"We didn't know how many orders of magnitude he [Smolańczuk] was wrong". Ninov, again, held sole control of the data analysis program called GOOSY, and he was the only one on the team that knew how to use it. In 1999, Ninov and his team reported sightings of element 118, almost exactly as predicted, and a decay chain that also produced element 116. However, other laboratories were unable to reproduce the results. Eager to prove their discovery, the team double-checked their instruments, and tried again. One more sighting was made by Ninov, but it was dismissed by a colleague, and a full formal investigation was spawned to get to the bottom of elements 118 and 116. The original element 118 data was independently analysed, and in the original binary data, there was no indication of the presence of element 118 or 116. The investigation dragged on for a year, until it was concluded that "Ninov... intentionally misled his colleagues-and everyone else-by fabricating data". Ninov, who had been placed on leave, was fired. The rest of Ninov's team officially retracted their claims in 2002. There was also an investigation conducted into Ninov's unsupervised science at GSI; it was found that "two sightings were spuriously created" (one of element 110 and another of element 112). However, very perplexingly, these false flags were found amongst lots of real data that still supported that his co-discoveries were legitimate. It was the conclusion of the GSI investigation that the discovery of those elements was legitimate. At minimum it is certain that Victor Ninov made a "wrongful claim" about elements 116 and 118. The heavy elements 116 and 118 were eventually discovered and verified in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and were observed contrary to LBNL's observations. These elements were named livermorium and oganesson respectively. Ninov maintains that he was innocent to this day. Impact on the scientific community The reports of the investigation came as quite a shock to other scientists as Ninov had been previously regarded as a very respected physicist. In the aftermath of the investigation it was troubling to many that so many co-authors on the papers about LBNL were none the wiser to learn they had contributed to a false statement. The Ninov affair resulted in stricter guidelines being set for coauthors; these rules "clarify co-authors' roles and duties" and they are "requiring all coauthors to vouch