Ahem, (cue swelling background guitar music, adopt Darryl Worley voice), actually, it sounds like Life to me. It ain't no fantasy ...
(Clears throat, /Darryl Worley voice) Ah, yes, anyway. Sure it would be tempting to fake a significant find, and garner all the prestige and accolades that had previously been so elusive. But man that's hard to do.
If you think you're a skeptical observer, that's nothing compared to the scrutiny that a scientific review gets. It's not the press that has to be convinced; we all know of their clueless gullibility. It is one's peers that have to be convinced. They're a tough crowd. Look at the treatment of Pons and Fleischman over their claims of "cold fusion".
You can't just make stuff up, even if you're tempted to do so. That's probably harder than the science.
Guess that's why all archeological finds will always be accredited to evolution. If it just might be a missing link, the skepticism is quite a bit lower than something challenging evolution. And the missing link will get you fame...until they eventually find it was a fraud, but even a valid challenge to evolution will get you mocked and derided.
The peer review process is not the scientific method in action. Its dogma in action. Science is about trying to falsify the leading theory. The scientific review is all to often about protecting it. Its easiest to see this nonsense in the "climate change" community now a days.
True indeed....my first PI was a trained entomologist and immunology of infectious disease type specializing in vector-borne diseases, mainly ticks and skeeters, and was on the review board of a few journals in his time and absolutely LIVED to find faults in submitted works.....it was his second career. To him, finding faults in others works was “the real science”...