Understanding an effect

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of watching two presentations from the MiniBooNE collaboration on their recently released results. The first was by Eric Zimmerman, with whom I’ve worked on Washington lobbying efforts, and the other was by Heather Ray. Heather’s talk was of most interest to me, as it explored the low energy event excess in the data. It’s always a pleasure to see the process being decribed. There is no time structure to these events, uniformity of their popultion in the detector, inconstent with cosmic rays. In short, they are consistent with a real physical process, not a detector effect or a known background effect. But what are they?