The saga of the “Matter Pollocks” — a group of paintings discovered by Alex Matter in a storage container in Wainscott, N.Y., and labeled as being by Jackson Pollock — appears to have reached a quiet conclusion on Wednesday night, at an event sponsored by the International Foundation for Art Research that was alternately suspenseful, comic, and just plain odd.

The climax of the evening was a presentation by the forensic scientist James Martin. Mr. Matter commissioned Mr. Martin to study the paintings, but Mr. Martin said earlier this year that he had been prevented from releasing his results by threats of legal action from Mr. Matter’s attorney. Wednesday night was the first time that Mr. Martin discussed his results in public. Although based on a larger sampling of the paintings, his findings largely agreed with those of researchers at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in concluding that many of the paintings contain pigments that were not available until after Pollock’s death in 1956, and in some cases not until the 1980s.

Mr. Matter found the disputed paintings in either 2002 or 2003 (he has said both at different times), in a storage container that had belonged to his parents, Herbert and Mercedes Matter, who were friends of Pollock’s. Some two dozen or so small paintings were encased in a brown wrapper, which described the contents as: “Pollock (1946-49) … Jackson experimental works.” (Some of the paintings apparently disintegrated soon after the wrapper was opened; 22 paintings survived.)

The attribution of the paintings to Pollock gained strength from the support of a professor at Case Western Reserve University, Ellen Landau, who previously sat on the Pollock-Krasner authentication board (which dissolved in the mid-1990s). However, other major Pollock experts, including the author of the catalogue raisonné, Frances V. O’Connor, disagreed with the attribution.

The paintings are currently on view in an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College called “Pollock Matters.” Mr. Martin delivered his lecture in the low, foreboding tone of someone describing a criminal investigation. At one point, he observed that the presence of one of the anachronistic pigments in the bottom layers of two paintings — beneath the application of the letters “JP” on one painting and another apparent signature on the back side of another — “may raise questions of intentional misattribution or fraud.”

Neither Mr. Matter nor Ms. Landau was present at the event (Ms. Landau was invited to speak but declined), and IFAR’s executive director, Sharon Flescher, struggled to keep the discussion balanced, interjecting at points to defend Ms. Landau in absentia. Before Mr. Martin gave his presentation, another scientist, Richard Newman of the MFA, gave an overview of the three studies conducted on the paintings. The chair of the art history department at New York University and a co-curator of the 1998 Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Pepe Karmel, gave a talk examining whether the Matter paintings look like Pollocks. Comparing images of the Matter paintings side by side with known Pollocks of similar scale, he argued that they did not. The Matter paintings were generally more homogeneous and repetitive in composition, while the confirmed Pollocks were often asymmetrical.

The general response of scholars to the case seemed to be summed up by a post-presentation question from a curator of American art at the Harvard University Art Museums, Theodore Stebbins Jr. Addressing himself to Mr. Karmel, Mr. Stebbins asked: “Since most people agree that, with a very few exceptions, they don’t look like Pollocks, why are we here? Why did this [story] have legs?”

“Fear,” Mr. Karmel responded, noting that experts who offer opinions about authenticity risk being sued by disgruntled owners. “There was the truck driver lady,” he continued, referring to Teri Horton, whose efforts to get a painting she purchased at a thrift shop authenticated as a Pollock were documented in the film “Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?” “She asked me to be interviewed for some TV program, and in her e-mail she was going on about the cabal of art historians and dealers,” Mr. Karmel said. “Those of us who are scholars don’t want to get involved.”

In the most entertaining cameo appearance of the evening, Pollock’s one-time girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, who survived the car crash that killed him, asked whether, in addition to research on the painting materials, research had been done on “the gesture.” “These were all painted from the wrist,” she said, her elongated vowels reeking of disdain. “Jackson would never have done these.”