The most puzzling and controversial finding raises the possibility that some neutrinos may have a mass as great as 17,000 electron volts.

This pioneering work would lead many to investigate the group's puzzling findings.

The study that Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz led at Yale came up with puzzling findings about the benefits and risks of clot-busting drugs.

Assessing the unexpected and puzzling findings, one of the mission scientists, Dr. Tobias C. Owen of the University of Hawaii, said, "Theories we have been living with are going to have to be modified."

But there were several puzzling findings in the range of 5.4 to 20.4 milligrams - a level of caffeine not low enough for the coffee to be considered decaffeinated but well below that of regular coffee.

Scientists meeting here debated today what to do about a puzzling but potentially important finding about AIDS: that circumcised men are much less likely to become infected than uncircumcised men.

Mr. Phillips also offered a possible explanation for another puzzling finding, that the elevators, which are the movable parts on the horizontal tail that are used to pitch the nose up or down, had moved independently.

This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

Then there is the puzzling finding that the kindergarten effect on wages seems to grow over time.

This puzzling finding has yet to be explained.