Let's say you see foot prints outside your house. And they look like deer footprints, and so you say they are. Somebody then shows that a small moose could have

Let's say you see foot prints outside your house. And they look like deer footprints, and so you say they are. Somebody then shows that a small moose could have left similar tracks. You don't need to state what definitively left those tracks to say that it's premature to declare them deer footprints. In the signal world this is even more true, because with signals this faint everything is going to come down to probabilistic analysis. And so the real question is not binary (gravitational waves or not gravitational waves), but rather the chance that what was detected was caused by gravitational waves. And so anything that could confound those probabilities is as good as a refutation, even without any explanation for what did cause the observed phenomena. I have no opinion on the issue one way or the other, but I do have to say that the large numbers of appeals to authority and ad hominem from the LIGO researchers do not inspire confidence. People tend to resort to these sorts of responses for the lack of a rational refutation. I found a much more informative article on the issue here [1], surprisingly from Forbes. There too, the responses from the LIGO team feel off. For instance they were criticizing the Danish team for using the tutorials LIGO provided on their site alongside the data! I mean...??? Did LIGO ever publish the exact method used to obtain their results? [1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-it-all-just-noise-independent-analysis-casts-doubt-on-ligos-detections https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-...