Not wanting to re read the 34 pages, can someone (Joe?) please summerise why this analysis was carried out and to what purpose.
Thanks
Those who stated the Skat should be tested were correct. I did not want to accept that at first because I believed myself to have been correct about my hypothesis and lab tests cost money. Whether or not I was correct in the end made no difference. The Skat is thus far, based on its likeness of base stamp to the artifact, the most reasonable alternative to Campana Italian Balm that has been proposed. The research that proposed it was done in good faith and is a credit to this forum that produced it. Because it is reasonable and done in good faith, until tested it would always be a spear to hurl into the heart of the hypothesis the bottle fragment was Campana Italian Balm, whether or not the artifact actually was, or was Skat, and whether or not my scientific rationales for dismissing Skat as skat were true. In short, in the end the only justification I had for not testing it was my own fear - small but real - that those proposing it might be correct. I owed it to this forum to own up to this and do the experiment that it urgently requested. And so I have.
Those who doubt a hypothesis or challenge an idea are many things. They may be obnoxious at times in the methods that they choose to employ in argument. This might mean they are boorish, but it doesn't make them necessarily bad scientists.
Richard Feynman does a better job of summarizing:
"It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition."
The entire speech is here. I apologize if I've used too many words for what is really a very simple idea.
Joe Cerniglia
TIGHAR #3078 ECR