Mineoro and ion detection
This whole subject is an excellent example of a phenomenon known as pathological science. Believers offer fantastic theories that are contrary to experience, and meet any criticism with ad hoc excuses. Such theories can easily be spotted as pathological, when only the believers can reproduce the results, and critics continually fail to duplicate the experiment.
This does not mean that anybody is being purposely dishonest, but simply that people are tricked into believing false results by a lack of understanding. There are many published cases over the years that have attracted a great deal of attention, and sometimes many hundreds of papers have been published supporting the results. Some even lasted as long as 20 years before it was accepted that the results were caused by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions.
Self-deception is a process by which we deceive ourselves into accepting something as true, when in fact it is based on a false idea. This is why scientists insist on clearly defined and controlled double-blind, randomized and repeatable tests. This is the only way to negate the wonderful ability of human beings to deceive themselves into believing things that are not true.
"Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits." - Michael Novak
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