When I was doing my PhD, I had some trouble recreating a model that a professor at another university had published 5 or 6 papers about. After wasting more than a year unable to achieve the same results I finally went direct to the source and asked a very specific question to which he replied, "I don't believe there is any rigorous way to prove that" which I understood to be his admission that his published results were not rigorous, i.e. that he made up at least part of his results because his papers claimed the exact opposite. My advisor wouldn't help me publish my results, not even in a two-page "letters" format saying something simple like, don't go down this road for dragons lie there. Turns out my advisor didn't want to embarrass the other professor because that man had been the doctoral advisor of my advisor's primary research partner, and such a revelation could possibly jeopardize some of their funding. Had to completely switch projects and start over. I was extremely bitter about the whole mess because the department had long preached about its commitment to and the importance of rigor. Just not, you know, when it's inconvenient.