What you wrote reminds me of the controversy around Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment [1]. It measured the charge of an electron. Later experiments confirmed the real value was slightly higher than Millikan reported. Many researchers who could not replicate Millikan's value just assumed that they did something wrong rather than questioning Millikan's value. It took a few decades, but fortunately science caught up with this. I often think about this when I see a colleague struggling to replicate something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...