The most controversial and well-known fairy episode in British history was the case of the Cottingley fairies in West Yorkshire, England. Two young girls, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, claimed to have taken photographs of fairies in the glen at Cottingley. This hoax fooled countless people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. It was some sixty years later before the now elderly ladies admitted to their deception. They had simply used crude cutouts of fairy illustrations for the photographs.

The Cottingley Fairies were the subject of a recent feature film, although a few of the facts were 'creatively omitted'.

In 1964 several children in Liverpool, Merseyside saw 'little green men', on a bowling green wearing white hats and throwing stones and tiny clods of earth at each another.

The Isle of Man is traditionally inhabited by 'little people'. In 1911, a 'great crowd of little beings' dressed in red were seen marching. In 1979, four children in Nottingham claimed to have seen about 60 little people driving around over the swamps near a lake in little red and white bubble cars. A similar incident involving only one little man was reported in Kilhampton, Cornwall in 1940.

Also, a 'faery boat' was seen sailing off the island of Muck, in the Scottish Highlands in 1912.