That’s actually not a good example, because the follow up analysis actually confirms the initial result. ALH84001 is actually some pretty good evidence for fossilized Martian life.
What happened though was that they went public early with too little information, because they were worried about being scooped in the media. When they got asked questions that they didn’t have answers to, the result started to look like it was on shaky grounds. The opinion was formed that it was a bad result. After that it was pretty hard to get anyone to pay attention after that. Follow-on results pretty much confirmed the original result though.
I think there's a more recent book that came out a few years ago, but a quick google search isn't finding the name, sorry.
For Wikipedia which relies on citations, it's going to reflect the majority opinion which is "ALH84001 is insufficient evidence for life." However the reasoning for saying that morphological features are insufficient signs of life (in contrast with biologists studying Earth life who routinely rely on such evidence) is actually a direct response to ALH84001. Like the Pluto-Is-A-Planet? debacle, the generally accepted requirements and definitions were drawn up after the fact specifically to exclude ALH84001, in order to end an embarrassing controversy and provide funding for more missions (why go to Mars when you can just pick up rocks in Antarctica instead?) rather than answer a scientific question.
we're still in the same place as the original publications: most scientists don't think that EM of rocks from that look like microbes on rocks on earth is a convincing argument. The morphological argument has held since before this rock, it wasn't added up afterwards.
There just isn't enough information here to conclude anything so it's easier to reject the hypothesis (I have to admit, it took me a while to accept the idea that there is that much mass exchange between planets in the first place!)
And yet, go try to find out an age for the origin of life on Earth. You'll find that ALL of the evidence is faint morphological features in rocks from Australia. It's the gold standard for one field, but circumstantial in another?
Not correct, the data on earth that is reliable is based on carbon ratios, which are a far better hallmark. The older morphological stuff, while fun, is really just speculative, still.
Not for origin of life, no. We’re talking >3gy. These fossils are rocks, not biomaterials. Isotopes of trace decay products in the rock itself are used to age it, as is done with other geologic samples.
At the time that the big announcement was made in the 90's, the scientific community immediately came up with a bunch of criticisms that weren't properly addressed in the original paper. They suggested terrestrial contamination, they suggested abiotic crystallization processes, and given the observed similarities with Earth fossils they questioned whether cross-pollination of life was possible. The scientists had no satisfactory answers and ALH84001 was dismissed by the press as a dud and the scientific community as a career-ending topic (like cold fusion is for physicists).
Still, in the years that followed further analysis was done by the original authors and their teams. Isotope ratios and captured atmosphere within and around the tracks confirmed that the fossil features were ancient and of Martian origin. Comparative characterization of terrestrial rock-worm fossils was done and it was noted that like the Earth fossils--and unlike abiotic processes--the ALH84001 features were of uniform size and were anisotropic on the sub-microscopic scale, consistent with fossilization of biological structures rather than geologic crystallization processes. Finally, testing showed that the inside of the ALH84001 meteorite itself never exceeded 40 degrees when it was blasted from the Martian surface, or when it entered Earth's atmosphere, so any biological life deep within the rocks could have survived (no one thought the fossils were live, but by implication Mars could have, and almost certainly was seeded by Earth, making it not surprising that we would see a the telltale signs of Earth microbes in a rock from Mars.
TL;DR: At the time of the press conference and the weeks after, a bunch of reasonable questions were raised about the ALH84001 work. In the years that followed a few of the scientists involved followed up with further tests which confirmed or at least did not disprove their martian-life interpretation of the fossils. But the rest of the world moved on.
which turned out to be so completely wrong it's ridiculous:
https://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-p...
Coupled with NASA's constant touting of crappy life science aboard ISS, I've more or less just tuned them out (with a prior probability of 0.01).