Geoffrey Crawley (10 December 1926 – 29 October 2010) was a photographic expert and journalist, and was the editor in chief of British Journal of Photography for two decades.
He was educated at Westcliff High School for Boys, and during World War II he was evacuated to Derbyshire where he was placed with a miner and his family.
[5] While there were longstanding claims that the photographs were hoaxes, Crawley undertook "a scientific and analytical approach" to analyzing the images starting in the 1970s.
After studying the capabilities of some of the cameras that had been used to take the photos, Crawley concluded that they would have been unable to capture images as sharp as the ones in the purported unaltered photographs.
In a series of articles published in the British Journal of Photography in the early 1980s, Crawley concluded that the images had been manipulated and that the fairies were a hoax.