Actually, from the beginning they've mentioned that equipment failure would be one of the ways to account for the findings. They also have been incredibly open in asking for help to explain the anomaly. I don't see this as scary at all. Science has come out looking incredibly even keeled and reasonable. Some of the news outlets that have covered the science... less so. But still, almost every article I read had all the caveats listed even if there were have some overly hopeful headlines.
Oh, "scary" is the right word, notwithstanding everything you just said, which is all true.
It takes courage to stand in front of every camera on earth and claim to have measured something impossible, no matter how cautious you are, and no matter how gracious everyone else is. It takes courage to knowingly and deliberately turn yourself into the butt of jokes in foreign languages whose names you don't even know, all on the very slim chance that this thing you can't explain is something breathtakingly awesome, Isaac Newton-awesome, Albert Einstein's 1905-awesome. It was bound to be embarrassing in the end, and lo and behold it is shaping up to be exactly as embarrassing as every one of my fellow experimentalists knew it would be, and I can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or salute, because when you've spent months or years of your life in utter despair, trying to get your experiment to produce something halfway believable, or redoing six months of work because a broken fridge probably contaminated the first batch, or trembling as you cross-check the simulation code the week before your thesis is due, you've learned how it feels: Awful.
I'll go with "salute": Let's all raise a glass to these folks and be grateful that they are on the road to finding their problem, rather than being haunted by uncertainty forever. May their next result be twice as exciting and only half as wrong!
It has little to do with science, and I don't understand your comment about science being scary. Science is simply method used to discover how things actually work. There is nothing "scary" about that.
This is more a question of engineering. Doing modern physics experiments require extremely complicated machines with tolerances so fine that the tiniest amount of noise in the results can throw off the accuracy of the measurements.
The experimenters were not some quacks making spurious claims. They very, very, very carefully checked and rechecked their results before deciding to talk to the outside scientific community and asking for help.
Given the complexity of these machines, it doesn't surprise me at all that a single cable might be the source of the errors. If you write code, you find many times throughout your career you get errant results. In the process of tracking down the cause, you may spend hours, days, or longer going line by line and missing the problem. In the end, it may turn out to be a mis-named variable or the wrong kind of comparator (== vs === in js). Simple things that are easy to miss.
There was a story recently about a commonly used algorithm that dates back decades that had a bug in it. When the algorithm was originally developed, it was never thought that it would still be in use 30 years later and disregarded the size of data sets available. When the algo was used on a very large, modern set of data an integer would flip and go negative. The point is, its easy to miss things in very complicated systems and very hard to make sure there are little or no bugs at all. I don't remember what type of algo it was, but it was an interesting read.
You're probably referring to is, "Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken", discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130463
