Hah, no worries, I'm Team Mulder too. And science is probably always a blast, so it looks like an interesting thing to check out for myself. For instance, I looked into chemical, but completely neglected (the applications of) magnetic properties it could have, which is much more my day-job area of interest. I'm just lukewarm on the whole controversy, because Avi "chair of physics at Harvard" Loeb crying foul at the 'physics establishment' is a tad hilarious. If nobodies like am_U or I seriously postulated anything like he did, we'd be keelhauled under the liquid nitrogen cystern, not published. ;)
I'm not saying 'the system' doesn't suck, but it's undeniable that anyone else would have been strongarmed into removing the part even implying/suggesting ET intelligence as a possible explanation for the possibility of the object being a 'pancake' sail rather than rotated oblong. Would it be awesome to be true? Absolutely. Do we need more data? Yes. Does it require more research? Ditto. Do I want to believe? Hell yeah! But because of the implications of this work, skepticism has to be on the all-time high. Back when the topic was fresh, I was being dismissive of quite a few rebuttals to Loeb, saying how "adding these 15 parameters gives a better explanation" is a worthless statement on par with "my gf is homeomorphic with a torus, so is Liv Tyler, therefore I'm screwing Arven on the daily, therefore I'm Aragorn." Now? I want to believe, but don't want to be reckless or show any less scrutiny than I'd give to my research, neither on the record nor off. Which I suppose is exactly what you want in a scientist. I just became far more wary of Loeb('s persona) with time.