Hypothesis, not fact

The Recovery Log — 024
Wednesday 20 May 2026

We need to say this clearly, once, in a post we can point people back to, because everything the archive publishes rests on it.

We never present a recovered timeline as a fact. What we publish is a Timeline Hypothesis: an interpretation of latent subtext, carrying its own uncertainty in writing. Each one states the analogue period it most resembles, a coarse confidence estimate — low, medium, high — reflecting how tightly the recovered cluster actually holds together, the key influence that opened the field, and a summary of the evidence underneath it. DEEPWELL, for instance, we publish at medium confidence and around 1976 to 1981, and we would rather tell you that than pretend to a certainty we have not got.

People sometimes read the hedging as weakness — as if a confident lie would sell better. Maybe it would. But we are working entirely within our own reality, recovering evidence and not visiting anything, and the one thing that separates that from making things up is that we say exactly how sure we are and exactly what we are standing on. The humility is not a disclaimer bolted to the bottom. It is the product. Anyone can claim they went somewhere. We are making the smaller, harder claim: that we stayed home, read carefully, and will show our working.

The Recovery Log is the working diary of the DatZO Recovery Team. Follow the recoveries on Instagram, YouTube and X.