I started posting my findings about Jose Escamilla's "rods" on the message board on his roswellrods.com site in late February and early March of 2000.  For some reason, Escamilla stopped posting for about a month, but in April he finally posted the following response:

Guess what guys...Jim Peters and I are LOL!

Holy $#&%!!!!

If you only knew the totality of the evidence!

You "scientists" are basing all you know on this web site's minimal information.

ROD MEN RULE!!!

Jim Peters is a member of Escamilla's "rods research team".  A few weeks earlier, Peters had posted a fairly lame response to my findings and arguments, which completely ignored or side-stepped the most important points.  Specifically, neither he nor any other "rods researcher" offered any explanation at all for why "rods" seemed to always show a continuous streak pattern completely indistinguishable from the blur streak of a flying insect (or a flying tinfoil ball for that matter).  But Peters also made the claim that the "totality of the evidence" would disprove the "bug theory," once it was finally made public.

One might expect that such claims would be followed by some attempt to present some evidence.

One might suspect that perhaps Escamilla's posting was a triumphant announcement that he was about ready to put the "bug theory" to rest, once and for all.

About a week after posting the above message, Escamilla removed the message board from his site.  He stated that the removal was only temporary, and that it was because he was reworking his site, and he promised that there would be a new and better board soon.  And he actually did do some reworking of the site, but all the changes were cosmetic HTML changes, with no real change of substance and no new evidence.  And anyway, the message board wasn't hosted on his site -- it was hosted by a site called InsideTheWeb.com -- so there wasn't really any good reason why he couldn't have left the message board up while he reworked the site.

It's been over six years now (as of May 2006), and he still doesn't have the promised replacement board, and the "totality of the evidence" has yet to make an appearance on his site. In fact, the evidence that Escamilla presents on his site has slowly declined since then, to the point that there are hardly any "rod" images there now. 

But he does have a new DVD for sale!  Perhaps this is the promised evidence, but it's only available to those who pay for it?  Fortunately, he did have a short promotional sample of the video on his site, and the following are composites of all five of the images from that sample. Two of the sequences have two "rods" each, so there are seven "rods" shown.  By yet another astonishing coincidence, all of these "rods" -- even though they are different sizes -- are traveling at 60 times their own length per second, so every one of them makes a nice continuous streak when composited, just like a bug.

"Totality of the evidence," indeed.

Update, May 2004:

It has come to my attention that Escamilla has changed the DVD sample video posted on his site. It now contains only one of the five sequences that I have shown above (the second one from the top). However, this new trailer contains several quick views of "rods" from his previous videos, including two of the Cave of the Swallows sequences that I had already posted on this site (on this page). Here are the originals:

  

When I posted these composites, I hypothesized that this pattern of "rods" separated by gaps of the same length (which is seen in most of the frame captures that Escamilla had posted at that time) was caused by taking only one field from each NTSC video frame. (Some VCRs only show the first field from each frame when paused and advanced.) As I noted then, if this hypothesis is correct, then the fields that were not shown would also contain "rods", but they would be in the gaps in the images that were captured, and if all the fields were used in the composite, then the "rods" would form a continuous streak. And this continuous streak, which is seen in many other "rods" videos, is just the expected result whenever anything (including bugs and tinfoil balls) flies past a camcorder and the exposure time is identical to the field capture time (e.g. 1/60th second for NTSC, but the same effect would occur with 1/50th second exposures in a PAL camcorder capturing 50 fields per second).

Well, it seems that when these two sequences were copied to the DVD format, all of the fields were included, and they made it through to the ".mov" format of the trailer, and guess what:

(The staggered offsets in this composite were caused by the camera panning downward to follow the jumper.)

When all the fields from the DVD sample are included, the "rods" form a continuous streak, as predicted.

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Update, May 2006: Alas, it seems that Mr. Escamilla is no longer offering any free samples of the DVD, and in fact there are very few "rod" images at all on his site now. Perhaps not suprisingly, there are no images remaining of sequential video frames, which were the basis of my original study. I'm beginning to suspect that Mr. Escamilla is not so interested in the "totality of the evidence" after all.