He's trying desperately to prove that photographs can be faked by various means, in this case by photographing inanimate props or cutouts, that aren't readily apparent to photo experts. So he has to desperately try to style Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a "photo expert" or as some sort of scientist or Real Smart Guy. Then he can tell us that if Conan Doyle was fooled, then we have no basis for saying that photo experts decades later, and for several subsequent decades, should have found evidence of fakery in the JFK photos. He tries to shift the burden of proof while admitting he has none.
Conan Doyle was a fiction writer, a politician, and a very enthusiastic Spiritualist. Not the best authority you could choose for authenticating a photo purporting to be of a fairy. Of the three photography-related companies Conan Doyle asked, two refused to authenticate the photos but admitted they were unable to tell how they had been faked while the third outright told him they thought they were fake.
This is Robert Prey's typical approach to expert testimony. He finds some crackpot who happens to agree with him, then tells us we have to believe him because the crackpot is really some kind of expert. In this case, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a "leading intellectual." But because Robert failed to realize Conan Doyle was heavily biased and had no pertinent expertise, he'll try for about a page to rehabilitate that claim, then he'll go through a bunch of gyrations to disentangle himself from any "expert" claim on this evidence and tell us the evidence stands alone on its own merits -- i.e., that the obviously fake fairy photos are "objective" evidence that photos can be undetectably faked.
And around and around we go. He'll probably get another 20-50 pages of attention in this thread before he has to resort to throwing lunch meat.
