Polywater

Polywater was a substance believed in the late 1960s to be a polymerized form of ordinary water, first described by the Soviet scientist Nikolai Fedyakin. Western press coverage from 1969 onward stoked fears of a scientific gap between the United States and the Soviet Union over the material, which in turn drew growing scientific attention and, as early as 1970, growing scientific doubt about whether it was real. By 1973 researchers had shown that what had been called polywater was simply ordinary water contaminated with small amounts of common compounds, and the episode is now cited as an example of pathological science, in which normal experimental artifacts were mistaken for a genuine new form of matter.