'm sticking to". </P> <P> Elsie and Frances were interviewed by journalist Austin Mitchell in September 1976, for a programme broadcast on Yorkshire Television . When pressed, both women agreed that "a rational person doesn't see fairies", but they denied having fabricated the photographs . In 1978 the magician and scientific sceptic James Randi and a team from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal examined the photographs, using a "computer enhancement process". They concluded that the photographs were fakes, and that strings could be seen supporting the fairies . Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, undertook a "major scientific investigation of the photographs and the events surrounding them", published between 1982 and 1983, "the first major postwar analysis of the affair". He also concluded that the pictures were fakes . </P> <P> In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies . Elsie had copied illustrations of dancing girls from a popular children's book of the time, Princess Mary's Gift Book, published in 1914, and drew wings on them . They said they had then cut out the cardboard figures and supported them with hatpins, disposing of their props in the beck once the photograph had been taken . But the cousins disagreed about the fifth and final photograph, which Doyle in his The Coming of the Fairies described in this way: </P>

There are fairies at the bottom of my garden