The tenet that radiation cannot spread a fungus is incorrect. Fungi radiotrophic effects in the literature is exactly aligned with radiation making cancer worse. See cryptococcus neoformans and ionizing radiation triggering a melanin synthesis virulence loop. See the lichen that grew on the international space station. Other fungi including sacchyromyces are also included here. You can match this phenomenon to reports of mammogram induced cancers of which there are studies available.
You are correct, the fungus theory is testable.
My response, written in about half an hour, from the top of my head:
I think the fungal theory is very likely something that oncology has missed.
Congratulations, you have entered into the legendarium @RatsWrongAboutUAP. I fully agree with you and think you will win big here. I have been trying to create a bet with Eliezer since 2021 on this same issue (I have receipts) but could not word the criteria as elegantly as you did. Now, what I wanted to comment on was expanding on one of the criteria.
The Breakaway Group. This example may not fall under any of the previous explicit examples: they are still human, they are not an ancient civilization, they are not time travellers. The Breakaway Group represents a rogue element using the cover of the national security apparatus of unacknowledged special access programs to avoid disclosures, oversight and achieve compartmentalization of tech and knowledge. This is the complicated world where the nature of these programs may not be fully revealed due to the enmeshment of the military industrial complex with the nation state, but craft and/or new technology may be revealed that still matches UFOs because they came from reverse engineering programs or recovered craft.
I would consider the above scenario satisfying the "Secret Manhattan style project with beyond next gen physics, that we had back in the 60's" criteria, partially. But there are some additional assumptions built-in, like the potential illegal nature of Breakaway Group activities (operating without proper oversight, murder to maintain secrecy as per Grusch) meaning that it is not like the Manhattan project at all. But it would still be significantly weird to cause ontological shock, so it is likely to satisfy the same. Still, worth clarification.
I am available here or on twitter @micksabox for anyone else to offer bets under same resolution criteria, if that is allowed.
I replied to J Bostock. To address the "wouldn't it be infectious", that mental model has the assumption of being able to actually detect transmission. That type of thinking seems inherited from acute infectious models rather than chronic disease modelling. In the chronic pathogenic model, progression of disease can be slower and causal attribution can be unassigned. To understand this point, see link below re: latency in cryptococcus neoformans, where the fungi can go dormant in white blood cells for years or decades.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7324190/
For what it's worth I found OP extremely valuable.