What I find worrying about this whole affair is that first everyone jumped on them saying that the fossils aren't really fossiles but instead just simple rock formations and then afterwords that the fossils are earth life so that the fossils didn't form outside of the earth.
Certainly the JoC is insane, but the jumping to conclusions it's critics engaged in seems worrying to me.
When you have a rock and some things that look like fossils and you want to say that this is a space rock and these are space organisms then you have a responsibility to do all that kind of jumping to conclusions first, in order to rule each of them out. You should be attacking, as vigorously as possible, your theory because you know that's what other scientists are going to be doing and you can save them a bit of work if you show that you've tried to do this.
Otherwise you could actually have a space rock with space bugs but you'll be dismissed for longer because people don't have enough time and money to do your work for you.
Agreed, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim and clearly they did not carry this burden. Generally I don't worry about how crackpots do science because you know they are crackpots. I worry that the first response of the critics was a sadly uncritical rebuttal which turned out to be incorrect. Namely that the rock formations were not fossils and they the pictures were a 'Ink Blot' that someone was imagining fossils into. There really were fossiles. Lets do better next time.
It is correct to say that Perpetual Motion machines are impossible, but it is incorrect to say that Perpetual Motion machines are impossible because of the rotation direction of the earth.
