So Daniel P. Kidder, writing in 1842, says, in commenting on the testimony of the Witnesses: That these men may have seen plates is very possible. * * * * * That Smith showed them plates, which to ignorant men had the appearance of gold, is easy enough to be believed; and if he had manufactured the same, it would have been no great stretch of ingenuity. [22] Professor J.B. Turner, writing in 1842, adopts the same theory with reference to the testimony of the Eight Witnesses: We are not only willing, but anxious to admit that Smith did show some plates of some sort; and that they [the Eight Witnesses] actually testify to the truth, so far as they are capable of knowing it. [23] So John Hyde, [24] 1857: Every careful reader must be compelled to admit that Smith did have some plates of some kind. Smith's antecedents and subsequents, show that he did not have genius sufficient to originate the whole conception, without some palpable suggestion. The having chanced to have found some plates in a mound, as Wiley found his, or as Chase discovered Smith's "Peepstone," would be just such an event as would suggest every peculiar statement Smith made about his plates, at the same time account for what is known; and, therefore, it is more than reasonable to conclude that Smith found his plates while digging gold. This entirely destroys all the shadow of argument so laboriously compiled by the "Mormon" apologists, which, even without this, although their strongest argument, only proves that he had some plates, but at the same time has no force of proof as to Smith's obtaining them from an angel. [25] Professor Riley, with some other anti-"Mormon" writers, suggests the possibility of collective hypnotization in the case of the Eight as well as in that of the Three Witnesses: and hypnotization produced both visual and sense illusion; but it is only a suggestion. While maintaining, with the utmost confidence the mental mirage theory, induced by hypnotic suggestion, as an adequate accounting for the testimony of the Three Witnesses, he can only suggest it as a possible solution of the testimony of the Eight Witnesses, and inclines rather to the theory of "pure fabrication." "It is a document," he remarks, "due to the affidavit habit." [26]