All these people are making unsupported claims. It's backed up by nothing more than "someone says."
The work has been replicated and reported in the peer-reviewed literature multiple times, beginning with Arata. And in the final analysis, ALL science is based on "someone says", even peer-reviewed material. Especially when the controllers of the peer-review process have an ax to grind, either against a particular topic (as with cold fusion) or in favor of it (global warming). That corruption of peer review is NOT to the benefit of science as a whole.