People who do 'their own research!' don't trust themselves

It is a wide held held conspiracy, that the USA changed the dimensions of space shuttle parts for the public internet; back in the 1980s.

Assuming that is only a conspiracy theory, how can you dispute government data tables?

Disputing facts (from the latin 'factum', basically 'that what is') I can sort of understand but disputing data? I personally know a few people who do that but haven't been able to determine how or why they can.

My personal approach is correlation matrix, then intervenous variable, replace existing table with "other predictors" then compare "fittings".