My grad school advisor wrote a couple papers in 1970 and 1971 where they proposed a 3D structure for polywater, and then "disproved" its existence. The second one has a wonderfully scientific statement: "It is important to distinguish clearly between the essentially empirical interrelation of experiments achieved by the original model and the current attack on it, because it is obvious from ref. 1 that we have placed ourselves in the unusual and all too easy to discredit position of being authors both of the original model and of the new results against it."