However, would you agree that Bogdanoff brothers' work has been, at least at some points, approved and positively reviewed by credentialed physicists with official and reputable academic affiliations? After all, they successfully published several papers and defended their theses.

As I recall, they didn't defend their theses, and only eventually got their degrees by a number of questionable devices like replacing a thesis with publications somewhere and forcing a shift to an entirely different field like mathematics.

EDIT: The oddities of their theses is covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanoff_affair#Origin_of_the_affair