Clicking on the embedded link takes her to a site called Retraction Watch, which she’d heard about before but never visited: a tongue-in-cheek listing of the constant stream of retractions from scientific journals. Papers were retracted for sundry reasons, everything from having improperly analyzed data to outright fraud or misrepresentation, and the entire spectrum in between.

Totally regular star dimming: missing data leads to retraction of weird astronomical ~ndings.

Apparently, there was a little mishap involving how bright stars are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The journal Nature has issued a retraction of “Anomalous star dimming in the Milky Way.” The now-unavailable paper claimed that various instances of star dimming could not be explained by comets, solar dust storms, or any other natural cause. Obviously, that only leaves aliens! Apparently the paper advocated that such dimming anomalies might be because of Dyson spheres: structures alien civilizations would build around a sun to extract more and more energy from it. They even said this increased the chances that aliens would have visited earth. But an internal investigation carried out by the funding agency of the study, DARPA, concluded that the authors could produce no lab notebooks nor any electronic copies of the data reported in this article in any form. The authors claimed that the electronically-stored data had been accidentally deleted and that the physical lab notebooks had been lost. Therefore, under suspicion of data fabrication, the paper was withdrawn. The first author on the paper, Greg Alpern, is a 2nd year PhD student at MIT. We’ve contacted Greg, his principle investigator, and DARPA, and will let you know if we hear back with any updates.

The entry was dated three years ago. Carmen digs around the internet some more and turns up a host of innocuous information about Greg Alpern confirming that it really was Greg. The email had come from an anonymous address. She fires back a quick email asking, “Who the hell sent this?”

So Greg had faked data. And had previously been funded by DARPA, although that could just be a coincidence. Greg had probably changed his name in order to avoid the exact kind of search result that Carmen was turning up now . . . Everything she knew about him is falling away, every comment he had made didn’t seem awkward anymore but creepy. Maybe he had lied his way into the program, maybe Atif had found out, maybe when Greg had left early that night he had gone to make sure Atif didn’t tell anyone else . . .