Reichenbach's claims drew scientific attention specifically because he framed od as a testable physical force rather than a purely religious or mystical claim, and that framing invited direct scrutiny: a committee of experts examining his demonstrations concluded that they had in no wise established what they were intended to show, and gave no proof of a new natural force, since the sensitives' reports could not be reliably reproduced under conditions that ruled out suggestion, expectation and simple guessing, a criticism the historical record and later skeptical scholarship, including Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary, has treated as decisive. Reichenbach's method never survived reliable blinded testing, and mainstream physics of his own era already found no place for a force with od's proposed properties, distinct from every known form of energy yet detectable only by a self-selected minority of observers working in darkness.
Despite this, od's vocabulary and its central image, an invisible, colored radiation surrounding living bodies, fed directly into later Theosophical descriptions of the human aura and into twentieth century New Age energy-healing language, a lineage historians of Western esotericism such as Joscelyn Godwin have traced explicitly back to Reichenbach's mid-nineteenth century experiments. Od today stands as a frequently cited early case study in how a scientifically framed claim about a life force was proposed, tested by the standards then available, and found wanting.