Soviet scientist Fedyakin reported anomalous water condensed in quartz capillaries: denser, 15 times more viscous, freezing below zero, boiling above 100. Derjaguin championed it in England in 1966; hundreds of papers followed, hydrogen-bond polymerization models, and warnings that escaped polywater could autocatalytically convert all terrestrial water. The collapse: samples were too tiny for analysis, and when analyzed, proved contaminated, silicon, phospholipids. Electron microscopy showed particulate matter in ordinary water. Derjaguin conceded in 1973: the experiments do not support anomalous water.
Bell Labs' Denis Rousseau suspected contamination from the researchers themselves: after a handball game he wrung his T-shirt into a spectrometer, and the sweat spectrum matched polywater. His 1971 Science paper proposed every human walks in a Pigpen fog of personal aerosol, which lands in capillaries and becomes anomalous water. Polywater was one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. The field moved on; millions of research dollars did not come back.
The claim: polywater is the fossil of the general case, contamination is never just chemical, it is cognitive, the researcher's expectation lands in the sample like sweat in the capillary, and every era's anomalous result is partly the anomalist. Verdict: the NAS used it as exactly this lesson. The archive files it beside the Dogon mirror and the golden ratio's rulers: instruments measure what you put in, and you are always, partly, what you put in. Rousseau's true finding: the observer sweats.
If hundreds of peer-reviewed papers documented a substance that did not exist, what are this decade's polywaters?