Whatever happened to the house sized space snowballs coming in over the north pole?

[astro]

Celestial Snowballs: Do Small Comets Hit Earth Daily?

Was this theory from a few years back ever proved or refuted?

Every day, thousands of icy objects the size of small houses pummel Earth and blast apart and evaporate in the upper atmosphere. That’s the theory University of Iowa physics researchers Louis Frank and John Sigwarth defended earlier this month at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting. Last week, the small comet theory, largely dismissed by the scientific community for more than 10 years, became the center of renewed and heated debate.

At the spring AGU meeting in May, Frank and Sigwarth revealed a series of Polar photographs as proof of the existence of 20-to-40-ton ice comets that, over the age of Earth, could have provided enough water to fill the oceans. The comets captured by the camera range in size from one the size of a two-bedroom house shown disintegrating 5,000 to 15,000 miles above the Atlantic Ocean to an image of light emitted by the breakup of water molecules from a small comet less than 2,000 miles above Earth’s surface.

[The_Bad_Astronomer]

Basically, the concensus among astronomers is that they don’t exist. What Frank and other saw were most likely spurious data in their instruments.

I have read a few papers and listened to some talks, and concur, to my ability to understand the problem. These comets have to have almost magical properties to exist (they must be extremely brittle, because there is no seismic evidence of them hitting the Moon using detectors the astronauts left there; they are never seen by the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who watch the skies very closely, etc etc).

I need to put up a page about this on my site; I have a couple, but they are old, discussing the topic as if the comets may indeed be real, but now I think they are not.

[astro]

Thanks!

[bbeaty]

Here’s the discoverer’s website:
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/
From the articles I saw at the time, it seemed that the scientific community was using a priori reasoning: “we don’t believe it, now just try and shift our opinion,” i.e. prejudice rather than skepticism. A true skeptic doesn’t leap to a position of initial bias, and is skeptical about both pro AND con arguments. The small comet controversy even wound up in this article about scientific misbehavior:

Moving The Goalposts
http://www.anomalist.com/commentaries/claim.html

Dr. Frank notes that there need not be any lunar seismic signatures, since the tidal force spreads the fluffballs before they strike… but there should be light flashes.

One thing I wondered about: if space is full of sooty black fluffballs, then even if they’re hard to detect by reflected light, they should be detectable when occluding other objects, say, the moon or sun.

And one thing I heard about long after, but don’t have a reference: the original data from earth-observing UV cameras went away when an instrument on a different satellite was used. My memory is so vague that this could have been speculation about how to verify the original report, rather than a disconfirming report.