"...reliant on government funding...": you keep on questioning their integrity, this is baseless slander. If we cant trust the independence of scientist and engineers, the world is in danger. "it was a NIST guy": citation needed, and if true, was he alone or did he represent consensus among his peers? You might be true that there has not been any peer review so far, but by publishing their report they open their work for review by peers. And note that the reputation of NIST is at play here, if some  outside expert can find a major error in their simulations, it should be published in peer reviewed literature and, given consensus in the field about the error, NIST would have to retract its claims. Your words: '"new phenomenon" that is still not clearly explained'. NIST report: new phenomenon that IS explained by basic physics, please read the report and don't distort facts there. "altering input to match the results": this is pretty standard in the simulation business to account for uncertainties in your model and is allowed as long as you alterations are within reasonable limits. And stop whining about the lead investigator, a non-expert boss being able to explain the work of his expert subordinates happens everywhere, media relations is usually part of his job description. "The majority of the engineering community": a few websites is not a majority, please show me a statement by an engineering society or so. But I wont stop them from doing research, if they write a report as thorough as NIST, I will be open for their ideas.