These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences. Various papers were read, including the following:
Tead's Hypothesis that energy, in whatever form, has a sort of subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity, had taken up word-spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking to human nature.
Schilch's Theory that there were no words and that the whole grisly phenomenon was the result of mass autohypnosis. This proposition (which might valuably have been given further investigation) was discarded by the scientists for empirical reasons: they, themselves, they felt, could not be hypnotized and certainly their instruments could not be. (It will be noted that there was no discussion of the possibility that the scientists could be so hypnotized as uniformly to misread their instruments.)
Boden's Proposal that the human unconscious mind actually formed the Words by telekinesis. To defend this (another idea worthy of deeper scrutiny) he cited J.B. Rhine—and was laughed off the rostrum.
Jetefti's remarkably erudite Demonstration—following studies of cosmic radiation around various Words—studies of ionization, of stratospheric air currents, of polarization, of the uninterruptibility of streams of neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, electrons, photons, and other forms of radiation with which the Words had been surrounded, of the Heaviside Layer, etc., etc.—that no external (i.e., interplanetary) agency or intelligence had projected the Words on city skies.
Poglief's Discussion of God which concluded, "Religious Fundamentalism has been the recourse of millions, as might be expected. These persons hold either that God has permitted the Devil thus to rebuke humanity, which may be a sound moral observation but which is not good physics; or else that the Words represent the imminence of the Day of Judgment and the approach of the Opening of the Gates of Paradise. This latter theory, gentlemen, is not, I feel, borne out by the specific nature of the abundant tokens."
Hearty laughter greeted this conclusion. And again—the opportunity to consider the nature of God, a third valuable occasion, was missed.
Ultimately, it was decided that
(a) No direct harm whatever had come from the Words
(b) Thus the disaster was of psychological occasion, up to the present time