Lol. You're splitting hairs: confirm/check/verify all mean the same in this context. It was exciting, controversial and thrilling. I was there. Of course th

Lol. You're splitting hairs: confirm/check/verify all mean the same in this context. It was exciting, controversial and thrilling. I was there. Of course the default mode was skepticism. Even for (3). But you are fooling yourself if you don't think these things were the main topics of conversation. It had a lot to do with the reputations of the scientists involved. Fleishman and Pons were very well respected, for example, so while people question how they lived through the experiments (based on expected byproducts), they were pretty sure something new must be going on.