Here is what actually happened. As the author notes, it was a routine fact checking exercise of the sort public figures and institutions deal with every day.
In early morning of July 6th, I sent fact-checking emails to the CEO of the AAAS and to the top officials and/or media contacts of the 30 other organizations. Appendix B of the paper contains the email exchange with AAAS. The emails asked only about signing the letter, not about its content. Specifically, my email asked whether the letter in question was signed by the listed organizations or their leaders, and asked for an opportunity to see the actual signatures. In its reply, AAAS changed the published allegation that the letter was signed to “reflect the participation of leaders of each of the 31 named scientific societies” (Fact #1). My follow up letter, asking AAAS to confirm that the letter was actually signed, went unanswered.
That same day, a different email (Appendix A) was sent to each of the other 30 organizations. All these emails had substantially the same text, but each organization was contacted separately, usually with copies to multiple recipients within that organization. The organizations were not cc’ed on emails sent to their peers, and were not told that other organizations were contacted, except for the triplet of the Agronomy/Soil Science/Crop Science Societies. 9 out of these 30 organizations answered, and all 9 confirmed that they signed the letter. 5 out of 9 replies flatly denied that there was any pressure to sign, and none indicated otherwise. Some probably thought that the question about the pressure was inappropriate. Thus, all replies and non-replies can be divided into two categories: “yes” and “no answer.” If the respondents acted independently, the 9 positive replies would be a valid statistical sample, confirming the null hypothesis that the letter was properly signed by all participants.
But the respondents did not reply independently, as one might expect from any organization simply asked to confirm its signature on a published document. “Leading scientific societies” might also be expected to think independently, but that’s another matter. Instead, the respondents colluded and coordinated their responses or non-responses in an unthinkable manner. This is evidence of foul play by itself (Fact #2). Honest people do not need to coordinate their answers. This lack of independence also makes it impossible to use statistical methods to infer what answers would be given by the 21 organizations that did not reply.
This routine fact-checking exercise suddenly evolved into an experiment, and its timeline is as important as the questions and answers. The replies started pouring immediately after I sent the questions. In fact, 6 out of 10 replies (including the one from AAAS) arrived within eight hours. Then, an email from the Ecological Society of America arrived, and it was as if a silence spell was cast on the “leading nonpartisan scientific societies.” This is the email: