Honestly there's no way those claims are worth anything, really. No one was keeping track of the ancestry of most strains until very recently, so virtually all of the info on older strains (the ones bred in the 80s and 90s, when new strains really began to proliferate) is basically not trustworthy. Scientists don't even consider indica a different species (and indeed, since it can interbreed with sativa and produce reproductively-capable offspring, it really isn't). Ruderalis, at least, has a clear phenotype to distinguish it (auto-flowering), but as far as I know, no one expects anything specific from ruderalis strains in terms of effect.
Different strains do have different effects, though; that's well-known.
Honestly there's no way those claims are worth anything, really. No one was keeping track of the ancestry of most strains until very recently, so virtually all of the info on older strains (the ones bred in the 80s and 90s, when new strains really began to proliferate) is basically not trustworthy. Scientists don't even consider indica a different species (and indeed, since it can interbreed with sativa and produce reproductively-capable offspring, it really isn't). Ruderalis, at least, has a clear phenotype to distinguish it (auto-flowering), but as far as I know, no one expects anything specific from ruderalis strains in terms of effect.
Different strains do have different effects, though; that's well-known.