[studentrob]

Yup. There are also organizations who meet and research about contacting aliens. Doing research is not evidence of validity or progress.

One thing to note though is these efforts are often put forth by some hard working folks and the product can be something great.

For example, "Thinking Machines" [1] [2], founded in 1983 in Cambridge and defunct in 1994. The folks who spent effort there would later take their knowledge of parallel programming and built a tool called An Initio as a successor company. The tool was way ahead of its time. It'd maximize resource usage on a machine in parallel without much technical knowledge needed by the developer. They made a boat load off of deploying this tool on internal datasets at many major companies for what was then called "data warehousing".

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/406781/thinking-machines/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation