Film developed by Semyon Kirlian in the 1940s that had been exposed while in a powerful electric field, showing auras around human skin and other living matter. It was reported in the 1970s in the West in Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain.
Photographs have also been produced to support other claims of strange and supernatural happenings, the most well-known being the many photos purported to be of UFOs and the photos of the cottingley fairies. One example of the former were photos that Ed Walters of Gulf Breeze, Florida, claimed to be of a UFO that he had seen. They were pronounced absolutely genuine by Dr. Bruce Maccabee of the Fund for UFO Research. Later a neighbor, Tommy Smith, disclosed that he had helped Mr. Walters to fake UFO pictures and a model flying saucer was found in Walters’ attic. The Cottingley Fairies were for many years forcefully asserted by many, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE (1859-1930), to be genuine photos of fairies, without doubt. These photos were taken in 1917 by two young girls, Frances Griffiths, aged 10, and her cousin Elsie Wright, aged 16, who maintained that they had seen the fairies at the bottom of the Wrights’ garden in Cottingley, Yorkshire, England. Elsie had photographed Frances with four of the fairies dancing before her. Later the two girls produced other photos showing fairies in their company. Skeptics, Frances’s father among them, were unable to shake the girls’ story, and spiritualists and occultists seized on it as incontrovertible proof of the existence of the little people. Attempts by the two girls four years later, in 1921, accompanied by the clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson, to obtain similar photos were unsuccessful. Doyle founded the Society for the Study of Supernormal Photographs. In 1926 he published History of Spiritualism, in which he maintained that the fairy pictures were genuine. Many years later, in the 1970s, the women were interviewed on two occasions on television programs. When asked about the photographs Elsie said, “I’ve told you they’re photographs of figments of our imagination and that’s what I’m sticking to,” and Frances supported her.