I quite agree about the need for results to be reproducible
Great!
It had sounded as though you wanted to have it both ways: Dr. Hoodless was such a great expert that no one can question his methods or results, but such a buffoon that no one else can use the measurements that he used to generate his results.
I grant that the TIGHAR Nikumaroro hypothesis is well supported by circumstantial evidence - the reexamination of Hoodless's data, the final proven radio messages, the accounts of Emily Sikuli, and those of Pulekai Songivalu and Tapania Taiki regarding wreckage, the post-loss radio messages, artifacts found on the island that fit the time period, the size 9 shoe sole etc. But in the end none of those can stand alone ...
That's what is meant by a "circumstantial case."
No part of a suspension bridge "stands alone."
No part of an aircraft "flies alone."
If the parts aren't fitted together, there is no bridge or aircraft.
We agree that "none of those can stand alone."
without being given the major help of some purely imaginary theories regarding Earhart and Noonan's behaviour and their links to it, and that is the really big problem isn't it.
All experiments require "imaginary theories." That's how scientists prepare an experiment. They take an idea, imagine what the testable implications of that idea are, then construct the experiments
before they know how the experiments will turn out. If they are prohibited from using their imaginations to foresee what has not yet been observed, no experiment could ever be created.
In this case, the "experiment" being conducted is to "search the space toward which some circumstantial lines of reasoning point." Tom King, who holds a Ph.D. in archaeology,
explains why TIGHAR is searching Niku.
I know that the answer for some members of this forum is to argue that you construct a story and turn it into a hypothesis by trying to make pieces fit and that is how everything like this works, but that isn't really the way it works in science is it.
Asking the question of how the pieces fit together is not contrary to the methods of science. If a theory doesn't cover all the facts, that may be grounds to reject the theory. Fudging the data to make it fit the theory is bad, too.
In science or in any inquiry the individual pieces of data that are being used have each got to have their own integrity. If one or several of those has to have some help with achieving that integrity and its place in the hypothesis by fudging the edges a bit, or adding some conditions that are not present in the original data, then not only is that individual bit of data immediately rendered untrustworthy but the whole edifice is weakened.
You've brought back the "weak-link-in-the-chain" argument, dressed in a new metaphor.
You have expressed a philosophical view. People have the right to philosophize. Since your view is not a finding of physics, chemistry, biology, or archaeology, it is something freely chosen and advocated by you.
Therein lies the whole problem with the data so far advanced to support the Nikumaroro hypothesis but I hasten to add that that is the problem with every other hypothesis advanced to answer the mystery of Earhart's disappearance. So far in many of the arguments about the data presented and its value I am reminded of what a friend of mine once wrote in a paper about ideas with similar tenuous links to reality "the thinner the ice the faster they skate". In the end this discussion has not proven that the Nikumaroro hypothesis has any more substance than when it was first advanced but that TIGHAR still has to find something solid and incontrovertible.
Yes, TIGHAR would love to find the "
Any Idiot Artifact." The organization has kind of noticed how useful it would be to clinch the case. I think that is why it has spent so much time and money searching where it estimates the artifact is most likely to be found.