BBC:
In The Coming of Fairies, Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to be setting out the evidence for a race of magical beings, visible only to a chosen few. For the past five years, the writer and doctor had been studying a series of photographs that appeared to have captured this ‘subhuman race’ frolicking in a brook in Yorkshire – and he was now convinced of their authenticity.
The photos were a hoax – a schoolgirl prank that duped many people besides Conan Doyle. But how could someone so intelligent have fallen for such an obvious scam?
I’ve read various versions of this story for years. It’s always fascinating and an instructive lesson that everyone can be fooled if they want to be.
Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series (which I don’t recommend, really, because white it starts strong, it turns a bit more to rambling Objectivist philosophy with each passing book) has this paragraph in the first book. Unlike most of the other philosophy, I absolutely love this bit:
“People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”
Seems very pertinent right now. Especially in the context of a con game supported by magical thinking.
the last sentence part is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Conan Doyle was a sucker for almost all supernatural claims.