Father De Marchi believed related miraculous phenomena, such as the Sun's effect on standing water from heavy rains that immediately preceded the event, to be genuine. According to De Marchi, "...engineers that have studied the case reckoned that an incredible amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up those pools of water that had formed on the field in a few minutes as it was reported by witnesses." De Marchi wrote that the prediction of an unspecified "miracle", the abrupt beginning and end of the event, the varied religious backgrounds of the observers, the sheer numbers of people present, reports of sightings by people up to away, and the lack of any known scientific causative factor make a mass hallucination or mass hysteria unlikely. De Marchi concludes that "given the indubitable reference to God, and the general context of the story, it seems that we must attribute to Him alone the most obvious and colossal miracle of history."