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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Split Decision”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer, which is six letters long, is where you’ll find this puzzle’s missing clues.
Answer: UTOPIA
Correct entries: 421 overall, of which 364 were solo

Same answer two weeks in a row! Nothing planned, that’s just how the meta-cookie crumbles sometimes.

Six fictional campus organizations served as our theme entries, whose names comprised two or three Greek letters a la sororities, fraternities, honor societies, et al. In each case, one of the Greek letters involved could not be determined with certainty since key crossings were clued only as “CLUE MISSING”. Each of the six bogus organizations was clued as simply “Fictional campus organization (created for this puzzle):

16-A: OMICRON ?HI, crossing ES?. Could have been either PHI/ESP or CHI/ESC

22-A: ?PSILON SIGMA crossing ?SO. Could have been either EPSILON/ESO or UPSILON/USO

30-A: ?I IOTA OMEGA crossing O?EN. Could have been either XI/OXEN or PI/OPEN

42-A: TAU DELTA P?I crossing SO?O. Could have been either PHI/SOHO or PSI/SOSO

47-A: ?ETA ETA ALPHA crossing ?OWIE. Could have been either ZETA/ZOWIE or BETA/BOWIE

59-A: THETA ?U RHO crossing HO?ES. Could have been wither MU/HOMES or NU/HONES

Now what? How to decide which answer is correct?

Answer: Why not both? Use both possible letters in those squares, put another letter between them (see title, “Split Decision”) and you’ve got a three-letter entry in the grid. Like so:

16-A: C or P, so CUP at 10-Across, yielding the U. There’s no way to tell whether the P or C is used first, so you’d just need to check the grid for P?C and C?P words to tell.

22-A: U or E, so UTE at 62-D, yielding the T

30-A: P or X, so POX at 40-A, yielding the O

42-A: H or S, so HPS at 60-D, yielding the P

47-A: B or Z, so BIZ at 19-A, yielding the I

59-A: N or M, so NAM at 41-A, yielding the A

Those yielded letters spell contest answer UTOPIA, fittingly since it means “nowhere,” and that’s exactly where you’ll find this puzzle’s missing clues: nowhere. You never resolve which letter goes in those squares since you don’t need it. I made sure to point out that UTOPIA means nowhere in last week’s post, in case you didn’t know already!

Brainbow says:

Can I take an early guess at next week’s answer?

It’s not UTOPIA, I promise!

Eckless writes:

So for once, Chrome’s autofill feature got everything correct for submitting my answer on this puzzle…my unique nickname, my email, and my entry!

And finally, Magoo quips:

“More” of the same?

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a four-letter word that’s encoded somewhere in the grid.

NOTE: This week’s grid contains circles, so make sure you seem them if you’re solving in Across Lite (which occasionally will remove circles for some solvers).

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.