Proud Mary wrote ...

I couldn't agree more that the dapper French alchemist N, and people like him, have done a great deal to undermine serious professional LENR research. In one experiment of his 'experiments' that I recall, he seemed to think he would be able to detect a minute neutron flux with a kiddy's 100 bucks GM counter, while he electrolysed potassium carbonate solution or whatever.

Proud Mary wrote ...

The damage that quacks like N have done can be measured by Scotty's query: "Not sure how acceptable the topic is on this board" i.e. Scotty was afraid (has been made afraid?) of expressing an opinion, or showing an interest in about a possibly taboo subject- in a word, a kind of pressure has been applied to him - to all of us - to renounce observational science which must ever be free to enquire, to question, to doubt, to hypothesise, to speculate, to reconfigure, to rearrange and to dream.

Proud Mary wrote ...

It is said with good reason that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary levels of proof,' but let us never get into a situation where we put the cart before the horse, and say that the absence of extraordinary levels of proof means that a claim, notion, idea, is invalid, or incorrect, and should not therefore should not be invesitgated. Several very eminent Victorian scientists of great talent claimed that "there was now nothing more to be discovered.!"And think how long it took before it occurred to the quiet persistence of the kind and gentle Eddington saw that the solar eclipse of 1919 might provide the first empirical evidence in support of the General Theory.

Conundrum wrote ...

Interestingly, there was a documented case over here in Guernsey a while back, where they had multiple sightings associated with a strike on an aircraft that had just taken off.