The girls produced a number of photograph of themselves with fairies . Mr wright did not believe the fairies wrer real , but the girls' mothers were not so sure . They didn't think their daughters would trick them and, like many people at that time , they wanted to believe that fairies existed . They showed the photographs to other people, who studied them and argued about them . Many believed that the cottingley Glen fairies were real, even the famous author Arthur Conan Doyle.