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CERN Confirms Hints of Hypothetical Particle Have Disappeared (arstechnica.com)
John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica: Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics. This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise. The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.
To quote Wernher von Braun, it's not a failure as long as we get data.
If the data is "nope, doesn't work", we still learned something.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Prior to the Mercury controversy, Uranus was found to be moving in ways not described by Newton's theory of gravity. Again, there are two solutions: our description of gravity is wrong, or there is an unseen ("dark") mass pulling on Uranus. In this case, it was dark matter, namely the undiscovered Neptune.
Both modified gravity and dark matter have been solutions to past conflicts between theory and measurement. There's no need to assume there's some conspiracy suppressing this or that idea.
Also, sometimes it takes a long time between a theoretical proposal to explain a mystery and direct detection. The neutrino was hypothesized in 1930 in order to conserve energy and momentum in beta nuclear decays. It wasn't directly detected until 12 years later in 1942. It took 49 years between the first papers proposing the existence of the Higgs boson and its discovery at the LHC. All we can do is search everywhere and be patient.