The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: UAP may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth, underground, in near environs such as the moon, or walking among us, per Lomas, Case, and Masters, Philosophy and Cosmology, 2024, the authors affiliated with Harvard's Human Flourishing Program and Montana Tech, with the paper's own disclaimers documented: a speculative thought piece, not a Harvard position, and in all likelihood false, the authors arguing only for epistemic humility. Their four sub-hypotheses: human cryptoterrestrials, survivors of an ancient advanced civilization; hominid or theropod lineages; former extraterrestrials or extratempestrials, time travelers; and magical cryptoterrestrials, earthbound angels, fairies, elves, nymphs, the folklore shelf read as reports. The name traces to Mac Tonnies, The Cryptoterrestrials, published posthumously in 2010, indigenous humanoids as the answer to the Fermi paradox's travel costs.
The folk power of the hypothesis is that it is folklore's own thesis formalized: every tradition already had the hidden neighbors, the sidhe under the hill, the djinn in the desert, the Nagas under the waters, Agartha's and Telos's interior civilizations, this archive's inner-earth wing being the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis in its native costume, and the 2024 paper's fourth category conceding the mapping in print. The tradition's structural argument: the extraterrestrial hypothesis requires impossible travel, the cryptoterrestrial one requires only privacy, and the planet's documented privacy budget, 80 percent of the ocean unmapped, caves by the million unentered, 360 Cappadocian complexes mostly unexcavated, is large.
The claim: the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is the archive's standing lesson inverted, every other entry asking why a secret is kept, this one asking why a presence is concealed, and the paper's own framing, stealth as the defining feature, meaning the hypothesis survives any null result, absence of evidence being the thesis, which is either the deepest insight in the UAP file, the neighbors' defining behavior is hiding, or the exact structure of an unfalsifiable belief, and the archive cannot improve on the authors' own verdict: in all likelihood false, worth investigating anyway. Verdict: the archive files the hypothesis where it files the whole shelf: the underground is real, Derinkuyu and 360 neighbors prove cities can hide for millennia, the ocean is real and mostly unmapped, and the neighbors are unproven. The doors are documented. The doorbells are not. Ring carefully, and cite everything.
If the neighbors are documented only by the doors they use, volcanoes, vents, tunnels, what does the neighborhood look like from inside the door?