Despite the objections raised, however, the majority of historians remain convinced of the historical value of the Venona material. Intelligence historian Nigel West believes that "Venona remain an irrefutable resource, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots."

Ganzel has written in response to the Freemans' study, "He Freeman assumes Collier's guilt and that leads to looking at Collier's work with the expectation of finding fraud...my study revealed what was the irrefutable evidence that he was a victim of a conspiracy of which Frederick Madden was a part...Freeman starts with a criminal; I tried to end up with a man.

Egan wagered ₤1,000 that he could prove "by clear, convincing and irrefutable evidence" that Shakespeare wrote the play.

Song Ci believed in the importance of irrefutable evidence and was strongly opposed to wrongful conviction.

The conclusions that the Socrates team derived about competitiveness in general and about the U.S. in particular were in almost all cases in direct opposition to what the professors, economists and consultants had been saying for years, and to what had been accepted as irrefutable underlying truths by decision-makers throughout the U.S.” When Reagan's presidential term ended and the Bush administration came to the White House, Project Socrates was labeled as "industrial policy", and began to fall from favor.

In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable.