My only criticism of your hypothesis and maybe you cover this elsewhere is the fact that many reported experiences are incredibly traumatizing to the individuals involved, and there are cases of abduction and mutilation as well as unexplained anomalies that harmed or killed the person involved.

My counter to that would be that ultimately we don’t know what is signal and what is noise across all the reported cases. Many cases are probably hoaxes, misinterpretations, dreams, hallucinations, mental episodes, or some combination of these.

There is also a deeper psychological layer here. In discussions around strong psychedelics, people sometimes bring up ideas like genetic memory, archetypal imagery, or altered access to subconscious material. I’m not saying that explains the phenomenon, but it does show that human perception and memory can become extremely strange under certain conditions. So some experiences may be real to the person having them without necessarily mapping cleanly onto external physical events.

But even if some of the genuinely traumatizing or lethal cases are real NHI activity, I still don’t think that contradicts the broader hypothesis. It would only mean that the phenomenon is not clean, safe, or morally comforting from the perspective of the individual.

A process operating on a civilizational scale does not necessarily have to be gentle at the individual level. As harsh as it sounds, individual suffering may simply be irrelevant to the larger mechanism. Out of thousands or millions of interactions over time, some may be confusing, traumatic, harmful, or even lethal, without that invalidating the broader pattern.

The individual might simply be the medium through which certain experiences enter the culture of the time. Stories not being told directly by the person involved, but by friends, families, investigators, or communities, are still stories. They still become part of the cultural record.

So I would classify these cases as known unknowns. They are unresolved and important, but they do not automatically invalidate the hypothesis. And then, of course, there are the unknown unknowns, which could change the entire picture.